Edward Stacey "Tedd" Pierce III (August 12, 1906 – February 19, 1972) was an American screenwriter and voice actor of animated cartoons, principally from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s.
Biography
Pierce was the son of a stockbroker, Samuel Cuppels Pierce, who in turn was the son of Edward S. Pierce, a long-serving treasurer of the St. Louis-based Samuel Cuppels Woodenware Company. Pierce completed his education through the fourth year of high school, according to the 1940 census records.[2]
Pierce spent the majority of his career as a writer for the Warner Bros. "Termite Terrace" animation studio, whose other notable alumni include Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, contributing storylines and gags for numerous shorts from 1935 until his departure in 1959. Pierce also worked as a writer at Fleischer Studios from 1939 to 1941. Jones credited Pierce in his autobiography Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (1989) as being the inspiration for the character Pepé Le Pew, the haplessly romantic French skunk due to Pierce's self-proclamation that he was a ladies' man.[3] He had one son, named Geoffrey Pierce, from a formal marriage.[1]
In early credits, his name was spelled "T-E-D". He was said to have added an extra "D" to his name as a way of lampooning puppeteer Bil Baird when he dropped one of the "L"s from his first name.[4]
In his Warners career, Pierce worked with three of the best-known Warner animation directors (Jones, McKimson and Friz Freleng). While rotating between Jones and Freleng (often in collaboration with Michael Maltese) for much of the 1940s, the dissolution of their partnership in 1946 left Pierce reassigned solely to Freleng's unit. Freleng would, however, replace Pierce with Warren Foster (then McKimson's primary storyman) in 1949 owing to his dissatisfaction with Pierce's output, reassigning Pierce to McKimson's unit for much of his remaining tenure at Warner's. Pierce's credited output includes Freleng's Hare Do (1949), Bad Ol' Putty Tat (1949), Bunker Hill Bunny (1950) and Big House Bunny (1950); Jones' Hare Tonic (1945, an early success for both of them) and Broom-Stick Bunny (1956); and McKimson's Hillbilly Hare (1950), Lovelorn Leghorn (1951) and Cat-Tails for Two (1953), the last of which was Speedy Gonzales' first appearance. Because much of Pierce's Termite Terrace career was spent with McKimson's unit, however, it would follow that Pierce was generally overshadowed by his contemporaries Maltese and Foster.
While it has been speculated that Pierce did voice-work for coming-attractions trailers for Universal Studios, experts in the voice acting field such as Keith Scott have disputed this point.
