Eliza Jane
| Voice Over | |
| IMDB.com | Eliza Jane's Website |
Eliza Jane Schneider has taught and recorded dialects all over England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, both Islands of New Zealand, all 50 United States, South Africa, the West Indies, Russia, Israel, and France, to name a few. For five years, she voiced 8 Series Regular characters (Wendy, Shelly, Principal Victoria, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Cartman, Mrs. McCormick, Ms. Crabtree, The Mayor) and hundreds of additional voices for Comedy Central’s hit animated series “South Park.” Her critically acclaimed one-woman, 34 character show, “Freedom of Speech,” won the “Best Solo Show” award at the New York International Fringe Festival, then ran Off-Broadway at P.S. 122, and was ultimately moved to the The Public Theater. The popular show continues to tour, selling out venues from CitiStage Symphony Hall in Massachusetts to The Washington Center for the Performing Arts. Recently profiled for her dialect research and character acting on the International BRAVO! Network’s “Arts & Minds” program, alongside “Sting,” Eliza Jane Schneider has created multiple dialect characters for MTV’s animated series, “3 South”, NBC’s “King of the Hill,” Cartoon Network’s “Squirrel Boy,” the Mel Gibson film, “What Women Want,” and PIXAR’s smash feature, “Finding Nemo.” On camera, Eliza Jane recurred on UPN’s “Girlfriends” as a white girl, surprisingly fluent in “Ebonics”. She also recurred as a Russian on NBC’s “Spy TV,” and is known in over 60 countries as series regular “Liza,” on CBS’ “Beakman’s World.”
Founder of the “Eliza Doolittle Dialects” school, Ms. Schneider has been coaching actors for dialect roles in film and television in Hollywood since 1992. She published her “Distinctions in American Southern” dialect CD in 1999, and is currently compiling the rest of her dialect research from around the world into CD’s and instructional tapes for actors. She taught dialects at Brown University, Trinity Rep, The O’Neill Theater Center, The Famous Radio Ranch, The Learning Tree University, and Dolores Diehl’s Voice-Over Academy. She has also been the primary research partner and protégé to Robert Easton, “The Henry Higgins of Hollywood,” from 1997 (when his clients Robin Williams and Helen Hunt each won Oscars for their roles in “Good Will Hunting” and “As Good as It Gets,” respectively) to 2007 (when his client, Forest Whitaker, won every award there was for the Ugandan role of Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.”) Doing business as “Higgins and Doolittle,” Easton and Schneider have spent ten years co-authoring a master work on dialects and accents, entitled “How To Talk the Talk: A Five-Volume Encyclopedic Textbook of the Dialects of Spoken English with Accompanying Digital Recordings.”
Fascinated by sound all her life, at age 7, Eliza Jane was recognized as a violin virtuoso, studying the Suzuki ear-training method at the Eastman School of Music, where she also studied classical voice. By age twelve, she had gotten her Equity card playing an English role in “A Christmas Carol” and an American Southern role in “Inherit the Wind.” She has since performed in dozens of plays, including the title roles in Antigone and Agnes of God (for which, at age 17, she won Rochester, New York’s “Dionysus Award” for “Outstanding Performance”). Schneider studied dialects and acting at Northwestern University and UCLA, where she graduated with a BFA from the World Arts and Cultures Department in Theater. She wrote her senior thesis on American regional dialects, and then participated in the Dialect 2000 conference at Queens University Belfast. Some of her recordings were used in the creation of the book resulting from that conference, Language Links: The Languages of Scotland and Ireland. She was then an invited guest at the joint meeting of the Northern English Dialect Societies in Yorkshire. Eliza Jane Schneider continues to traverse the globe. She has digitally recorded over 7000 interviews with native speakers of variant forms of English throughout the world, and is one of the top dialect coaches, voice actresses, and fiddle players in Hollywood. For info on Schneider’s playwrighting and music credits, visit www.elizajane.com.