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Arthur Burghardt

Arthur Burghardt is an American actor whose career moved easily between film, television, animation and video games. Born in New York City on August 29, 1947, he made his first movie appearance as the Great Ahmed Kahn in Network in 1976. It was the beginning of a varied body of work that would often place his voice at the center of larger-than-life characters. Animation fans may know Burghardt best as Destro in G.I. Joe or Devastator in The Transformers. He also voiced Turbo in Challenge of the Gobots and later played Venom in Ultimate Spider-Man. These roles made him a familiar presence across several generations of animated action, even when his face was nowhere on screen. His live-action television work included an appearance in the first episode of the daytime soap Santa Barbara in 1984. He also appeared in the 1991 series premiere of Good Sports, starring Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, and portrayed Laurant in the 2001 television series Los Luchadores. In film, he voiced Cy in the 1997 family science-fiction movie Star Kid. Burghardt also became part of the growing world of video game performance. He played a commando in Night Trap, then voiced both Mannoroth and Grom Hellscream in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. He later returned as Mannoroth in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and voiced Thanatos in God of War: Ghost of Sparta in 2010, the year he retired. There is even a small Seinfeld connection: the fictional Arthur Burghardt Expressway in the eighth-season episode “The Pothole” was named after him. In 2016, Burghardt joined the convention circuit with CelebWorx and appeared at Long Beach Comic Con, giving fans of his animation and gaming work a chance to connect the performer with the many characters he had voiced.