Acclaimed voice actor Peter Cullen, best known as Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, has died at the age of 85.
Cullen played the alien robot in the classic ’80s animated series, as well as in the series of popular live-action films directed by Michael Bay and starring Shia LaBeouf.
Fans of retro children’s television may also recognize him as the voice of Eeyore in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which ran from 1988 to 1991.
His agent announced that Cullen died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home, but did not indicate a cause TMZ.
“Peter Cullen passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loving family – and in the hearts of his many friends and countless fans around the world,” his family said.
“His family asks that you honor his remarkable legacy by serving your communities and leading others with compassion, integrity and loyalty, and always remember ‘be strong enough to be gentle,'” their statement continued.
Acclaimed voice actor Peter Cullen, best known as Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, has died at the age of 85; pictured 2023
Cullen played the alien robot in the classic ’80s animated series and series of hit live-action films; the character is depicted in the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction
Peter Claver Cullen was born in Montreal in 1941 and grew up with three siblings – one of whom, his brother Larry, provided the basis for the voice of Optimus Prime.
Although he initially dreamed of becoming a serious actor and studied Shakespeare as part of the first graduating class of the National Theater School of Canada, “he quickly came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t cut out to be the artsy guy,” he said.
‘I was having too much fun. I had gone through the experiences of elementary school and high school of being the clown,” he said in an interview The young people.
Cullen worked in Montreal in local films and TV and began working in nightclub revues, where he honed his talent for assuming a variety of accents and characters.
With his young wife and child in tow, he headed to Hollywood for a Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In style show that flopped, leaving him struggling to pick up the pieces and eventually landing an announcing job on The Sonny & Cher Show.
It was his friend Jonathan Winters, the iconic comedian and star of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, who advised him: ‘You know, Peter, what you should do is you should do your voice. You could make a lot of money with those votes.’
After playing a series of “extra voices” on shows like Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo and Alvin and the Chipmunks, he got his big break in 1984.
That year, he had his “cattle call” audition for the role of Optimus Prime, the head of the heroic machines known as Autobots, in the show The Transformers.
“On the advice of my brother Larry – who is a captain in the Marine Corps and fought in Vietnam and when he came back he had a very different outlook on life – one day when he asked where I was going, I said, ‘I’m going to audition for a truck,’ and he laughed,” Cullen recalled decades later.
“And I said, ‘No, he’s a hero truck,’ and then he got really serious and said, ‘Well Peter, if you want to be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be one of those fake Hollywood-sounding types who think they’re tough and they’re not.’
Larry’s advice to his younger brother was, “Be compassionate, be strong enough to be gentle and have some dignity.” But be strong.’
When Cullen arrived at the audition, his brother’s voice was still ringing in his ears, and it was Larry’s intonation that came to the fore as he began playing Optimus Prime.
The show became a beloved children’s classic during its run from 1984 to 1987, producing what became a multi-billion dollar franchise over the decades.
Cullen’s inimitable contribution was a mainstay, including in the 1986 animated film The Transformers: The Movie, Orson Welles’ swan song.
In 1988, he earned a job on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh as the staunchly brooding donkey Eeyore, a role he continued in such projects as The Tigger Movie, A Very Merry Pooh Year, Piglet’s Big Movie, My Friends Tigger & Pooh, The Book of Pooh and House of Mouse.
He joked that it was a “relief” to step into the gentle world of AA Milne after his previous action-packed shows and films, speaking on stage of TF Con.
In 2007, his voice reached a large global audience with the release of the first of the live-action Transformers films, directed by Michael Bay.
Featuring an all-star cast including Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Jon Voight and Anthony Anderson, the film emerged as one of the highest-grossing films of the year and spawned a cavalcade of sequels.
The first five films in the series were all directed by Bay and two of them, Dark of the Moon in 2011 and Age of Extinction in 2014, earned over $1 billion each.
