Phil Hendrie

Hendrie's father was a salesman who came to Los Angeles in 1950 after serving in the Canadian Army during World War II.

When Hendrie was 12 years old, listening to radio was his escape.

He was a huge fan of the Top 40 D.J. "Emperor" Bob Hudson and once rode his bike to radio station KRLA in Pasadena to meet him.

When he was 13 years old, Hendrie's parents divorced.

His father moved to Europe and married a woman who had four kids.

Hendrie's family home was repossessed, forcing them to move into a small rented apartment where he slept on a couch during his senior year in high school.

After graduating, Hendrie attended Pasadena City College to earn an English degree.

Philip Stephen Hendrie (born September 1, 1952) is an American radio personality and actor.

He is widely known for his voiceover talent throughout the radio and film industry.

In 1958 when Hendrie was five years old, his family took a road trip to visit relatives in Toronto, Ontario.

They listened to the radio the whole way.

He knew then he wanted to work in radio one day.

He was one of four children in an upper-middle-class Catholic family and an altar boy at Arcadia's Holy Angels Church.

After one year at college, he left for Orlando, Florida, in the early-1970s.

He got a job in construction working on the build-out of Walt Disney World.

Hendrie made a demo tape and got his first DJ job at WBJW in Winter Park, Florida a city just outside Orlando, in 1973 at age 20.

In 1978, he left WORJ in Orlando to do evenings at WNOE-FM in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

He would go on from there to spin records up until 1988 in Miami, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

In 1989, Phil debuted as a weekend talk show host on KFI, a news/talk station in Los Angeles.

He came to prominence in the 1990s hosting The Phil Hendrie Show, a radio talk show where he portrayed both himself as a calm, rational host while simultaneously portraying any of several outrageous and offensive characters who would engage in debates with Hendrie and callers to the show.

Hendrie has also acted professionally on a number of occasions, notably in a recurring role on the drama The Unit, as well as the voice of multiple characters on the animated comedies F is for Family, Rick and Morty, Futurama, King of the Hill and The Midnight Gospel.

Hendrie was born and raised in Arcadia, California.

After his show was cancelled on KFI, KVEN in Ventura, California, offered him a job in August 1990.

In late September 1990, Hendrie introduced his first fictional on-air character on his radio talk show: Iraqi Raj Fahneen.

The Gulf War had broken out and Fahneen vociferously defended Saddam Hussein.

Thinking it was a real person on the air, listeners went ballistic.

An entire cast of characters evolved, and in 18 months Hendrie took the show to major market stations in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Miami and eventually back to Los Angeles.

As a radio satirist whose show is driven by a cast of fictional characters, all of whom Hendrie created and plays on air, he sets up a topic and discusses it with one of his characters.

Feeding the circle of social satire are the callers who are real and genuinely passionate about what Hendrie's "guest" is saying.

Loyal fans enjoy being in on the ruse as Hendrie orchestrates a parody of his own profession—talk radio.

In October 1996 Hendrie went back to KFI to host The Phil Hendrie Show daily.

Hendrie's popularity resulted in the radio show going national in 1999 via Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications.

In February 2005, Hendrie's flagship station, KFI, moved him to sister station KLAC in an effort to help turn the all-sports talk radio station into a ratings winner with entertainment programming incorporated.

The show remained nationally syndicated on 120 radio stations until 2006.

On April 27, 2006, Hendrie announced he was leaving radio to pursue his acting career on a full-time basis.

At the time, Hendrie was working on NBC's sitcom Teachers as cynical history teacher Dick Green.

His last day on air was June 23, 2006.

On June 4, 2007, it was announced that Phil Hendrie would return to radio June 25, 2007, via national syndicator Talk Radio Network (TRN), with shows airing nationally Monday through Friday from 10 PM to 1 AM Pacific Time on 100 radio stations.

The show was a straight talk show until September 14, 2009, when he welcomed back his cast of characters, bringing back his original brand of radio theater.

"Radio needs alternative programming, like my show, now more than ever," said Hendrie.