James Howard Woods is a veteran American actor, who is best known for voicing Hades in the 1997 Disney animated feature film Hercules, and reprised this role in future appearances. He also voiced Dr. Phil Benedict in Recess: School's Out, and portrayed Jack Russell in the 1992 Hollywood Pictures film Straight Talk, H. R. Haldeman in the biographical drama film Nixon, and a ringside fan in the 1999 Touchstone Pictures film Play It to the Bone.
Outside of Disney, Woods is well-known for his various film and television roles, such as Gregory Powell in the crime thriller film The Onion Field, Joseph Scott in Chaplin, Carl Panzram in Killer: A Journal of Murder, Byron De La Beckwith in Ghosts of Mississippi, Sebastian Stark in the CBS drama series Shark, Karl Weiss in the NBC miniseries Holocaust (with Meryl Streep), and voicing Falcon, the main antagonist of Stuart Little 2 and Reggie Belafonte in the 2007 Sony Pictures animated film Surf's Up.
Woods was born Vernal, Utah, and had a brother ten years younger. His father, Gail Peyton Woods, was an army intelligence officer who died in 1960 after routine surgery. His mother, Martha A. (née Smith), ran a preschool after her husband's death and later married Thomas E. Dixon. Woods grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island, where he attended Pilgrim High School, from which he graduated in 1965. He is of part Irish descent and was raised Catholic, briefly serving as an altar boy. Woods was an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated on Inside the Actors Studio that he originally intended to become an eye surgeon. He pledged the Theta Delta Chi fraternity and was a member of the student theatre group Dramashop, acting in and directing a number of plays. He dropped out of MIT in 1969, one semester before graduating, to pursue an acting career. Woods has said that he owes his acting career to Tim Affleck, father of actors Ben and Casey Affleck, who was a stage manager at the Theatre Company of Boston, which Woods attended as a student.
Roles[]
(Straight Talk)
(Nixon)
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Woods has said in some interviews that he enjoyed voicing Hades so much, that he will always be willing to voice him in any future appearances, regardless of the pay. So far, he has done so in Hercules: The Animated Series, Hades Challenge, Fantasmic!, House of Mouse, the Kingdom Hearts series, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, Disney's Not So Spooky Spectacular, World of Color: Villainous, Disney Speedstorm, and Once Upon a Studio.
- However, the only times Woods did not voice Hades was his line in the song "It's Our House Now!", which was done by Rob Paulsen, and the DuckTales episode "New Gods on the Block!", where he was instead voiced by Chris Diamantopoulos, albeit the latter being a completely different version of the character with a unique design made for the continuity of the DuckTales reboot, and is therefore not the same Hades from the original film.
