Harry Shearer
Harry Shearer is an American actor, comedian, voice actor, musician, writer, screenwriter, film producer, radio personality, and journalist born on December 23, 1943, in Los Angeles, California.
Shearer was educated at Los Angeles High School before pursuing higher education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later at Harvard University. This academic background preceded a career that would span multiple creative disciplines across several decades of work in American entertainment and media.
Among his notable projects, Shearer has been associated with This Is Spinal Tap and The Simpsons, two productions that represent the breadth of his involvement across film and television. His work as a voice actor on The Simpsons, in particular, brought him considerable recognition, and he received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance in connection with that role. In addition to his on-screen and voice work, Shearer has maintained a presence as a radio personality, extending his reach beyond visual media into audio broadcasting. His activities as a musician and journalist further reflect the range of disciplines he has engaged with throughout his professional life.
The intersection of comedy, performance, and writing runs consistently through Shearer's output. As both a screenwriter and a comedian, he has worked across formats that require distinct but related skills, moving between scripted performance, improvisational comedy, and character-driven voice work. His work as a dub actor adds yet another dimension to his performance career, demonstrating a facility with language and vocal characterization that aligns with his broader identity as a voice actor. These overlapping roles — performer, writer, producer, broadcaster, and musician — define the contours of a career grounded in comedic and dramatic performance, with voice acting serving as a consistent and recognized thread across his body of work.
Quotes by Harry Shearer
Harry Shearer's insights on:
People don't play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or L.A. - to become stars or to get rich - they play because they've got to. It's in the streets, in their family, in their blood.
Bryce Canyon isn't as famous as the Grand Canyon, but it is just incredible - nothing compares to it.
My family was lower middle class, and my parents both worked, so we couldn't take proper vacations. We'd go for three days to Santa Barbara or to the desert, so my first real vacation came was when I was 12, when friends of my parents were taking their kids away. We went to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park in Arizona and Utah.
To me, the funniest American of the Twentieth Century is Richard Nixon because he had the most to hide, and he was so bad at hiding it. To me, that's what's really funny - people who think they're doing a great job of hiding stuff, and it just keeps leaking out.
One of the problems with 'SNL' is that, if you tried to adlib, the director would put you off camera and off the mic, so only you would know that you ever did it. The director always directed to the script; he wasn't listening to what you were doing. He was calling shots whilst looking at the page.
'Leave It To Beaver' is a fairly famous show in America, but I don't think it travelled. It was one of those typical '50s family comedies. I was in the pilot episode as sort of the dark presence: my character was called Eddie Haskill.
I always thought, as a kid, if you - and the reason that I sort of stayed away from doing one character on a sitcom is - if you're doing one thing all the time, the audience is going to come up to you and say the one thing all the time.
I'm lucky that I can walk down the street, and maybe one person will recognise me from 'The Simpsons,' and another person will recognise me from 'Spinal Tap,' and it's always surprising.
I love to see what real human behavior looks like. I've always envisioned my job as just observing and noting that and, for the purposes of my work, just cutting out the boring parts.
I like Mr. Burns because he is pure evil. A lot of evil people make the mistake of diluting it. Never adulterate your evil.