Here is Harry Shearer voicing his Simpsons characters -

Harry Shearer did more than just voice-act many of Springfield’s inhabitants. He breathed life into them. His departure from “The Simpsons” means the actor behind dozens of characters — Montgomery Burns, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, Reverend Lovejoy, Otto, Dr. Julius Hibbert — will be gone.

[‘The Simpsons’: With Harry Shearer’s exit, the show will lose much of its character]

Seeing a real-life person embody the voices you’re so used to hearing come out of cartoons can be jarring and thrilling, which is probably why Shearer has been asked to do this over and over.

Here he is on “Inside the Actors Studio” answering questions in the voices of Waylon Smithers, Mr. Burns, Flanders, Skinner and Rainier Wolfcastle:

Shearer, who has had a long and versatile career outside voice acting, developed those characters’ voices with minimal information. “I would see a script, never saw the drawings, and there would be a one-line description in the script the first time a character appears,” he said in 2014.

As Shearer told the A.V. Club in 2003:

“It was not done the way normal animation is done, where it’s written, then drawn, then voiced. We did the acting first, after the writing, and then the animation followed us. At the time, when we created these characters vocally, we had no idea what they looked like. So it was just guessing. ‘How about this? Okay, how about this?’ “

Among his characters, Shearer favored Mr. Burns. “I like Mr. Burns because he is pure evil,” Shearer said, while in character, during a 2008 interview with the Jewish Chronicle. “A lot of evil people make the mistake of diluting it. Never adulterate your evil.”

Here is Shearer in 2013 voicing Burns, Flanders and Kent Brockman as he promoted a holiday singalong:

Mr. Burns’s voice did change from the first season. “I think he was a little lower and not as guttural as he is now, not as strained sounding as he is now,” Shearer said during a 2014 interview. “But he moved up in pitch the second season. ”

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Here is Shearer answering questions as Burns, Lovejoy, Skinner and Flanders:

Of all the characters he voice-acted, Shearer’s least favorite was Dr. Marvin Monroe, the therapist who eventually was killed off. “I just made it a bad choice to do a guy with a particularly gruff voice, and then got caught doing it semi-regularly,” Shearer said in 2000. “Although I was saddened when I heard they’d killed him off, it was a relief to my vocal chords.”

He also said that almost all of the other voices are easy for him to slip into. “I wouldn’t do them if they weren’t easy,” Shearer said in 2000. “I mean, Marvin Monroe was an oddity. Usually they’re all easy to slip into. Even he was easy to slip into, it was just keeping it up was a task.”

When asked in 2007 about his favorite episodes, Shearer highlighted “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish,” in which Mr. Burns runs for governor. The Season Three episode won an Environmental Media Award in 1991.

“I think that’s one of the greatest episodes in the history of the show,” Shearer said.

The other episode Shearer noted comes from Season Eight. In “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer,” Homer hallucinates after eating an extremely hot pepper.

“That’s about the most beautiful half an hour on American television, just in terms of the artistry and the wildness of the animation,” Shearer said.

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