Another great joy of working with voice and speech, is learning about the voices and speech patterns that people find soothing, stimulating, beautiful or alluring.   I have a library of voice recordings to listen to but when I think of the people I love – I need no recording, I can hear them clearly in my mind’s ear.
It’s no surprise then that most of us can recall voices with our mind’s ear.  Reading about Michael Haneke’s film  Amour, he explains how he came to cast Emmanuelle Riva as Anne, the retired piano teacher in Amour.  He had been captivated by her voice when as a thirty year old actress she’d played an unnamed French woman talking to her young Japanese lover in Hiroshima Mon Amour.   As the journalist Kim Willsher explains:  “It is her (Emmanuelle Riva) voice, poetically repeating the same lines, that is etched on the memory long after the black-and-white credits rolled.  Now, fifty four years later, Emmanuelle Riva’s voice is still as mellifluous and gently mesmerising.”  It leaves a heart stirring sigh for the inevitability of life, love, death.

All best wishes for the Oscars, Madame Riva