Terence Hill, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, Arnold Schwarzenegger and so many others: voice actor Thomas Danneberg was the voice of perhaps the best era of action films. Now she has fallen silent.
Memory is embedded in a person’s voice; hearing it can bring situations, days, entire periods of life and epochs back to life. For example, if you watch the film “The Expendables” in the German dubbed version. In 2010, some of the action cinema warriors of the video cassette era met there for a kind of class reunion in front of the camera. In one scene, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger joke around, both with their big cat-like, motor-cool German voices. If you close your eyes, you can hear, without any background noise, perhaps the best time ever for action films – it’s not two voices, it’s one: the voice of Thomas Danneberg. As a voice actor, he was so present in German cinemas from the 1980s onwards that he regularly voiced both Schwarzenegger and Stallone, even when they both appeared in a film together in “The Expendables” and thus Thomas Danneberg spoke to Thomas Danneberg. As Danneberg’s wife Leni announced on Instagram via voice actor colleague Charles Rettinghaus, this voice fell silent on Saturday.