Maurice LaMarche is a Canadian voice actor and former stand-up comedian. He is best known for voicing The Brain in Animaniacs and its spin-off as well as his Emmy-winning performances in Futurama.
LaMarche began on Inspector Gadget and went on to Dennis the Menace, Popeye and Son, and The Real Ghostbusters. After The Real Ghostbusters, LaMarche became a regular mainstay of the voiceover industry appearing in such shows as Tiny Toon Adventures, GI Joe, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: The Animated Series, Taz-Mania, Where’s Waldo, The Little Mermaid, Batman: The Animated Series, and Bonkers before landing perhaps his most recognized role in 1993 as The Brain on Animaniacs (and later its spin-off show Pinky and the Brain).
Following this, LaMarche worked on The Critic, Freakazoid!, and The Tick before then reprising his role of Egon in Extreme Ghostbusters. The stretch of two years after this saw LaMarche portray characters in such shows as Hey Arnold! as Big Bob Pataki, Queer Duck, The Chimp Channel, and Sonic Underground as Sleet. During this time Maurice would become the voice actor for Mortimer Mouse whom he would voice in the television series Mickey Mouse Works and Disney’s House of Mouse.
Much of his best-known voicework is from Futurama where he voiced Zapp Brannigan’s beleaguered assistant Kif Kroker, melodramatic soap acting unit Calculon, the Nero-esque Hedonismbot, and Lrrr, Supreme Ruler of Omicron Persei 8, among numerous others. He has also done his Orson Welles impression on the show, winning a 2011 Outstanding Voice-Over Performance Emmy for his portrayal of Lrrr and Orson Welles in the episode “Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences”. He won another Emmy the following year for the Futurama episode “The Silence of the Clamps”.
Maurice is also often heard in the commercial world as the voice of Toucan Sam (spokes-bird of Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal, a part he’s played since 1987), and he is especially proud to have been chosen, beginning in the summer of 2009, to be the current signature Voice of Lexus.