LOS ANGELES — Fred Travalena, the master impressionist and singer whose broad repertoire of voices ranged from Jack Nicholson to Sammy Davis Jr. to Bugs Bunny, has died. He was 66.
Travalena, who began being treated for an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2002 and saw the disease return last July after going into remission in 2003, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles, according to his publicist, Roger Neal. Travalena also was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003 but had been in complete remission since then.
Dubbed "The Man of a Thousand Faces" and "Mr. Everybody," Travalena emerged on the national stage as an impressionist in the early 1970s.
Over the next three decades, he was a headliner in Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City, performed in concerts around the country, appeared on "The Tonight Show" and other talk shows and starred in his own specials, such as "The Many Faces of Fred Travalena" and "Comedy in the Oval Office."
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The boyish-faced entertainer is said to have had a repertoire of more than 360 celebrity, political and cartoon-character voices, including Clint Eastwood, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Johnny Mathis, Bruce Springsteen and Luciano Pavarotti.
"I've known impressionists who have reached a wall where they can't do any more (voices)," Travalena told the Omaha World Herald in 1996. "I don't have that problem, thank God."
In one part of his act, Travalena physically and vocally "morphed" into U.S. presidents, from John F. Kennedy up to George W. Bush.
He also was known to sing "Have I Told You Lately" in various voices, including Kermit the Frog, Katharine Hepburn and Frank Sinatra.
The imaginative entertainer even did Sinatra imitating Boy George.
Of Italian and Irish heritage, Travalena was born Oct. 6, 1942, in the Bronx, N.Y., and grew up on Long Island.
When it came to impressions, he had an early role model: his father, a one-time entertainer who sang and performed comedy and impressions.
"He got me doing church shows when I was just a little kid," Travalena recalled in a 1998 interview on "The Crier Report" on Fox News Network. "I used to do an impression of (singer) Johnny Ray."
In school, he said, he learned to deal with bullies by imitating a Martian voice or Porky Pig. And he found he could deflect a teacher's question of why he didn't do his homework by making her laugh with his impression of Crazy Guggenheim, the goofy character played on TV by Frank Fontaine during Jackie Gleason's "Joe the Bartender" sketches.
During a stint in the Army's Special Services, Travalena won the All-Army Entertainment Award for best singer and once impersonated President Lyndon Johnson's voice on the base theater's answering machine to announce the movies and show times.
Although he told The New York Times in 1989 that he was "headed for the commercial art field," Travalena said, "That wasn't getting me up in the morning, and I couldn't get show business out of my mind."
Travalena made occasional guest appearances on TV series such as "The Love Boat" and "Murphy Brown," as well as on "Hollywood Squares" and other game shows. He also did voices on a number of TV cartoon series and appeared in the 1978 movie "The Buddy Holly Story."
Travalena received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.
