William Phipps, the voice of Prince Charming in Disney’s animated classic Cinderella and the star of several science fiction films of the 1950s, has died at the age of 96.
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According to The Hollywood Reporter, Phipps died on Friday night at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, succumbing to the effects of lung cancer. The announcement was made by Phipps’ friend, the showbiz author Tom Weaver.
Phipps began his career under contract to RKO Radio Pictures. He made his on-screen debut in Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 film Crossfire, a noir classic about the investigation of the hate-crime murder of a Jewish man. Crossfire was the first B movie to ever be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award and earned five nominations in total.
Phipps went on to become a sci-fi regular. In 1951, he played a young poet who was one of five people to survive a nuclear explosion in the film Five. He fought against the Martians on multiple occasions in 1953, appearing in The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars. He also was featured in 1953’s Cat-Women of the Moon and 1954’s The Snow Creature.
Before appearing on screen, it was Walt Disney himself who chose Phipps to voice Prince Charming in 1950’s Cinderella. Phipps put in two hours of voice work on a January afternoon in 1949 and was paid $100 for his trouble.
Phipps was also featured in a contest to promote the film, in which a young woman could win a date with the voice of Prince Charming. Phipps later told the story of the evening.
“They gave me (I think) $100 pocket money and a limousine and a driver so we could go anywhere we wanted,” he said. “We went to Ciro’s and the Mocambo, which were the two most famous places on the Sunset Strip at the time, and we went to the Trocadero, too.
“At the end of the night, around midnight, the limousine driver and I took her back to the Roosevelt Hotel, where she was staying. And then the chauffeur took me back home — a rooming house we called the House of the Seven Garbos, a home for fledgling actresses, where I lived in a room in the basement for seven dollars a week! The next day I went to the tuxedo rental place and turned in my stuff.”
Phipps was an Indiana native, born in Vincennes in on February 4, 1922. Phipps acted in plays while he was in school studying to be an accountant before deciding to commit to acting as a profession. After his brother was shot down over the South Pacific during World War II, Phipps enlisted in the US Navy as a radioman.
