Biography

JULIE BERRY trained at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, ending with a postgraduate year in Elizabethan & Jacobean Drama. Afterwards, she taught Speech & Voice and Shakespeare in drama schools for a few years and directed several Shakespeare productions. Since then, she has concentrated on performing and, specifically, working behind the microphone.

THEATRE work in the 80s included two stints in London’s West End in Daisy Pulls It Off at the Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre; The Englishman’s Wife in Flight To Venice at the Gate Theatre; Flora in Slight Ache at the Abingdon Festival; Calpurnia in Caesar’s Revenge at the Edinburgh Festival; Jean in What About Borneo and Kristin in Miss Julie, both on the London Fringe and Emilia Bassanio in the Dark Lady Contest in Brighton.

Her regular radio and television voiceovers have included campaigns for DHL, Garnier, Wella, Sainsburys, Flora, British Airways, Financial Times, Daily & Sunday Mirror and Pretty Polly Legacy (which earned her a nomination for BAFTA Best Voice Over 1992) and, most recently, Flora Pro Activ.

She has voiced many programmes for the BBC’s Open University as well as countless corporate videos and was the original voice model for BT’s Directory Enquiries automatic voice response – “The number you require…” In this guise, she appeared on Tell The Truth – TVS 1991; on the Danny Baker Show 1993; on a live Friday night programme on Wire TV and has guested on many radio programmes.

Other TV acting work includes 2nd Niece in The Critic by Sheridan, a Play of the Month for BBC TV; announcing for the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition and a part in Crimewatch. She spent a very happy year with the BBC’s Radio Drama Company, playing everything from Debussy’s wife in the award-winning Black Cat and the Moon with Daniel Massey, to the voice of the BBC in a play about William Walton.

Work outside of voice-overs has included a spot of directing, bringing a new play to the stage, Beating Time by Alice McVeigh, at the Lewisham Theatre; presenting a conference for Sunseeker Boats in Florida (with live voicing to picture because all the computers went out of sync!) and playing an anonymous Nurse in a reconstruction for the BBC’s Panorama investigation of NHS Trusts.

Recent work includes narrating documentaries for Channel 5 (Interview with A Cannibal), Meridian (The Castle), Sci-Fi Channel (Rutger Hauer), Sky (Twins in Peril) and Crime and Investigation Network (The Real NCIS).