Bernard-Yves-Raoul Poulain (June 17, 1926 - January 27, 2013), better known as Bernard Dhéran, was a French actor and voice actor.
He joined the prestigious Comédie-Française stage troupe in 1953 and became its 437th sociétaire in 1961. Adding to his long list of roles in the French stage repertoire and beyond as well as his lengthy career of small roles on film, he was perhaps most well known to modern audiences as a voice actor. He was the regular dubbing voice of Christopher Plummer, and often dubbed David Niven and Anthony Hopkins. And Michael Caine, occasionally.
His most famous voice acting/dubbing roles were pretty much all villains (not surprising considering how deep and smooth his voice was), including older Magneto (Ian McKellen) in the original X-Men film trilogy, Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars, and the Cardinal Richelieu in the cartoon series Albert the Fifth Musketeer. He was also the first voice of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Odin in Thor (he was replaced at that by Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter voice, Jean-Pierre Moulin, after his passing in early 2013).
Selected roles (live-action):
- Napoléon (1955) as Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
- Le Bossu (1959) as the narrator
- Le Capitaine Fracasse (1961) as the Chevalier de Vidalenc
- The Count of Monte Cristo (1961) as Henri de Villefort
- Arsène Lupin (1971) as Dreux-Soubise
- The 7th Company Has Been Found (1975) as Colonel Voisin
