Joe Alaskey lived through his characters. "Even at 3 years old," he once said, "I was always looking for a pair of sunglasses or people's cigar butts to grab to do characters, and that led into me working on impressions, and that led into theater."
As himself, Alaskey was a jovial, energetic jack-of-all-trades. But he could be just about anyone else.
The impressionist and Emmy award-winning voice actor who succeeded Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck passed away from cancer Wednesday in New York. Alaskey was 63.
Over the course of his lifetime, he lent his voice to some of animation's greatest hits. He became one of the principal actors on the Looney Tunes after Blanc's death in 1989, voicing not only Bugs and Daffy, but virtually all the characters, including Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird. Alaskey also played Yosemite Sam in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," both his first major film and a seminal work in live-action animation.
Before he was recognized as a sonic sensation, however, he had envisioned himself in a variety of other jobs - perhaps a telling glimpse into the shape-shifter that he would become.
He was born Joseph Francis Alaskey III in Troy, New York. At age 10, Alaskey told Splitsider, he wanted to be an archaeologist. A while after that, he wanted to be a priest, and then an English teacher.
Alaskey was in his early 20s when he moved to New York City to pursue show business as a stand-up comedian. While doing shows on the side, he worked for an insurance company and apprenticed for a diamond cutter.
It was on stage, though, that he sharpened his impressions.
A heavyset man who wore wire-rim glasses and joked about having a second head below his double chin, Alaskey could manipulate his voice to adopt both high and low pitches, tenors young and old. He switched between characters without missing a beat, an entire comedy troupe in a single man.
In 1981, he got a call from Friz Freleng, the creator of Looney Tunes.
"This guy calls me on the phone and says, 'It's Friz Freleng. I heard your act. We're looking for replacements. Mel Blanc is not going to live forever,'" Alaskey recounted to Splitsider with a laugh.
There was no more cutting diamonds after that. The rest of his career was more about sharpening the sound of Bugs Bunny talking through his big buck teeth.
When he was just starting out in impressions, Alaskey had also honed to near-perfection his Jackie Gleason. Many told him he bore a striking resemblance to the renowned and rotund comic genius, a genetic gift that paid off when Gleason himself called on Alaskey to voice him on the "lost" episodes of Gleason's "Honeymooners" that were revived in the 80s from Gleason's private collection.
"That was quite an honor," Alaskey said in a TV interview.