A closer look
Elderly chain-smoker Pat Welsh was the raspy, distinct voice behind the iconic alien in Steven Spielberg's 1982 family blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Sound designer Ben Burtt discovered Welsh at a camera store, noticing her voice had a bizarre, croaky quality due to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and paid her a massive sum of 380 dollars for her vocal services. Generations of weeping children and emotional adults bonded with a magical, glowing-fingered space botanist whose entire vocal persona was fueled by heavy nicotine addiction. It is wildly entertaining to realize that one of the most heartwarming and financially successful creatures in the history of cinema sounded that way purely because an elderly woman spent decades absolutely destroying her respiratory system
