Peter Cullen, voice actor who gave Optimus Prime a soul, dies at 85

NEW YORK - Peter Cullen, a voice actor best known for bringing to life Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise and the gloomy donkey Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh cartoons, died on Aug 26 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.

His agent, Kevin Motley, confirmed the death, but did not specify a cause.

Cullen has said his favorite voice role was the one with which he was most closely associated: Optimus Prime, the honour-bound protagonist of the Transformers franchise, which began as a television cartoon series in 1984, based on a popular set of toys.

His take on the character was inspired by his brother Larry, who had served with the Marines in Vietnam.

The brothers were roommates when Cullen auditioned for a role in the series, about robots that transform into other objects, like vehicles.

“I say, ‘I’m going to an audition,’” Cullen told the Los Angeles Times in 2014, recalling an exchange with his brother.

“He says, ‘For what?’ I say, ‘I’m going to be a truck.’ He laughs. I say: ‘No, Larry. It’s a hero truck!’ He says, ‘A hero truck? Well if you’re going to be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be a jerk.’”

His brother then offered one final pointer: “Be strong enough to be gentle.”

Cullen remembered that counsel during the audition, adjusting his voice’s pitch to more closely mimic his older brother’s.

“His advice to me was that to be a leader, be strong and compassionate,” Cullen told The Calgary Herald in 2019.

“Don’t be a yelling, screaming Hollywood phony. The tone of his voice was very, very clear and compassionate and soft with depth.

“I went to the audition and there it was. It was Larry, my brother, on the pages in front of me. That’s how I handled it.”

After the cartoon series, which ran for four seasons in syndication from 1984 to 1987, Cullen reprised the role in several iterations of the Transformers franchise, including video games, television series and the Michael Bay-helmed live-action films, which were box office smashes in the 2000s.

The Optimus Prime character was killed off in a 1986 animated film.

At a 2015 Transformers convention in Mississauga, Ontario, Cullen recalled reading the script with Frank Welker, who voiced Megatron, Optimus Prime’s mortal enemy.

“‘Hey Frank, I’m getting whacked on page 17,’” Cullen recalled telling Welker, according to an account in The Mississauga News. “I’m not coming back. There go the car payments.”

After a backlash, Optimus Prime was revived in the third season of the cartoon series.

Cullen’s other notable role came when he was cast in 1988 as the voice of Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh’s grumpy friend, in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, an animated series on ABC.

He went on to reprise the role in films, other animated series and straight-to-video releases.

“I enjoyed doing Eeyore because he was simply charming,” Cullen told NPR in 2014.

“And I get an awful lot of reactions from, especially, young kids when I go up and just say” – he slipped into Eeyore’s voice – “‘Hello. Thanks for noticing me.’ And to see their faces light up, that to me is one of the great joys.”

Peter Claver Cullen was born July 28, 1941, in Montreal to American parents, Muriel McCann, a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and Henry Laurence Cullen, an executive with the International Paper Sales Co.

Peter was exposed to radio at an early age; his maternal grandfather, Alfred Watterson McCann, was a muckraking radio journalist on WOR in New York City.

After McCann died in 1931, Peter’s aunt and uncle, Alfred W. McCann Jr. and Dora McCann, took over his show and would put their nephew on the air when he visited from Canada.

“They would say, ‘And now, my young nephew from Montreal is in the room, and come over here, Peter, go and say hello to the people,’” Cullen recalled at GalaxyCon Columbus in 2023.

Cullen traced the origin of his voice acting career to the time he spent on a farm as a child.

“I could imitate the cows, the calves, the chickens, the different dogs they had,” he told NPR in 2014.

He graduated from the National Theater School of Canada in 1963 and spent the early days of his career working in the Canadian theatre and on satirical shows, including Funny You Should Say That on CBC Radio.

His first big break after moving to Hollywood came in 1967, when he was hired as an announcer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

Four years later, he became the announcer for The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. His other voice credits include DuckTales, My Little Pony and the Ghostbusters television series, as well as an uncredited role providing the strange guttural noises made by the title creature in Predator (1987), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Cullen’s marriage to Carol Ann Balmer, a former Miss Canada, ended in divorce in 1982.

They had two children, Peter Cullen Jr. and Claire Ann Cullen, both of whom survive him. His brother Larry died in 2011. Full information on Cullen’s survivors was not available.

In 2011, Cullen was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for his performance as Optimus Prime in the animated reboot series Transformers: Prime.

Though he had dozens of credits to his name, the endurance of his Transformers role can be credited, at least in part, to the power of listening to a trusted family member.

“I can just feel Larry’s words coming out of my mouth,” he told the Los Angeles Times, recalling his audition.

“So, I took his sound – my first words were, ‘My name is Optimus Prime.’ And all these years later, we’re talking about it.” NYTIMES