Harry Shearer

Harry Shearer began as a child actor in Los Angeles, which turns out to be the useful fact about him: he has been inside the industry long enough to satirise it from the furniture rather than from the street. Between 1969 and 1976 he belonged to the radio comedy group The Credibility Gap, then co-wrote Real Life with Albert Brooks in 1979 and wrote for Martin Mull on Fernwood 2 Night. He was a Saturday Night Live cast member twice, in 1979 to 1980 and again in 1984 to 1985.

His method is imitation so exact that it stops registering as imitation. This Is Spinal Tap, which he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in as bassist Derek Smalls, works because none of the three performers ever signals that he knows the band is absurd. Shearer plays Smalls as the least gifted and most contented member, a man whose entire personality is standing between two louder egos. The same control runs through his broadcast voices: the talk-show host in The Truman Show, the news anchor in Godzilla, the recruiter in The Right Stuff. He can produce the exact cadence of American authority and leave the parody to the writing.

Since 1989 the bulk of his working life has been The Simpsons, where he voices Mr. Burns, Waylon Smithers, Ned Flanders, Reverend Lovejoy, Principal Skinner, Kent Brockman, Otto and Lenny, among others, and won a Primetime Emmy for character voice-over performance. Burns and Flanders together make the case for him better than any showreel: two characters at opposite ends of the moral scale, both played with the same total absence of winking.