"Bear \"replicant\" Powell" <replicant@triad.rr.com> wrote:
| 
| |Looking at her past, she was more a normal actress and model.
| |Maybe she didn't make it as an actress, so she decided to
| |try becoming a seiyuu.
| 
| How common is it for this to be successful? We see a
| decent amount of this in the US, but the actors continue
| to do both live action and animation. From my experiences
| I always see seiyuu starting in their teens or early 20's.

For the current young seiyuu group, they go to seiyuu school
instead of college (or maybe during high school),
and try to become a seiyuu.
So they are usually in their early 20's.

For the actor/actress or any other profession to seiyuu,
the age can be just about anything.
I have no idea how successful this is, as we probably don't
hear too much about the unsuccessful ones.

As for popular actors/singers/idols becoming seiyuu,
many do seiyuu work in addition to their normal work.
For example, Nakagawa Shouko.  She is still mainly an
idol/singer/actress, but she does some seiyuu work.

Recently, one member of SKE48 (sister group of AKB48) said
that she was going to quit SKE and try to become a seiyuu.
Hata Sawako will quit SKE at the end of this month.
She's currently one of the AKB/SKE girls doing a voice in
the AKB0048 anime.
She's also one of the cutest ones in AKB/SKE, and she's my
favorite among the AKB/SKE girls, so maybe she might become
my favorite seiyuu in the future. (^^;

Some pics of Sawako from her own blog..

http://akiba-search.net/ablog/?S=%E7%A7%A6%E4%BD%90%E5%92%8C%E5%AD%90&X=image

--
Hitoshi Doi
                          " this space for rent "
http://www.usagi.org/doi/                                    doi@usagi.org