Jacques Deschamps

Despite making several movies, Jacques Deschamps was more in demand as a dubbing artist. Indeed, most French film fans would recognize his voice rather than his face. A prize-winning student at the Conservatoire National in the early 1950s, Deschamps made his way in theatre and radio before debuting on screen in Claude Chabrol's key Nouvelle Vague drama "Les Cousins." He wouldn't appear before a camera for another eight years until Jean-Pierre Melville cast him as a cop in the hitman classic "Le Samouraï." In the interim, however, Deschamps had started voiceover work by looping José Ferrer's dialogue in the theatrical drama "The Shrike." He reached his biggest audiences via television, dubbing Robert Stack as Eliot Ness in the long-running crime series "The Untouchables," Richard Anderson in the sci-fi favorite "The Six Million Dollar Man" and Dan Frazer in the policier "Kojak." Meanwhile, on the big screen, Deschamps voiced Clint Eastwood's performances as The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, Steve McQueen in the war adventure "The Sand Pebbles" and Dean Martin in the Western, "Bandolero!." Amongst many other assignments, he also dubbed several Ugo Tognazzi and Nino Manfredi comedies, while his animation roles for Disney, included Amos Slade in "The Fox and the Hound," Fidget in "Basil, the Great Mouse Detective" and Triton in "The Little Mermaid." In the mid-1980s, he also acted in the gentle age-gap comedy "Le Voleur de feuilles" and the crime drama "Justice de flic."