Larry Thor was a sometime movie and television actor who started his professional entertainment career doing voice work, as an announcer on radio. Born in 1916, he grew up in Lundar, Manitoba, Canada, in what was basically an Icelandic village. He broke into radio in 1937, working at various stations for a decade after, until he arrived in Los Angeles in 1946. His rich, resonant voice gave him a career as an announcer, with occasional bits of acting. In the early '50s, he crossed over into film work when he played a sports announcer in the 20th Century Fox baseball biopic The Pride of St. Louis, telling of the life of pitcher Dizzy Dean (Dan Dailey).
Although he occasionally played announcers in subsequent movies, including The Kid From Left Field (1953) and Zero Hour! (1957), Thor also moved into straight acting roles, usually smaller or supporting parts where he could play authority figures -- he was in two key early productions of Roger Corman, Five Guns West and The Fast and the Furious. Once in a while, Thor also got to play a major role, such as that of Major Coulter, the military physician in Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), whose death scene is one of the highlights of the movie's low-budget thrills.
Much of Thor's career from the mid-'50s onward, especially after the decline of radio, was spent on television, in every kind of series from M Squad to My Three Sons. He also made recordings, especially of children's records, and was still doing announcing work in documentaries and industrial films right into the 1970s. Typical of the odd arc of his career, a result of his specialized talent, in 1970, the same year in which he appeared in Fox's Tora! Tora! Tora!, he also was the voice of Kakafonous A. Dischord in The Phantom Tollbooth. He passed away in 1976.
