A music-hall singer who became Disney's spare set of voices: the Walrus and the Carpenter, both Tweedles, a colonel and an elephant. You will not know his face, and in his best work you are not meant to notice it is one man.
Fi1m perspective
Put on Alice in Wonderland (1951) and listen to the Walrus and the Carpenter. One is smooth and quick, one is slow and put-upon, and the pair of them are being recited by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who tell the story. All four are J. Pat O'Malley. We have watched the sequence knowing that and still could not hear the join, which is the whole point of him: the voices do not share a trick, a pitch or a rhythm, and none of them is asking to be admired.
He began as a singer, in the British music halls and with Jack Hylton's orchestra between 1930 and 1935, then went to America around 1935 or 1936 and became an actor instead. The films came from the early 1940s, Lassie Come Home (1943) among them, then Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s, then some thirty years of television, where he was the kindly or eccentric old man who turns up for one episode and does exactly what is needed. Disney used him first for the serials, as Perkins in Spin and Marty (1955–57), and then for the features, where his habit of taking several parts in one film became the job.
The three we rate most he barely surfaces in, and that is not a complaint. In One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) he is the Colonel and Jasper; in The Jungle Book (1967) he is Colonel Hathi the elephant and Buzzie. Our reviews of all three do not single him out, because the films do not: Phil Harris and George Sanders carry one, the villain carries another, and O'Malley fills in around them. He kept his British accent in America and could put on an American regional voice when a western needed one, and the studio plainly valued a man who could arrive and be three people before lunch.
The cost of that shows in the live-action credits. He was often small, uncredited or both, a bit part in Witness for the Prosecution (1957) being typical, and there is no film of his that is about him. He was also Dick Van Dyke's dialect coach on Mary Poppins (1964), a fact we report without comment.
Watch the Disney films for what they are; nobody should put on The Jungle Book to hear the elephant. But if you want to know what a working actor sounds like, run the Alice sequence again and try to count him.
Biography
J. Pat O'Malley was an English actor and singer who appeared in numerous American films and television programmes from the 1940s to 1982. Born James Patrick O'Malley in Burnley, Lancashire, he began his career in British music halls and as a vocalist with Jack Hylton's orchestra before emigrating to the United States.
He provided voices for several Disney animated films, including the Walrus, Carpenter, Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Colonel and Jasper in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), and Colonel Hathi and Buzzie in The Jungle Book (1967). O'Malley also appeared on Broadway in Ten Little Indians (1944) and Dial M for Murder (1954), and made over 100 guest appearances on American television series.
