David (I) Kaye filmography and biography
Date of birth: 14 October 1964, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
David (I) Kaye biography
A man of a thousand voices - and a growing number of faces - actor David
Kaye was already a radio professional by the age of 16. Working summers
and weekends during his high school years in Peterborough, Ontario, he
dropped his plans for a psychology degree to pursue a full-time career
on-air.
Kaye's breakthrough came as a radio personality on a station in London,
Ontario, and he followed that with a move to Vancouver's CKLG. There he
handled every shift before joining the popular "Morning Zoo" crew, for
which he came up with zany characters like the drawling "Cowboy Dick"
and "Stunt Boy" with the latter providing him an excuse for remote
broadcasts from odd locations.
Writing and improvising material for the Zoo soon gave him a taste for
more challenging fare, so he undertook acting studies. Kaye has since
worked non-stop as a voice actor. He began by supplying vocal
personalities to cartoon characters on series like G.I. Joe (the
Canadian's first cartoon character was as the "great American hero"
General Hawk!), G.I. Joe Extreme; David played the
infamous Megatron on Beast Wars: Transformers (also
Beast Machines; Beasties; Transformers Armada); D'Myna League (Barry),
Kleo The Misfit Unicorn (his character Slim shares star-billing with a
character voiced by Mickey Rooney), _"StreetFighter: The Animated
Series" (1997)_ (Akuma), Kong: The Animated Series
(Ramone De La Porta), Exosquad (Hallas, Draconis) a
series directed by Gordon Hunt (Helen Hunt's, of Mad About You fame,
father). He was also cast as Akela The Wolf in _"Jungle Book Shonen
Mowgli" (1989)_, starring 'Charleton Heston' as the narrator, and is
the narrator himself on MGM/Sony's Bible Story series.
And that was just the very beginning of his career. Fast-forward now
through over a hundred characters to his most recent ones and you get
to the voice of Professor Xavier on WB Kid's animated
X-Men: Evolution series; Major Powers for Hasbro's toy
'Major Powers'; Dragon, in Mattel's new cartoon Barbie as Rapunzel;
Clank, in the popular Playstation 2 game, 'Ratchet and Clank';
Sesshoumara in the new hot anime Inuyasha; and he's
still Megatron, this time on
TransufAtilde;acute;mAtilde;cent;: Maikuron densetsu. Finally, fulfilling
another lifelong ambition, David Kaye recently received his first
paycheck from "the mouse", for a Disney Christmas project 'Mickey
Mouse's Twice Upon A Christmas'. And this breakdown of characters only
touches the list of voices Kaye has provided in animation ... a list
impressive enough to land top talent agency, William Morris in both
L.A. and in New York.
But more than 'toon-town beckoned. As part of North Vancouver's First
Impressions theatre company, Kaye landed key roles in classic plays
such as Noises Off, Of Mice and Men, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, A
Streetcar Named Desire (he played Stanley Kowalski), and Harvey (he
played Elwood P. Dowd). Early television auditions yielded supporting
roles in the series Northwood and M.A.N.T.I.S., and in TV-movies like
Someone Else's Child and Zalinda's Story for ABC's Lifetime. On the big
screen, he was often cast - not too surprisingly - as TV reporters (in
Tailhook, Sliders, and Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore, among others, he
played glib commentators).
Over the past six years, however, he has been recognized for his growing
skills with lead, co-starring and guest starring roles in The Outer
Limits, So Weird, The Sentinel, Viper, Dead Man's Gun, The Twilight
Zone; features such as Carpool, Prisoner Of Zenda Inc., Dead Like Me
and the TV movies Murder In My Mind, Ladies and the Champs, MVP II:
Most Valuable Primate, and Live From Baghdad. He performed the lead
role in The Love Charm, a half-hour independent film which won the Best
Short Film Award at the Leo Awards (Vancouver). The actor also
co-starred in the TV movie Prince of Mirrors: The Rich Donato Story,
and Mermaid (starring Ellen Burstyn) in which he played a supporting
lead role.
The six-foot, brown-haired Kaye comes by his flamboyance naturally,
since he counts Captain Blood - the infamous model for Errol Flynn's
most swashbuckling role - as one of his family ancestors.