Jesse Corti (born July 3, 1955), is a Venezuelan American actor and voice actor best known for voicing LeFou in Beauty and the Beast and playing Courfeyrac in the original Broadway show Les Misérables. He also voiced the Spanish Dignitary in Frozen. He has appeared in numerous feature films, and in several popular TV series such as 24, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, The West Wing, Judging Amy, Law & Order and many more. In 1990, he received a Clio Award for his Drug Free America commercial.
Personal life[]
He is originally from Venezuela, but was raised in Paterson, New Jersey. His father was a Baptist minister. He graduated from Eastside High School in 1973. He is married to Julietta Corti and they have two children. Their children are Jesse David Corti, an actor, who provided the voice of Neku Sakuraba in the video games The World Ends with You and Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, and Avrielle Corti, who is also an actress.
He is the uncle of Miguel Corti, who is part of Capcom's localization staff.
Corti's first wife, Laura, was killed in a 1987 collision between an Amtrak train and a Conrail freight train in Chase, Maryland. At that time, Laura Corti had been returning to New York City after having seen her husband perform in Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The crew of the freight train in that collision tested positive for marijuana and Jesse Corti subsequently appeared in both an English-language and a Spanish-language public service announcement for Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
Roles[]
Trivia[]
- Jesse Corti, being Venezuelan-born, also provided the Spanish voice for LeFou for the Spanish localisation of Beauty and the Beast.
- However, he did not do his own Spanish voice for the Spanish Dignitary and Manchas in either Spanish dub of Frozen and Zootopia respectively.
- The son of Jesse Corti, Jesse David Corti, is the voice actor for Neku Sakuraba in the Square Enix developed game The World End with You, who would later make an appearance in the Disney/Square RPG crossover game, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance.
- Jesse Corti (the original voice actor for LeFou in Beauty and the Beast) and Josh Gad (the actor of LeFou for Disney's live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast) are the first actors of alternate version of the same Disney property to have contributed to a Disney movie together (as The Spanish Dignitary and Olaf respectively in Frozen).
- Jesse Corti is the first voice actor in Disney to have voiced a Disney character for both the hand-drawn and computer-generated animation mediums in the Walt Disney Animation Studios Canon.