Ellyn Stern
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Ellyn Stern

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Stern has had an incredible acting career, which began with theatre from the age of 12 to doing film and television from the age of 18. At 15, she acted in her first major play, Peter Pan, with Vincent Price.

“I started in junior high when I was 12 years old in the drama classes. As soon as I got to be 18, I began to seriously study and I studied with unbelievable coaches. I’ve studied all my life – I studied acting, singing, voice, Shakespeare, archery, sword fighting, dance…I was in the ballet company; I did modern dance, jazz, musicals…my desire was to be a full scope actress, so that I could be in touch with whatever was given to me.”

At the time that Stern started doing anime, there wasn’t even a name for it. “It was in the early ’80s and it was even before Robotech,” she considers. “Robotech was the first one that blew up. I had no idea that this work that I was doing was going to blow up and have the kind of significance it did. It came as a total surprise to both myself and to Richard [Epcar – Stern’s husband who shares her acting passion and line of work]. My whole career was on camera on film, television and on stage, and voice work became something of a sideline. I had no idea it was going to take such prominence in my career, which goes to show you that for anybody who wants to participate in the entertainment industry and in the voice industry, this is something you need to do.

“You need to learn about voice; you need to learn about acting and all different facets of the business that surrounds it, so that when it comes about, you’re ready and they can go, ‘oh wow, you can do this’. And that’s exactly what happened. I’d just finished doing a lead in a film and the casting director asked me afterwards, ‘would you like to do some voice work?’ And I said, ‘sure’, so I went to the audition and I said, ‘do you mind if I bring my boyfriend along?’ So Richard and I both got the job and we’ve been working ever since, and that was over 30 years ago.”

Stern runs an in-depth panel called Women in Anime, where she addresses the problems of the attitudes of women in anime and discusses concerns such as anorexia, bulimia, surgery and narrowly-defined gender roles. While these issues are increasingly being addressed, she believes much more needs to be done.

“Anime has very stereotypical visually-drawn images of women where the breasts are very large; the eyes are very round, and the bodies are idealised in a way that isn’t realistic,” Stern asserts. “Anorexia and bulimia are two of the issues; the other issue is self-empowerment for women. It’s beginning to change, but there aren’t that many roles that have really good images for women. There are becoming more and more roles within anime today that are showing women in a better way, in a better form and showing them more empowered and more self-identified without being objectified, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

“There’s more to it than just the bulimia and the anorexia – it’s about the image of women. We all have beacons and role models; people that we look up to and so when we are in love with anime…the stories are wonderful; the philosophical and psychological stories are beautifully drawn, and they’re challenging stories – we want to identify with those challenging stories and we want to feel empowered by those stories, but I think it’s also important to feel empowered by role models.”

The passionate actress describes all her characters as her babies. “Each time I do a role, I fall in love with it,” Stern expresses. “Each one of them is one of my children that I have created. There is a Disney project that I just did and I had a lot of fun doing that. I play the mother in it. I enjoyed doing Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. I played the character of Haraway. I loved my character in Bleach. I played Masaki Kurosaki in that one and she had an ethereal quality to her. I like the deeper characters; I like characters that are multi-dimensional and not superficial, but I like comedy, also. I worked on Bobobo-bo bo-bobo and they were really funny characters that I did there. I loved my character in Noein – Miyuki Goto – and she was a very good role model. She was a mother who was concerned about bringing up her son; she wasn’t objectified, and she had real emotion.

“Authenticity is the most important thing to me in any character that I portray,” says Stern. “That is always my goal, and I hope in every single character that that truth rings out and becomes apparent to all the listeners. That is what I look for – authenticity.”

BY CHRISTINE LAN