Henry Corden (January 6, 1920 – May 19, 2005) was an American actor and voice artist best-known for taking over the role of Fred Flintstone on The Flintstones after Alan Reed died in 1977. His debut as Fred's new voice was on the syndicated weekday series Fred Flintstone and Friends in 1977. (He also provided the singing voice for Reed in the 1966 theatrical film, The Man Called Flintstone).

Corden gave his voice to a number of other Hanna-Barbera productions, including The Jetsons, Josie and the Pussycats, The Atom Ant Show, The New Tom & Jerry Show and Jonny Quest. Corden also gave voice to the wizard Gemini and Ookla the Mokk in Ruby-Spears Productions' Thundarr the Barbarian as well as the Gorilla General Urko in DePatie-Freleng Enterprises' Return to the Planet of the Apes.

With his deep voice, jet-black hair and ethnic looks, Corden was frequently tapped to play heavies in films and on television. He can be seen in such live-action films as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ( 1947), The Black Castle (1952) and The Ten Commandments (1956). He also appeared in dozens of TV shows, including Dragnet, Perry Mason, Hogan's Heroes, and Gunsmoke. Corden also played landlord Henry Babbitt on The Monkees (1966).

Corden had one enduring role for which he was never credited. He was called upon to impersonate Jackie Gleason for the "television edit" of Smokey and the Bandit. 05_20.html#009882" target="_blank">http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_05_20.html#009882 The repeated broadcasts of this version, the liberal use of the nonsense phrase "scum bum" to replace profanity, and the fact that it obviously wasn't Gleason speaking have given the performance a sort of cult status.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Corden moved to _New York as a child and arrived in Hollywood in the 1940s.

Corden died of emphysema at age 85 at AMI Encino Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Corden's wife of nine years, Angelina, was with him at the time. Besides his wife, Corden is survived by two children, three stepchildren, two grandchildren, and three step-grandchildren.

Although versatile character actor and voice extraordinaire Henry Corden will forever be associated with, and fondly remembered for, providing the bellicose, gravel-toned rasp of cartoon immortal Fred Flintstone, he enjoyed a long and varied career prior to this distinction, which took up most of his later years. Born in Montreal, Canada, on January 6, 1920, Henry's family moved to New York while he was still a child. Henry received his start on stage and radio before heading off to Hollywood in the 1940s. He made his film debut as a minor heavy in the Danny Kaye vehicle Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The (1947) as Boris Karloff's bestial henchman, and continued on along those same lines, often in unbilled parts. A master at dialects, he was consistently employed as either an ethnic Middle Eastern villain or some sort of streetwise character (club manager, salesman) in 1950s costumed adventures and crime yarns, both broad and serious. He seldom made it into the prime support ranks, however, with somewhat insignificant parts in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), Asphalt Jungle, The (1950), Viva Zapata! (1952), Scaramouche (1952), I Confess (1953), King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Jupiter's Darling (1955) and Ten Commandments, The (1956). On TV he could regularly be found on both drama ("Perry Mason," "The Untouchables") and light comedy ("My Little Margie," "Mister Ed"). A heightened visibility on TV included playing Barbara Eden (I)'s genie father on the popular sitcom "I Dream of Jeannie," and the contentious landlord "Mr. Babbitt" on "The Monkees." Henry made a highly lucrative move into animation in the 1960s supplying a host of brutish voices on such cartoons as "Jonny Quest," "The Jetsons," "Secret Squirrel," "Atom Ant," "Josie and the Pussycats" and "The Harlem Globetrotters." A well-oiled talent for Hanna-Barbera, he reached his zenith after inheriting the voice of the studio's beloved, boorish Flintstone character after the show's original vocal owner, Alan Reed (I), passed away in 1977. Corden would go on to give life to Flintstone for nearly three decades on various revamped cartoon series, animated specials and cereal commercials. He was performing as Flintstone, in fact, until about three months prior to his death of emphysema at the age of 85 on May 19, 2005. Married four times, he was survived by wife Angelina, his two children from his first marriage, and three stepchildren from his last union. Unlike the crass guys and gruff villains he tended to articulate on film and TV, Henry was actually a humble, modest man, well loved and respected by friends, family and peers.

Henry Corden was born in Canada and raised in New York. He acted on the stage and in radio before he migrated to Hollywood in the mid-1940s, film-debuting in 1946 in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" with Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff; the sinister-looking Corden played villain Karloff's brutish henchman. In the 1960s he began supplementing his income with voice-over work, getting his feet wet voicing a fish in a TV commercial for Starkist Tuna and then regularly voicing "heavies" on Hanna-Barbera's adventure cartoon series "Jonny Quest." Corden began occasionally doing the voice of Fred Flintstone shortly before the death of the cartoon character's original voice artist, Alan Reed (alternating with Reed), and took over after Reed's 1977 death. His last on-camera acting was in 1981's "Modern Problems"; he soured on the audition process because "I had started coming into too many offices where the casting director was like ten and a half years old and I could barely see him over the desk and he would say, 'Tell me, Mr. Corden, what have you done?' Mind you, at that point I was in the business for many, many years, and it would seem to me that I would have...maybe not a good reputation, but SOME reputation. Eventually, I decided, 'Enough.' I was doing well with voice-overs, so I said, 'That's it. I won't put myself through this any more.'"