Tony Jay

Tony Jay (February 2, 1933 - August 13, 2006) was an English actor. A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was best known for his voice work in animation and computer games. Jay's distinctive baritone voice often landed him villainous roles, including Fallout's Lieutenant. He was also the Narrator in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel instead of Ron Perlman, who narrated the previous games.

Jay was born in England in 1933. He later moved to the United States, and became a naturalised citizen.

Jay has appeared on-screen in several movies and on television, including Love and Death, Twins, and Eerie, Indiana. He also has developed a distinguished career in the theatre, in plays such as Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, and The Merchant of Venice. Jay's other non-animation roles included the villainous and scarred Paracelsus on the 1980's CBS series Beauty and the Beast and later as the character of Minister Campio on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the prudish and poorly chosen betrothed of Lwaxana Troi. He was also well known for his role as the voice of the virus Megabyte in the award winning 3-D animated show ReBoot.

Jay was an impassioned devotee of classic Broadway, and has made several recordings and performances of old-time Broadway lyrics, in spoken-word form. A CD of these readings, Speaking of Broadway, was released in 2005, however a years-earlier version of this same collection was titled Poets on Broadway, the same as his website. It features Jay reciting lyrics written by the likes of Noel Coward, Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein and was composed entirely by him, according to the CD liner notes.

He is also well-known and well-loved among Legacy of Kain fans for his voicing of the original Mortanius and of the Elder God, alongside several other minor characters.

Jay also performs the voice as the Ghost Host for the load spiel at the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom park of the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.

Tony Jay died in Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on August 13, 2006, aged 73. He had been in critical condition since April 2006, after failing to recover from endoscopic surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumor in his lungs.