Actors - George Manley

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	Actors - George Manley

George Manley (born George Edmond Manley on September 17th, 1965, in Sacramento, California) is an American voice artist, screenplay writer and ring announcer for independent wrestling promotion Texas Wrestling Entertainment currently residing in the state of Texas.

Seemingly destined to a life of public service after majoring in Theatre and Drama for a year and a half at San Jose State University, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1985. Manley himself describes this part of his life as “more than a little blessed since our country managed to keep itself out of mischief and me off of the battlefield.” He was honorably discharged in 1989 after four years as an M60-series Patton armor crewman and found his way back to the stage.

For the better part of the ten years that followed, he would lend his talents to lip-synch acting troupes that performed along with The Rocky Horror Picture Show in various venues in Northern California under the nickname “Rock” Manley. This included a six-month stint as the Cast Leader of the New Varsity Theatre’s Erotic Nightmares in Palo Alto, California. A term, some would say, was marred by his attempt to make the volunteer company a “one man show,” a reference to his professional-wrestler style introductions of the show and his dubbing of the phrase “Rockamania.,” which was actually a take off on the pro wrestling phrase “Hulkamania” and was meant to refer to the film and the experience itself rather than his own persona. During other runs with other casts, he preferred to let others to take the spotlight and eventually tired of the Rocky experience and performed his last show with San Mateo’s Cosmic Light in 1998. Additionally, he had appeared in local community theatre productions such as The Rimers of Eldritch which naturally played to his gregarious nature and powerful bass voice.

From the time he could watch color television in the early 1970’s, Manley became a fan of Japanese animation (anime) as programs such as Kimba the White Lion (Junguru Taitei), Speed Racer (Mach Go Go) and Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) stirred his imagination. Later, shows such as Battle of the Planets (Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman) and Star Blazers (Uuchu Senkan Yamato) would keep his fires for anime simmering. However, it wasn’t until he had given up his foray into the Rocky Horror world that he saw something that ignited his interest in acting professionally.

Walking into a video rental store in Reno, Nevada, he stumbled upon the newest wave of English-language dubbed anime titles available in the mid-90’s. He was thrilled by some of the material, which wasn’t all simple morality plays or apocalyptic visions. Upon further investigation, he found that one of the distributors, AD Vision, operated its own dubbing facilities in Houston, Texas. Undaunted by the admonitions that he had to live where the work is, he began to take steps to improve his education as an actor and focused on gaining the skills to work in animation.

In the early 2000’s, he took courses with San Francisco’s Voice One Studio, operated by veteran voiceover artist Elaine A. Clark, author of There’s Money Where Your Mouth Is. In spite of admonitions that the Bay Area was hardly an animation market, Manley chose classes that accentuated his desire to work in animation: basic voiceover, improvisation, character creation, phonetics and dialectics. All of this, while he had earned a degree in information systems and was working as a network security specialist for large-scale internet service provider Excite At Home, remnants of which are still operating in Japan.

In 2002 he lost his job with Excite At Home. Because of the job shortage created by the mass collapse of similar companies, he remained unemployed for several months. During this time, he went to a local anime convention (Fanime Con, San Jose, California) and ran into AD Vision (now ADV Films) veteran actress Amanda Winn-Lee and her husband Jason Lee during their acting workshop at the trade show. Additionally, a short conversation with veteran actor Tiffany Grant and her then-fiance, ADV co-founder Matt Greenfield, helped him understand that his own hero-worship was stopping him from trying acting as a career. After seeing him work through several improvisation games and watching him perform a monologue, Amanda gave him some very strong encouragement to pursue entertainment as a career. The exact words, according to Manley were, “You need to be acting for a living.”

A few months later, after a short attempt to break into the Los Angeles acting market, Manley was in an auto accident in his then-hometown of Modesto, California. The accident gave him two cracked ribs and totalled his car. Seemingly, his opportunity to keep on driving to Los Angeles to look for work (he’d actually done two episodes of the NBC show Meet My Folks as a commuter between these two cities) had vanished.
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