Article content continued

In the 1970s and ’80s he was one of the three or four most famous voices — if not names — in that industry. “He was in the top echelon,” said his long-time manager, Scott Linder. “He had a voice that grabbed your attention when you heard it on TV.”

Bleviss was the oldest of three children born to Joseph and Lee Bleviss, a relatively devout Jewish couple in Edmonton. The family kept kosher, according to Bleviss’s daughter Sarah, even if that meant driving for hours to get to the kosher butcher when the family lived outside the city for several years.

You never heard anyone have a bad word about Alan Bleviss

Joseph Bleviss ran a series of businesses in Edmonton, including a nightclub, a skating rink, a car wash and, for a time, several theatres. But he never wanted his son to be an actor. When Alan enrolled in the theatre program at the University of Alberta, he lied to his father and said he was studying law. When Joseph found out the truth, he was furious. “He never got over it,” said Sarah Bleviss.

After a brief stint teaching high school in Toronto, Alan went on to study at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. After he graduated, he worked intermittently on stage, making ends meet with a hodge podge of part-time work, including, he claimed in later years, driving an 18-wheeler truck.

“I found it very difficult to support myself on $75 a week, maintaining two apartments — one where I lived and one that I had to rent on the road,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991.

Photo by Handout

His big break came in New York, when his agent suggested he try out for a voice-over job. At first, Bleviss wasn’t impressed.