For nearly three decades, Bud Collyer was Superman. Long before George Reeves, Christopher Reeve or the many actors who followed, Collyer brought the Man of Steel to life on radio, in theatrical animation and, eventually, on Saturday morning television. His performance was particularly remarkable for the way he used two distinctly different voices to portray Clark Kent and Superman, allowing listeners to experience a transformation they couldn't actually see.
Born Clayton Johnson Heermance Jr. on June 18, 1908, in New York City, he came from a family with connections to show business, although his original ambition was to become a lawyer like his father. He attended Williams College and studied law at Fordham University, but the growing opportunities in radio would lead him in an entirely different direction.
ADAM NEDEFF (game show historian; author, Game Shows FAQ): “He was really kind of a born showman in that he had actors in the family. His sister Dorothea was an actress, who went by the name June Collyer. His brother was involved in the business end of the movie industry, and his mother was an actress. But Bud was leaning towards law school and in high school had been part of the drama club. He was in four plays, yet he started attending Fordham Law School. While he was at Fordham, Columbia invited him to join their drama club, so by day he was taking law school classes and by night he would rehearse plays at Columbia.”
CHRISTINE COLLYER (daughter): “While he was in school, he became an announcer on the radio because his sister, my aunt June, was an actor in Hollywood and one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. So dad started working as an announcer on different days at a time when everyone got dressed up to do radio.”
ADAM NEDEFF: “By the time he had gotten to his senior year, he had gotten into radio and was on CBS radio every day singing for six days a week and he was doing some acting, as everybody in that era of radio eventually did. So during his senior year, he dropped out of law school, because the radio career was booming. I mean, there was just no turning back; he was making so much money on radio, in fact, that he treated himself to a month in Europe. He was on shows like Dreams of Long Ago, Capital K of America, The March of Time, Gangbusters and The Goldbergs. At the same time, he would record numerous shows, running from one to the other.”
Early Career and Radio Success
Adopting the professional name Bud Collyer, he became one of radio's most versatile performers during the 1930s, working as an actor, singer and announcer. His credits included The Goldbergs, The March of Time, Gang Busters, Terry and the Pirates, The Blue Beetle and Renfrew of the Mounted. The experience would serve him well when producers began searching for someone to bring the increasingly popular Superman to radio.
ADAM NEDEFF: “When you’re in demand, and Betty White talked about doing this too, and if you were good enough — and certainly not everybody was — because radio was such an instant medium, and a quick medium, where programs were only on the air for 15 minutes, and there were so many radio shows, at the time you could kind of pinball back and forth between different jobs during a given day.
“On top of that, if you did a live national show, because they didn’t have satellite technology yet, you would do a broadcast for the Eastern time zone at 8 p.m. and then you would stick around until 11 p.m. and do the show all over again for the listeners in the Pacific time zone. In one instance for the 11 p.m. show, the cast members looked around and realized that a co-star had forgotten about the second show and had already gone home. And Bud, with one-minute notice, stepped up and did the French accent required for the role and the show carried on.”
The Adventures of Superman: Defining the Hero's Voice
When The Adventures of Superman premiered in February 1940, Collyer became the first actor to portray the character in a continuing dramatic production. Although initially reluctant to accept the role, he would ultimately make it his own, distinguishing Clark Kent's lighter, conversational voice from Superman's deeper, more commanding delivery. That vocal transformation became one of the show's defining characteristics, particularly when Clark announced, "This looks like a job for Superman!" Collyer made the change of identity audible, creating a technique that would influence generations of Superman performers.
CHRISTINE COLLYER: “It was actually Jackson Beck, who was his announcer for years on radio and had a very memorable voice, who convinced him to do it.”
MICHAEL J. HAYDE (author, Flights of Fantasy: The Unauthorized but True Story of Radio & TV's Adventures of Superman): “He was talked into auditioning for the parts of Superman and Clark Kent. And when he did, Allen Duchovny thought that he was the only guy who could do both parts. He had that gentle, flowing, almost tenor type of voice as Kent. And then, he was able to drop it down real low when he says, ‘a job for Superman.’ It’s as good as when George Reeves would rip off his glasses and duck into a storeroom as far as getting the kids worked up. It’s the audio equivalent of that.”
BUD COLLYER (actor, Clark Kent/Superman, The Adventures of Superman radio show): “I thought the character would be nothing but an embarrassment, both personally and professionally. Of course, it grew into a magnificent career-within-a-career. It was great fun and a great way to get out all your inhibitions real fast.”
MICHAEL J. HAYDE: “In addition to being the daily announcer for different shows, he was also acting and had a pretty full plate, but then he was being asked to do this fantastic character who leaps a quarter of a mile and wears this outlandish costume (not that he had to wear it), and he’s just thinking, ‘No, no, no, no.’ I’m sure he’d seen the newspaper strip, if nothing else. As he put it, ‘The whole idea embarrassed me.’ So Maxwell says to him, ‘Look, we’re just doing a pilot, okay? We’d really like to get this done. Just do the parts and maybe we’ll cast you in some other roles if the show sells.’”
BUD COLLYER: “I can remember vaguely walking around saying to myself, ‘I can’t play it. I can’t go through this again. You’re actually out of your mind,’ but then you get on the air and you give a fine performance. Yeah, I don’t understand it either.”
MICHAEL J. HAYDE: “So he does the four shows and the thing gets shopped around. And at first the networks all turned it down, because it was too fantastic, just like the comic book people and newspaper syndicates originally turned it down. Plus, two of the episodes had war themes and were taking place in a Navy yard in Virginia, but we were not in the war yet and there was definitely a faction in the United States trying to make sure that we stayed out. We didn’t want to make any waves there. So eventually what happens is instead of going through the networks, they say, ‘Fine, let’s go to the ad agencies and see what we can do there.’ As it happened, there was an agency for H-O Cereals and they were looking to get into radio strictly on an East Coast basis at this point. So the show gets on in New York under the auspices of Hecker’s Oats and goes on the air in February of 1941. It became a sensation and the next thing you know, Bud Collyer is Superman.”
CHRISTINE COLLYER: “As he explained it to me, he’d get that deep voice by sort of taking a deep breath and trying not to burp to get from Clark to Superman. People don’t really know that, because it was so long ago.”
JERRY BECK (animation historian): “There’s a way you act on radio that’s similar to the way you act in silent movies that you don’t do in sound movies, because of the medium. Because radio isn’t visual, you have to act with your voice in a certain way to communicate what you’re doing. So that was Collyer’s way of communicating the change from Clark Kent to Superman, which allowed you to visualize it in your mind. I love that. I mean, I love George Reeves, please don’t get me wrong, but the problem with him is that if he’s talking on the phone as Superman, if he puts his glasses on in the middle of the conversation, suddenly the person thinks they’re talking to Clark Kent even though he sounds exactly the same. But Collyer avoided that in the same way that Christopher Reeve would later create two distinct personalities for Superman and Clark Kent.”
LEONARD MALTIN (film historian, author of Leonard Maltin’s 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen): “Bud Collyer’s sister June Collyer was kind of a starlet in the late ’20s or early ’30s. She married Stuart Erwin, and I met Stuart Erwin Jr., who later became a TV producer in California. The one thing I wanted to ask him about his uncle Bud was if he ever did the voice for him. He said that, yes, Bud lived in New York and the Erwins were in L.A., but once a year he’d come out for a visit or something and he would do the voice drop: ‘This looks like a job… for Superman!’”
STEVE YOUNIS: “Christopher Reeve embodied that in that one scene in Superman: The Movie after he’s had the interview with Lois on the penthouse of her apartment where he comes in as Clark and is just about to tell her that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same. He did the physical embodiment where he pulled back his shoulders, stuck his chest out and his voice changed a little there. So you could see that in the physical aspect with Chris, but with Bud Collyer, he had to convey that with only his voice. To me, it was spectacular. They did one episode of the radio show in a cave with Clark, Jimmy and a kid and their lantern goes out. It’s pitch black; they can’t see anything, so Superman somehow comes in. They don’t know how, but he’s in the cave with them. And because Jimmy and the kid can’t see anything, there’s a conversation between the guys, so it’s a conversation between all ‘four’ of them. Then you have to consider that this was in the day and age before editing — they did this live, recorded on discs. So Bud Collyer was having a conversation with himself in two different voices.”
The Radio Show's Impact and a Remarkable Superman Legacy
Running from 1940 to 1951, The Adventures of Superman produced more than 2,000 episodes, with Collyer playing the title character for most of its run before Michael Fitzmaurice succeeded him. The program also introduced important elements of Superman mythology, including Perry White, Jimmy Olsen and Kryptonite, while occasionally tackling serious social issues, most notably the 1946 storyline "Clan of the Fiery Cross," in which Superman confronted a racist organization modeled on the Ku Klux Klan.
But Collyer's Superman career extended well beyond radio. He also voiced the character in the Fleischer and Famous Studios theatrical cartoons of the 1940s and returned to the role in Filmation's The New Adventures of Superman beginning in 1966, continuing his association with the Man of Steel into the final years of his life.
That extraordinary longevity, combined with the sheer number of radio performances, makes Collyer one of the most prolific Superman actors in the character's history. More importantly, he established a vocal identity for Superman that remained recognizable across three decades and three different entertainment mediums.
Even as his association with Superman continued, Collyer became a household name in television through his work as host of Beat the Clock, which premiered in 1950, and To Tell the Truth, which debuted in 1956. His warmth, professionalism and easy rapport with contestants made him one of television's most familiar game show personalities. He was also deeply committed to his fellow performers, serving as president of the American Federation of Radio Artists and later AFTRA, and helping establish pension and welfare benefits for union members.
Collyer was married twice, first to Heloise Law Green, with whom he had three children, and later to actress Marian Shockley. A deeply religious man, he taught Sunday school and wrote two books exploring spiritual themes, Thou Shalt Not Fear and With the Whole Heart.
Final Years and Legacy
Bud Collyer died on September 8, 1969, in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the age of 61. His career had encompassed radio drama, animation, television and service to his fellow performers, but his place in Superman history was assured.
He was the first actor to make audiences believe that Clark Kent and Superman were two different people simply by changing his voice. For generations of listeners, that voice was Superman. And nearly three decades after he first stepped up to the microphone for the animated series, it still was.