
The Simpsons reveals new actor playing Milhouse...and she's been in a rock band
In 1989, Pamela Hayden joined the American animated series, voicing characters including Milhouse Van Houten, Jimbo Jones and Rod Flanders.
After appearing in more than 700 episodes, in November last year the 71-year-old revealed she was leaving the show.
'The time has come for me to hang up my microphone, but how do I say goodbye to The Simpsons?……not easily,' she shared in a statement.
'It's been an honour and a joy to have worked on such a funny, witty, and groundbreaking show, and to give voice to Milhouse (and Jimbo Jones, Rod Flanders, Janey, Malibu Stacy, and many others).'
Six months on it's now been revealed who will be taking over the character, best known for being Bart Simpson's best friend.
Entertainment Weekly has reported Milhouse will now be played by singer Kelly Macleod.
In 2022 she appeared in an episode of The Simpsons, the season 33 episode, Bart the Cool Kid.
In it she performed the song Two Badges, One Mind in the ep, which also starred The Weeknd and Michael Rapaport.
She began her career as a member of the rock band Private Life, which released two albums produced by Eddie Van Halen and Ted Templeman.
Their son Touch Me was also featured on the soundtracks of both Wayne's World and Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
Macleod then spent a decade with another band, The Sweet Potatoes and released the solo album, Wide Open, in 2021.
She will make her debut on The Simpson's Sunday night's season finale Estranger Things.
The episode's official synopsis teases: 'When Bart & Lisa stop watching Itchy & Scratchy together, Marge fears that they'll start to drift apart… but she has no idea how bad things are about to get!'
However, Milhouse will only have a minor part in this episode and will say one line. He will appear in a scene where he, Bart, and Lisa are all adults.
When announcing her exit from the show, Pamela also paid tribute to her best-known character.
'P.S. I'll always have a special place in my heart for that blue-haired 10-year-old boy with glasses,' she wrote. More Trending
Milhouse, named after former US president Richard Milhous Nixon, first appeared in The Simpsons a Butterfinger commercial in 1989.
Creator Matt Groening previously explained his origin story, sharing: 'Bart needed someone to talk to in the school cafeteria.
'We named him Milhouse because that was the most unfortunate name a kid could have.'
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The Simpsons is streaming on Disney Plus.
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Add the clatter of steel wheels on jointed track and you have the essence of rhythm and blues, with all its derivatives and tributaries. It's the sound of wide horizons, Depression-era wanderings and dreams of freedom. Trains chug, rattle and moan through the American songbook, from Bessie Smith's 'Dixie Flyer Blues' to Duke Ellington's 'Daybreak Express', Steve Reich's Different Trains and Aerosmith's 'Train Kept a Rollin'. You'll even hear one in the theme tune to The Simpsons. That's no surprise. Railroads built the USA and conquered the West: Manifest Destiny made tangible in fire and steel. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman both hymned early steam locomotives. 'Type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent,' exulted Whitman in 'To a Locomotive in Winter'. As late as 1957, Ayn Rand saw America's railroads as the nervous system of a libertarian utopia. 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In Britain the elderly Wordsworth thundered in verse against the building of the Windermere railway: the original nimby, initiating a very British ambivalence about rail development that persists to this day. Bat tunnels aren't the half of it. Opponents argued that Brunel's Great Western Railway would cause cows to miscarry, and Turner painted an apocalyptic vision of violated countryside in 'Rain, Steam and Speed'(1844). Yet within a century this disruptive new technology had become the essence of eternal England; the lyrical, nostalgic stuff of Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and John Betjeman's Metro-Land. Every modern heritage attraction and repurposed Victorian gasholder can credit its survival to the evening in October 1950 when a group of British hobbyists decided to see whether, through sheer enthusiasm, they could somehow rescue and run the tiny, decrepit Talyllyn Railway in mid-Wales. Its beauty was its own justification, though Britons are far from alone in idealising their railway heritage. In Matsuyama, Japan, a replica narrow-gauge railway recreates the world of Natsume Soseki's classic novel Botchan. The culture of railways is international, but it adopts local colouring. 'All the little stations in the small towns of the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy looked alike. Yellow and tiny, they resembled lazy cats lying in the snow in winter and under the sun in summer', wrote Joseph Roth. His elegies to a vanished empire revolve around its provincial railway stations – far-flung outposts of Vienna, where despairing exiles drink brandy in station hotels to the sound of last season's operetta hits. In the British Raj, meanwhile, railway stations became the crossroads of a subcontinent, enabling a new national consciousness. John Masters's end-of-empire novel Bhowani Junction uses a station and its people as a metaphor for a nation in transition, but India had taken imaginative ownership of its railways long before independence, with results that ranged from the culinary (Railway Mutton Curry now appears on menus in the former Imperial power) to the literary. Indian Railways has even renamed a station in Karnataka as 'Malgudi' in homage to R.K. Narayan's beloved fictional town. The distinctive dialect of Sri Lanka's Dutch Burgher railwaymen animates Carl Muller's novel Yakada Yaka – named after the gloriously onomatopoeic Sinhalese term for a steam engine, 'Iron Demon'. It's a similar story all over the world. Aircraft and motor vehicles might have supplanted trains in some (though far from all) regions of the globe, but the railway got there first, and it still dominates our ideas about travel. With their monumental architecture, major city terminuses are powerful statements of civic values – whether the iron-and-glass cathedrals of Paddington and St Pancras, the orientalist fantasy of Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji or the modernist panache of Rome's postwar Termini. It would take until 1991, and Norman Foster's Stansted, before the aviation industry realised what Brunel and Stephenson had understood from the outset: that transport infrastructure can move the emotions, as well as passengers and freight. So that's music, literature, architecture, heritage and cuisine; and we've hardly left the station. How about the long-distance train as microcosm; a ready-made setting for thrillers like Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and Bong Joon-ho's dystopian Snowpiercer? Or the railway as promoter of literacy? The world's first travel bookstall was opened by W.H. Smith at Euston in 1848. Allen Lane created Penguin Books to serve rail travellers, and Kipling wrote his first stories for the Indian Railway Library. What of railway companies as patrons of art and design, from Raymond Loewy's art-deco streamliners for the Pennsylvania Railroad to the (now ubiquitous) aesthetic of 1930s travel posters (the Gill Sans typeface went mainstream only after it was adopted by the London and North Eastern Railway)? Or there's the European connection: the modernist line through Monet and Caillebotte's studies of light, steam and steel at Paris railway stations (Monet painted the Gare Saint-Lazare on at least 12 occasions) to the vorticists and futurists such as Filippo Marinetti, who imagined an archaic Italy smashed open by speeding locomotives. Trains drift through De Chirico's dreamscapes, and haunt the steampunk visions of graphic novelist François Schuiten. So it's certainly not all about nostalgia: Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny Spielt Auf climaxes with a classical violinist being crushed beneath the wheels of an unstoppable jazz train. But sometimes it really is. Between 1955 and 1960, the American photographer O. Winston Link documented the last days of steam on the Norfolk and Western Railway, creating black-and-white images of locomotives that surge and bellow through jet-age America like creatures from prehistory or myth. We're back where we started, with the (steam-powered) soul of the blues, and the lonely cry of trains in the night. But 200 years into the world the railways made, the trains of our imagination steam onwards. The journey continues, and whether we realise it or not, we've all got a ticket to ride.