Actor Jim Cummings

James Jonah Cummings (born November 3, 1952) is an American voice actor who has appeared in almost 400 roles, including Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, the Tasmanian Devil, Pete and Darkwing Duck.

Early life

Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Cummings relocated to New Orleans, where he designed and painted Mardi Gras floats, worked as a river boat deck hand and sang and played drums in the regionally-successful rock band Fusion. He attended Immaculate Conception and St. Columba grade schools as well as Ursuline High School and graduated from there in 1970.

He later married and moved to Anaheim, California, where he managed a video store in the early 1980s, before launching his voice-acting career in late 1984.

Career

Cummings’s first voice role was as Lionel the Lion and Aunt Fira in Dumbo’s Circus. Some of Cummings’ earliest vocal work was at Disney, where he replaced Hal Smith as the voice of Winnie the Pooh in 1988. He began partially replacing Paul Winchell as Tigger, before fully replacing him as the character in 2000’s The Tigger Movie. In 1991, he ventured to Warner Bros. Animation to voice the Tasmanian Devil on the animated series Taz-Mania and would continue to voice the character in various Looney Tunes media.

When actor Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar in The Lion King, developed vocal problems during recording of the song “Be Prepared”, Cummings replaced him on the remainder of the track along with providing the voice for Ed the hyena. He also provided Scar’s voice in a brief nightmare sequence in The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. Cummings would later be hired as the singing double for Russell Means in Pocahontas, the speaking voice of Kekata in Pocahontas and the singing voice of Christopher Lloyd in Anastasia.

In commercials, he voiced Smokey the Bear in several commercials, ads and promos from 1993 to 2006. Also in 2006 through 2008 he was the announcer for the short-lived court show Judge Maria Lopez which was produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Television.

In 2018, he became the first voice performer of animation to reprise his role(s) for a live-action Disney film, reprising the roles of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger for the film Christopher Robin. His performance as Pooh was particularly praised by Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair, who felt it was “Oscar-worthy” and said that “[a]s Winnie the Pooh … the veteran voice actor gives such sweet, rumpled, affable life to the wistful bear of literary renown that it routinely breaks the heart.”

Personal life

Cummings has two daughters with Stephanie Cummings, as well as two older children from a previous marriage. Cummings and Stephanie divorced in 2011, after ten years of marriage.

Child custody case, domestic abuse and rape allegations

In 2019, during a child custody and care payment battle, Stephanie Cummings stated that during their marriage, her former spouse had “engaged in physical, sexual and emotional abuse including but not limited to death threats, rape, and various sexual deviant behavior forced upon me without my consent”. She also said that Cummings had raped her in 2013 and abused the family dog. She claimed that as a result, she had moved to Utah and filed a restraining order against him three times.

Cummings in turn denied all of these statements, and accused his ex-wife of extortion. He said that Stephanie was an abuser of drugs herself, had purposefully exaggerated her stories to paint him in a bad light, and had threatened multiple times to ruin his career. He stated Stephanie had also missed months of assigned and required visitations with the daughters. He also said that the authorities themselves had stopped responding to her calls of abuse after she kept calling them multiple times, with them citing it as “a waste of police resources.” Authorities, including child protection services in three states, investigated the couple’s claims.

Cummings won the case for primary physical custody over the girls, but both parents continue to share joint legal custody. Both were admonished by the judge for “bad parenting” by not having put their children first over their problems with each other, and that there was varying amounts of abuse on both sides. They were then awarded mutual restraining orders in which they had to stay 100 yards away from each other, excluding visitation purposes. The orders will remain in effect until May 9, 2022. In June 2019, Cummings stated in an open letter to fans that he and his legal team had contacted the FBI in helping to dispel the claims completely.

Filmography

Accolades

External Links

Actor Jim Cummings – Wikipedia