HER VOICE BECAME HER VESSEL.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

CANDI MILO says she used to hear voices in her head. Now she channels some of those offbeat characters into dozens of animated roles she speaks for.

Milo came to voice-over work after sampling the full spectrum of performing arts: singing on cruise ships, movie and TV roles, the national tour of ``Dream Girls,'' sketch and stand-up comedy and commercials. Her face may be most familiar from Mervyn's commercials as the impatient sale shopper outside the store anxiously bidding it to ``open, open, open'' - a campaign that began as a Milo ad lib.

It wasn't until Steven Spielberg was casting voices for his ``Tiny Toon Adventures'' that she found her niche.

``My agent said, you have this cartoony kind of voice. And I thought (sob) 'I want to be a singer,' '' she recalled over breakfast near her Calabasas home. ``So really reluctantly I went and I read 'The Three Little Pigs,' and I changed the three pigs into being suicidal and the wolf being kosher.

``And I had so much fun,'' Milo said. ``I ended up booking 'Tiny Toons,' and the first time I sat down I thought, I'm in a room with 12 people that are the funniest people I've ever met. They're warm and genuine. And I had never heard these words in my career: 'Bigger, louder, faster.'

``And I thought, I am home. Because I was doing sitcoms and they were going, 'Great, but you're mugging. ... We need you to be real.' 'I am real - it's just that my reality is bigger, louder, faster than yours.' ''

Considering no audience is watching, it's surprisingly taxing work. ``We've come up with a phrase I like to call 'chacting' - chair acting,'' she said. ``I am perspiring at the end of a day. I am going back and forth between characters and the mental shift and to put the emotion behind and then flip into another character - I mean, God forbid there's an argument.

``On-camera actors are interesting to watch in the booth, because they're acting with me and I'm acting to my page. ... Somebody will turn to me and I think, 'Don't look at me, dude, because I'm not giving you any eye contact because I'm not memorizing this, I'm reading this.

``In my technique, you get a mental picture. I zone out on my page and to me, the whole script comes alive.''

Flip into almost any animated television show and you're likely to stumble across a Milo character: Flea on ``Mucha Lucha,'' Dexter in ``Dexter's Laboratory,'' Mrs. Wakeman on ``I Was a Teenage Robot,'' Nick Dean on ``Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius,'' Snap and Bullnerd on ``Chalk Zone,'' among many others. Upcoming shows include ``Curious George'' for PBS and ``W.I.T.C.H.'' for Disney.

There are three projects in her current repertoire that are particularly dear to her. Snobby-cool kids Brianna and Justin on Nickelodeon's ``Rugrats'' spinoff ``All Grown Up'' allow her to draw on the contemporaries of her 13-year-old daughter, Gaby. She also plays the title girl and Spanish-speaking cousin Tito in PBS' series ``Maya & Miguel,'' a project that appeals to her as a Latina.

``This one I think is groundbreaking because animation had 'Fat Albert,' they had 'The Proud Family' '' - both featuring predominantly black characters - ``and we had nothing. So this will be great. ... It's 'The Cosby Show' for Latino families.''

Then there's Cartoon Network's ``Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends,'' in which she plays Madame Foster and a strange green-crested bird who says only her name, Coco. The show is partly inspired by Milo's youth. When she was 7, her father, comedian Tony Milo, opened a halfway house in San Jose for adults with mental disabilities stemming from birth defects, illness or injury. Many of them inspire her work. (``If they could dig those people up, they could give them a residual.'')

She speaks with both affection and disdain about those 10 years when she lived among a dozen people ``who looked like a thrift shop exploded on them,'' including Earl, an actor who clung to a Fisher-Price toy phone waiting for his agent to call; Marvin, who muttered cliches from Westerns; and Pedro, who often was cheated in stores because he judged his change by how much it weighed.

``I remember raising my hand when I was 9 - we all ate at the same table. 'I have a house rule. I think that nobody at the table should be able to talk to anybody that the rest of us can't see.' '' She was sad that friends never visited and mortified to be driven to school in a van labeled ``Milo Arms - How Can We Help You?'' complete with the phone number.

She has written a feature script about the experience and its lesson of unconditional love and hopes it will be made one day. ``When we first started talking about it eight years ago, we couldn't get it done because nobody would believe that an ex-stand-up comic could get a license to take care of people, and that there was such a thin line between the nuts and the people who were (caring for them).''

Milo says voice-over work helped her overcome her personal emotional lows. ``I hope it never, never, never goes back to what it was five years ago, when all the voices were just in my head and they were never coming out. Now I get to use any voice that pops in.

``I think voice-over is perfect for me because it lets me create whatever I want. I can be a man, a flower, I could be your tape recorder. I could be whatever I want and I can draw on anything and nobody says, 'Oh, you're too old, you're too young, you're too feminine, you're too this. I can do it all.''

Valerie Kuklenski, [phone]

valerie.kuklenski(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Candi Milo of Calabasas, one of Hollywood's busiest voice-over performers, poses with the stars of Cartoon Network's ``Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.''

David Sprague/Staff Photographer