Peter Cullen, the Canadian voice actor who played Eeyore across nearly three decades of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh productions and voiced Optimus Prime for four decades of Transformers, has died. He was 85.
Cullen died Wednesday, August 26, at his home in Los Angeles, his agent Kevin Motley confirmed to Variety. A cause of death has not been disclosed. His family said he died peacefully at home with them, and asked that fans honor him by serving their communities and leading with compassion, integrity and loyalty.
He Spent Nearly Thirty Years In The Hundred Acre Wood
Eeyore was originated at Disney by Ralph Wright, the studio story artist who voiced the gloomy donkey in the Winnie the Pooh featurettes and played him for the last time in 1983’s Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore, released months before his death that year. Ron Gans handled the character on the Disney Channel series Welcome to Pooh Corner in between. Cullen took the part in 1988 on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which premiered on the Disney Channel that January and moved to ABC’s Saturday morning lineup in the fall, running through 1991.
He then held Eeyore for most of the franchise. His work includes Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin in 1997, The Tigger Movie in 2000, Mickey’s Magical Christmas: Snowed In At The House Of Mouse in 2001, Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year in 2002, Piglet’s Big Movie in 2003, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie in 2005, My Friends Tigger and Pooh, and a Doc McStuffins crossover in 2017. Counting from 1988, he carried the character longer than anyone else has, Wright included.
Cullen understood how much weight that flat, sighing delivery carried. He told NPR in 2014 that greeting young fans in the voice with the line “Hello. Thanks for noticing me” drew an enormous reaction.
Disney did go elsewhere twice. Bud Luckey voiced Eeyore in the 2011 animated feature Winnie the Pooh, and Brad Garrett took the part for both Christopher Robin and Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018. Cullen remained the character’s primary voice everywhere else, and he said in later interviews that Eeyore ranked second only to Optimus Prime among the roles he loved playing.
Eeyore also remains a fixture at the parks, both as a walk-around character and aboard The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the dark ride that opened at Magic Kingdom in 1999 and later at Disneyland.
He Was Also The First Monterey Jack
Cullen’s Disney work went well past the Hundred Acre Wood. He originated Monterey Jack, the burly Australian mouse, in the first season of Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, and voiced the recurring police officers Kirby and Muldoon plus the alley cat Mepps on the same series. Jim Cummings, who had taken over Winnie the Pooh in 1988 and began sharing Tigger with Paul Winchell the year after, inherited Monterey Jack from Cullen in the second season. Cummings was passed over for Disney Legends honors at this month’s D23 ceremony, a snub that drew loud fan pushback.
Optimus Prime Was Built On His Brother’s Advice
The role that made him a household voice arrived in 1984, when Cullen was cast as Optimus Prime in the original Transformers animated series. He modeled the Autobot leader on his older brother Larry, a Marine who served in Vietnam, and specifically on Larry’s calm, controlled authority under pressure. Driving to the audition for what he only knew was a hero truck, he was carrying his brother’s advice: “be strong enough to be gentle”. That line became the character’s moral center, and his family put it in their statement this week.
Cullen returned to Prime for Michael Bay’s live-action Transformers in 2007 after roughly two decades away, then voiced him in Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon, Age of Extinction, The Last Knight, Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts. He last performed the character on The Masked Singer in 2024.
He built more than 200 credits over a career spanning more than 60 years, including King Kong in the 1976 remake, the clicking vocalizations of the title creature in Predator, KARR on Knight Rider and Thaedus on Invincible. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Children’s and Family Emmy Awards in December 2023, and NASA named its Optimus Prime Spinoff Award, given annually to young students working in space, science, technology and math, after his character.
“The phenomenon of Transformers itself is mind-shaking”, Cullen once said of the franchise, adding that being part of it stood out in his life and that he was grateful for it.
He is survived by his four children, Angus, Claire, Pilar and Clay.
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