An entrepreneur is making her mark on international companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, Clinique, World Wildlife Fund and FC Barcelona, by providing the voice for some of their campaigns.
Anna Parker-Naples, who grew up in Leighton Buzzard, does voice-overs for clients from all over the world from her professional-grade studio at her home in Heath and Reach.
Closer to LBO land, the 35 year-old is the official voice for the BBC’s The Voice iPad game and has also recently done a series of radio commercials for Heart Radio about the opening of the new MK 1 shopping centre.
Trained as an actress at The London Centre for Theatre Studies, Anna first began doing voice-overs in 2002 and was accepted as a student by the late Bernard Graham Shaw, one of the UK’s top producers. She went on to land her first gig in 2003, voicing a series of radio and TV adverts for Totally Spies Dolls and CBeebies.
She began voicing full-time after health complications during her third pregnancy in 2009 temporarily confined her to a wheelchair and doctors thought that she would not walk again.
Determined not to stop working, Anna decided to continue pursuing her performing career from home.
She said: “I used my time of ill-health to focus on honing and perfecting my skills as a voice-over artist, which allowed me time and space to recover fully and unexpectedly.”
The ambitious actress tackled this new venture with a business-minded approach, joining online marketplace Voices.com in 2010, to build up her client base. She said: “I am now really high up in the industry, even though it was one I never expected to be in – it was just a nice little accompaniment for my theatre work.”
The full-time mum is now fully recovered, but she is still concentrating her efforts on voice-overs and is gaining “more and more big international clients”.
However, Anna is getting back to her acting roots through her current involvement with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project, which celebrates the work of amateur theatre groups.