Another great talent has been wrested away from us: Emmy-winning Voice Actor Joe Alaskey died earlier this evening. He was 63 and the cause was cancer.

Joe was an on-camera impressionist and comic actor but he achieved his greatest fame doing voices for animated cartoons, including the role of Grandpa Lou Pickles on Rugrats (following the late David Doyle) and many of the major Warner Brothers characters, especially Daffy Duck. Joe won his Emmy in 2004 for his portrayal of Daffy on the series, Duck Dodgers.

Joe was born in Troy, New York and like many impressionists, learned at any early age that one could overcome great shyness by becoming someone else. One of his best was Jackie Gleason and as he got older, he could not only sound like the man they called The Great One but look like him, as well. When Gleason's voice needed to be replicated to fix the audio on the "lost" Honeymooners episodes, Joe was the man.

A few years after that, Joe was called upon to redub an old Honeymooners clip for a TV commercial. When he got the call, Joe assured the ad agency that if they needed him, he could also match the voice of Art Carney as Ed Norton. He was told they already had someone to do that — someone who did it better. Joe was miffed until he arrived at the recording session and discovered that the actor they felt could do a better job as Art Carney…was Art Carney. Joe later said that playing Kramden to Carney's Norton was the greatest thrill of his life, especially after Carney asked him for some pointers on how to sound more like Ed.

Voice matches were a specialty of Joe's, ranging from a few lines on a TV show to supplying the voice of Richard Nixon in the Academy Award-winning film, Forrest Gump. He often redubbed actors for the TV or airline releases of movies when "naughty" words had to be replaced — Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance. In cartoons, he was one of several actors who inherited Mel Blanc roles — in Joe's case, before Mel had passed on. Blanc voiced Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Tweety in Who Framed Roger Rabbit but decided that Yosemite Sam was too taxing on his throat so Alaskey spoke for that character and also for Foghorn Leghorn in a deleted sequence.

After Mel was gone, Joe was one of several actors who played Bugs, Daffy and most of the others. On The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, he spoke for both Sylvester and Tweety. (His greatest challenge? I once watched Joe for a while as he recorded lines as Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam for a G.P.S. It tooks days and thousands of lines for each…and after he finished as Sam, he couldn't speak for almost a week.) He also created the Daffy-like voice of Plucky Duck on Tiny Toon Adventures.

He was also heard in many commercials and non-animated TV shows. Recently, he was working as the narrator of Murder Comes to Town, a series seen on the Investigation Discovery Channel. He was also flexing a few of his non-vocal skills as a writer and as a cartoonist.

He loved voice acting and did not regret that he'd largely abandoned his work in clubs as an impressionist and acting in front of the camera. Two of his most visible roles were as the star on the 1988 cult film, Lucky Stiff, and the role of Beano Froelich on the TV situation comedy, Out of This World.

I was delighted to know Joe for many years, to have him on several of my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con, and to work with him in 2014 on The Garfield Show. Joe was temperamental and fiercely insecure at times, and you might hear of problems with directors and other actors. I can only tell you that when I hired him, he was an absolute professional. The only problem we had was that Joe had so many different voices that it was sometimes difficult to choose which one we wanted out of him.

The one I liked best was when he sounded like Joe Alaskey. He had a long, long list of voices but that's the one I will miss the most.