Biography

Although versatile character actor and voice extraordinary Henry Corden will forever be associated with, and fondly remembered for, providing the bellicose, gravel-toned rasp of cartoon immortal Fred Flintstone, he enjoyed a long and varied career prior to this distinction, which took up most of his later years.

Born in Montreal, Canada, on Tuesday, January 6, 1920, his family moved to New York while he was still a child. Henry received his start on stage and radio before heading off to Hollywood in the 1940s. He made his film debut as a minor heavy in the Danny Kaye vehicle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), as Boris Karloff's bestial henchman, and continued on along those same lines, often in uncredited/unbilled parts. A master at dialects, he was consistently employed as either an ethnic Middle Eastern villain or some sort of streetwise character (club manager, salesman) in 1950s costumed adventures and crime yarns, both broad and serious.

He seldom made it into the prime support ranks, however, with somewhat insignificant parts in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Viva Zapata! (1952), Scaramouche (1952), I Confess (1953), King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Jupiter's Darling (1955) and The Ten Commandments (1956). On TV, he could regularly be found on both drama ("Perry Mason", "The Untouchables") and light comedy ("My Little Margie," "Mister Ed"). A heightened visibility on TV included playing Barbara Eden's genie father on "I Dream of Jeannie" and as the contentious landlord "Mr. Babbitt" on "The Monkees".

Henry made a highly lucrative move into animation in the 1960s supplying a host of brutish voices on such cartoons as "Johnny Quest", "The Jetsons", "Secret Squirrel", "Atom Ant", "Josie and the Pussycats", and "The Harlem Globetrotters". He inherited the voice of Fred Flintstone after the show's original vocal owner, Alan Reed, passed away in 1977. He went on to give life to Flintstone for nearly three decades on various revamped cartoon series, animated specials and cereal commercials. He was performing as Flintstone, in fact, until about three months prior to his death of emphysema at the age of 85 on Wednesday, May 19, 2005.

Married four times, he was survived by wife Angelina; two daughters (from his first marriage), and three stepchildren (from his last union).
- IMDb mini biography by: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Henry Corden was born in Canada and raised in New York. He acted on the stage and in radio before he migrated to Hollywood in the mid-1940s, film-debuting in 1946 in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; the sinister-looking Corden played villain Boris Karloff's brutish henchman. In the 1960s he began supplementing his income with voice-over work, getting his feet wet voicing a fish in a TV commercial for Starkist Tuna and then regularly voicing "heavies" on Hanna-Barbera's adventure cartoon series "Jonny Quest".

Corden began occasionally doing the voice of Fred Flintstone shortly before the death of the cartoon character's original voice artist, Alan Reed (alternating with Reed), and took over after Reed's 1977 death. His last on-camera acting was in Modern Problems (1981); he soured on the audition process because "I had started coming into too many offices where the casting director was like ten and a half years old and I could barely see him over the desk and he would say, 'Tell me, Mr. Corden, what have you done?' Mind you, at that point I was in the business for many, many years, and it would seem to me that I would have...maybe not a good reputation, but SOME reputation. Eventually, I decided, 'Enough.' I was doing well with voice-overs, so I said, 'That's it. I won't put myself through this any more.'"
- IMDb mini biography by: Tom Weaver <tomweavr@aol.com>