My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was—old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. You heard it and it could only be him.

So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm—much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice.

Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) As Poling puts it, “George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.”

* * *

If you didn’t know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. I mean, if George Plimpton wasn’t my father and I’d never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.

Actually, that’s not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. She was having lunch at P. J. Clarke’s with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: “Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! …And what have we here?” My mom’s initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toity—“I mean, who did this guy think he was?”

But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my father’s voice that won her over. She’d wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: “I know a better way down.”

* * *

It’s strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, he’d missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the “great good fortune”—one of his favorite phrases—that marked his life). He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the last—a figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. No, my father’s voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were not—and his voice simply reflected this.

But it didn’t define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which he’d come. That life couldn’t contain him, he’d burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. He’d go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accent—though it probably would have made life easier for him if he’d adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dad’s stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks). No matter where he was, or who he was—quarterback, trapeze artist, Philharmonic triangle-player—his voice never changed, proving that you can be whomever you want to be without ever abandoning yourself.

* * *

Of course, I think he enjoyed the odd persona his voice and mannerisms conferred on him. If he couldn’t be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). Consider his duties as host of “Mousterpiece Theatre” (my first intro to my father as celebrity), a children’s TV show in which he debated the adventures and psyches of Donald Duck and Goofy in that marvelously serious voice: “Is Donald Duck really a strident existentialist and a hero?” How wonderful—what fun!—to have a constant reminder emerging from your lips that life was absurd, and identity, too; all of it a great game to be played at, enjoyed. So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too.