Bio
Ben Wright was a British actor and voice artist.
Wright worked extensively in American radio, supplying crisp, erudite diction as the radio incarnation of Sherlock Holmes (1949–1950) and Inspector Peter Black on Pursuit (1951–1952).
However, he considered himself a dialectician, playing Indian servant Tulku on The Green Lama, Chinese bellhop Hey Boy on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel, and various dialect roles on the anthology Escape.
His roles in the latter ranged from the Cockney protagonist of The Man Who Worked Miracles to the famed Arabian hero of The Voyages of Sinbad.
Other radio credits included work on Gunsmoke, Crime Classics, and Suspense.
In film and TV, he was busy on and off-camera. He was seen as the Nazi Herr Zeller in The Sound of Music, and had small roles in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie, Judgment at Nuremberg, and My Fair Lady, amongst others.
On TV, he guested on such series as Hogan's Heroes (as various Nazi officers), Combat!, Get Smart, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone and The Rockford Files.
Wright also worked heavily as a voice actor, and was often heard on The Outer Limits, as various alien voices, and also appeared on-camera.
Other voice work included playing the narrator in Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, the BBC announcer in the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank, and featured animation roles in several Disney movies: One Hundred and One Dalmatians (as Roger Radcliff), The Jungle Book (as Mowgli's wolf father, Rama), and The Little Mermaid (as Grimsby).
On June 16, 1989, after completing his last role, providing the voice of Grimsby in Disney's The Little Mermaid, he entered St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank for quadruple bypass surgery from which he never recovered.
He died of heart failure July 2, 1989. He was 74.