Melanie Crawley
SENIOR ARTIST
BIO
An accomplished and experienced audiobook narrator of more than 40 titles and a trained actor, Melanie has an engaging ‘storyteller’ style of narration and is a highly versatile character actor, able to deliver intensely dramatic readings and great comedy.
Melanie’s natural voice can be described as assured, no-nonsense, trustworthy, mature, believable, sincere and gentle. Her natural accent is roughly ‘neutral’ British English so she is often asked to narrate in a contemporary ‘RP’ (received pronunciation or BBC English) but she’s also a northerner and can narrate naturally in northern regional accents. She often provides all sorts of British accents and a wide-range of international accents from Eastern European to South African to US accents.
A recent USound client said of her narration:
"I wanted to email you direct, essentially to say, in capital letters to stress my gratitude, THANK YOU. I think you have done an amazing job, with such subtlety and sensitivity – and such compellingly accurate accents, too. I’m absolutely thrilled with it – so I wanted to convey, here, both my admiration and appreciation."
Nick Duerden, author of ‘Dishing The Dirt’ one of The Guardian’s ‘Books of the Autumn’
ACCENTS AND DIALECTS
- Neutral / Northern, native English speaker - RP, Heightened RP - Afrikaans - Cockney - West Midlands - Liverpool - Manchester - Scottish - General Irish - General US - Southern US.
VOICE QUALITIES
An assured, no-nonsense, trustworthy natural voice; mature, believable, sincere and gentle. A versatile voice actor, able to create and distinguish believable, contrasting characters and convey humour, drama and emotion.
AUDIOBOOKS (selected)
An Unknown Woman by Jane Davis
How to Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliot
The River Through Rome by Nicholas Nicastro
The Hellion by Harriet Young
Dishing The Dirt by Nick Duerden
Blood Red City by Rod Reynolds
Survive by Tom Bale
The Last Boleyn by Karen Harper
The Royal Nanny by Karen Harper
The From Italy With Love Series by Tilly Tennant
The Thrown Away Children Series by Louise Allan
Silent Sisters by Joanne Lee, Ann Cusack, Joe Cusack
TRAINING
Melanie studied drama at Manchester Metropolitan University alongside visual arts in her 20s, going on to work variously in theatre and event design, film and theatre production and exhibition, returning as an actor and VO to the stage and studio in the early 2010s. She maintains a voice studio of excellent quality voice actor and actor for stage. She regularly attends voice and accent development classes with coach Nic Redman and is part of the ‘Voice Over Social', is on the talent roster of many voiceover companies including the notoriously demanding Voiceover Profiles and international agency deVine Voices. She is a proud member of Equity, Spotlight and the Audiobook Publishers Association.