Interview with John Gayford

 

 

Back in 2017, I had the great privilege of getting to know the great dubbing actor, writer and director John Gayford (1933-2021), who spent 40-something years working in the English dubbing industry in Rome. John very kindly agreed to answer my various dubbing-related questions, and I think his wonderful recollections will be of much interest to other fans of English dubbing, so here I present the online conversations we conducted during October-November 2017.

 

Johan Melle: Hi, John. Thanks so much for agreeing to talk to be about your career. I greatly appreciate that. Now, first of all, I would like to ensure that I’ve correctly identified your voice. I made a little clip from the English version of the film Mark il poliziotto (1975). Can you confirm if that’s you dubbing the voice of Giorgio Albertazzi in this clip?

 

 

John Gayford: Yes, what a surprise, confirmed. I’d forgotten all about it, but I adapted the dialog for the dubbing. They’re all speaking Italian as far as I remember, and it was followed by a sequel. It was originally called Mark the Narc (narcotics agent). I did the casting and cast myself as Albertazzi as I seemed the most obvious choice out of the bunch. Mark was played by Frank Von Kuegelgen, an American actor/director. At that time there were around a hundred professional foreign actors (non-Italian) English speaking men and women, in the Rome organisation called A.R.A. (Associated Recording Artists). Frank was the president (voted in by members) and my favourite for casting as he was the best and always came over relaxed and easy. See how easily his voice sits in that Italian actor’s mouth.

When I was directing, I preferred not to play leading roles as I liked to be directed, and if I was at the helm, I liked to concentrate on directing and organising the dubbing turns – three-hour sessions, which had to be done calling the actors for as few sessions as possible for economic reasons and obvious budget restrictions based on the estimate I had done for the producer. If we went over, the difference came out of our share, so I had to be very careful to get all the actors finished on schedule!

This scene is a good example of a frequent problem encountered in dubbing into English; Albertazzi spoke too fast. All the lip movements must be covered so the English dialog is very clipped unfortunately. It was OK for that time for a Police Chief to sound British and have an accent honed in a London Drama School, but it does date it! I think I may have the original script for that somewhere.

By the way, I always hated dubbed movies and vowed to try to improve on the quality of dialog, sync and sound, not often with much success. Very rarely did I feel a sense of pride, but I tried!

 

JM: Good to know that I have your voice correctly identified. And I’m impressed that you recall working on this film after so many years. From what I understand, you guys were dubbing films in near conveyor belt fashion, and I’m impressed by your sharp memory. And regarding the quality of the dubbing, I think you and your colleagues did a great job as it can’t have been easy to match the dialogue to the lip movements when there were often so many different languages spoken on the sets, or finding the right voice to fit the actors and so on.

I think it’s interesting what you said about only giving yourself small parts when you were the dubbing director, so that you could focus on one thing. I’ve noticed that Ted Rusoff did the exact opposite when he was the dubbing director: always grabbing the biggest parts for himself.

 

JG: Yes, Ted and his wife Carolyn de Fonseca played the leading roles in every film he did. That way he was able to undercut the rest of us, which he considered good business. Actually, it made no difference.

 

JM: I also want to ask you if you ever worked on a film called What Have You Done to Solange? (1972). Most sources list you with playing the role of 'Joseph Kane', one of the teachers in the film, but this is clearly incorrect as the actor playing this role looks nothing at all like you.

 

JG: I remember the title of Solange, but I don’t think I directed the dubbing in English. I don’t remember being in it, but there was some connection and I actually have a tattered lobby card and possibly a poster deep in a cupboard. A mystery I shall look into... maybe I’ll pick up some residuals if I’m listed in the cast! Thanks.

 

The character in What Have You Done to Solange? that is often erroneously listed as being played by John

 

JM: Were you often on set on the movies you worked on?

 

JG: Sometimes, but usually only if I was in the picture or working as dialogue coach and then I usually translated the script and did the additional dialogue. I sometimes coached a Brit or American star who needed moral support in the midst of a sea of Italians, also helped them learn their lines and tailored their dialogue to suit them. The very last of these jobs was for Joe Mantegna who wrote to me from Hollywood afterwards to say “thank you for putting such lovely words in my mouth!” A nice way to finish.

 

JM: A nice way to finish indeed! And what a fascinating and varied career you’ve had. I actually didn’t realize you were in all these films, but I saw from the pictures you posted on your Facebook profile that you were in Seven Times Seven (1968) and many other enjoyable 1960s films without being credited. Do you remember any other Italian films where you appeared uncredited?

 

JG: I vaguely remember working for a day or so with Sydney Chaplin in something called Tiffany Memorandum. Ever come across it? Or La bambola in which I was an ignominious hall porter.

 

JM: I do know a spy film by the name of Tiffany Memorandum, from 1967, and featuring Ken Clark, Irina Demick, Luigi Vannucchi and Loredana Nusciak, but I don’t think Sydney Chaplin appears in it. Maybe you’re thinking of a different film that ended up being re-titled...? La bambola doesn’t ring any bell for me...

 

JG: Probably 1961 or 1962 early days here when I was still learning the rudiments of Italian.

 

At this point, I sent a video of Tiffany Memorandum to John.

 

JG: Thank you for the video of Tiffany Memorandum. I had never seen it, but I spotted myself in a scene with a few scraps of dialogue, dubbed by an unfamiliar (to me) voice, maybe in Germany. I had no recollection of shooting the scene. Just a medic or technician in a white coat – I did a lot of those to pay my bills and keep eating.

 

John (on the right) in Tiffany Memorandum

I knew the female lead, Irina Demick, as I worked with her on another picture with Vittorio Gassman called The Archangel (1969) where I coached her for her English dialogue, which I had translated to be dubbed later.

I have to admit that Tiffany had the kind of dubbing I really hate. It bore no similarity to the spoken word, with mechanical readings and all the leading characters trying to sound like Mister Testosterone. When I dubbed a bit in London at De Lane Lea studios before I went to Rome, I was forced to give flat readings and not try to sound natural, and I swore that if I ever had the chance, I’d direct the actors so that they would sound natural and talk to each other (even when on separate tracks!). I don’t suppose I succeeded, but I hope so sometimes.

One very unfair thing that used to happen was this: I would dub a picture, taking infinite care to not make it sound dubbed, then in order to pay the lower rate for a film that needed dubbing, the American distributors would complain about our work to the Italian producer (who never even bothered to look at it and didn’t understand the language anyway). They would then redub it badly in NY or LA and if we ever saw it, we had a terrible shock. This happened to me once when my producer called me in to say the Americans had refused our dubbing, so I rose to the challenge and demanded a screening in which I was cleared of doing a lousy job and received an apology.

I rang New York on another occasion and was told by the secretary that the distributor in America didn’t speak English and hadn’t seen the movie. She told me he thought “well, if the Italians had dubbed it in English is must be awful”, so since it was me and the cast had all been professional English or American actors it must be good...

Of course, if you can prepare the actors on set and get them all speaking English with the right rhythms, you can make it look like a live sound picture with careful post-syncing. I did this with a number of films that turned out well. I asked someone in America what she thought of dubbing after she told me she had just seen one of mine in NY. She said she had no opinion as she had never seen a dubbed movie. Then she said she loved Giancarlo Giannini’s voice and I was able to tell her it was the voice of Frank Von Kuegelgen. “Who?!!!” You can fool some of the people some of the time, but...

 

JM: Sorry to hear about those bad experiences, but I’m not too surprised to hear you’ve encountered such attitudes. It's also my experience that many film fans are automatically very skeptical towards dubbing. For example, I often see people on movie message forums stating they don’t want to see Italian films dubbed into English. They want to watch the original language version, and obviously do not realize that there’s no such thing since the Italian soundtracks are dubbed as well...

 

JG: How right you are. They used to shoot films with a guide track only and then every language version was based on that, though some of them were very different after they were adapted for dubbing. Some where I have three sets of videos of the same film, first with guide track (a hoot) then in Italian, and then my English version. It’s very interesting to see the development of the dialogue, correcting information needed in the plot laying, or correcting actor errors made that the director had said “Print it,” adding “Fix it in the dubbing!” The English translation of the script they worked with on set (without a coach) was abysmal and the actors were all Italian or French, you can imagine what garbage they were saying. And this film was announced as being filmed in English... I had fun with that one, but loved it.

 

JM: I can very much imagine those guide tracks being real hoots, with Italians, French and maybe some Swedes or an American lead speaking their own languages and not understanding each other so that they need cues on when to start speaking etc. It’s amazing you guys were able sync any dialogue to such linguistic messes!

 

JG: I hated the principle of dubbing as it robs the actor of his voice, thus taking away his entire performance and interpretation of the part. Coming from years of theatre work, I know how disappointing that can be. And there are always voice actors standing by ready to dub you. It happened to me a few times as I had a rather strange raspy voice and used to get reviews for my stage work like “John Gayford strides on stage like a young Lawrence Olivier... with a voice like a rusty door hinge!” for a revival of the Noel Coward comedy The Marquise at Worthing Rep. Well, I gave Joan Greenwood a spot of competition. She was an actress with a similar sort of scratchy voice. So it was ironical that I should wind up in the part of show biz that involved voice work.

 

JM: I do see what you mean and I agree that I’d rather hear the actors’ own voices, but since Italian films are dubbed anyway, I find that I often (but not always) prefer seeing them in English. It depends, of course...

I wanted to ask you about something else I’m curious about. You see, I’ve recognized the voices of several Rome-based dubbing actors in some Spanish productions that were dubbed into English by Atlas International Films. I believe Atlas was based in Germany, so what’s the story here? Were you guys sometimes flown to Germany to do dubbing work there?

 

JG: I never went to Germany to dub, but I was flown by American director Mel Welles with a bunch of other actors from Rome to Madrid for three weeks dubbing several films that had been shot in Spain (horror pictures as I recall and that’s all). Don’t remember Atlas I’m afraid, though that may have been Mel’s company, or his boss’s.

 

JM: Larry Dolgin is credited with the English versions of a lot of the films done by Atlas International. I know he was also active in Rome, so I assume he must have commuted back and forth a bit.

 

JG: Larry Dolgin is a good friend, if he’s still with us, I don’t know. He went off to Sardinia to retire with his lady, Daphne, an English dancer/choreographer. He did travel a lot so, yes, I’m sure he worked in Germany. I just don’t know the name of the company, but I’m sure you're right, it must have been Atlas.

 

Larry Dolgin

 

JM: Do you know where Larry was from originally? I’ve seen him on-screen in a fair number of films (American productions filmed in Rome etc).

 

JG: I have an idea Larry was from Canada originally, but I can’t swear to it. He lived in California for a while, but who didn’t? He knew a few Hollywood old-timers, too, like Jimmy Durante and Joe E. Brown.

 

JM: Your name sometimes appears in the opening or closing titles, crediting you with the English version, but unfortunately, there’s often no dubbing director credited at all. Was there any particular reason for that?

 

JG: Yes, it’s a shame about being left off credits. It’s all to do with money. They never put your name on screen unless they had to by contract because each one cost more from the title printers and I always forgot to ask about it. The worst case was with The Lenin Train (1988), directed by Damiano Damiani. Ben Kingsley played the lead, and his wife was Leslie Caron (my neighbour in Sardinia). I translated, adapted the dialogue and prepared the film for dubbing into English on the previso that I would not appear on any titles except for the English version. But the whole production was bought by the Germans, who knew nothing about me and simply translated the Italian titles into English when they released the English version with no sign of me!

 

JM: Do you know roughly how many films you might have dubbed, by the way?

 

JG: At one point I made a list of over 300, but other titles keep turning up. Saying it now, it doesn’t seem possible but I think that was the figure.

 

JM: You mean as a dubbing director, right? Because as a voice actor you’ve no doubt done far more, I’d assume.

JG: Oh yes, that doesn’t include pictures I dubbed in directed by others. We all did several every week if we could get them into our own work schedules. If we were working in the same studios, we’d pop across the corridor to dub another film if they called you. But the pictures all had pretty rigid work plans we had to stick to to get through on time. I used to work a lot at Fono Roma just off Piazza del Popolo. That was at the beginning of Hollywood on the Tiber and the Dolce Vita. Then Fono Roma moved to San Giovanni and became the territory of Gene Luotto, though I usually worked on Gene’s pictures in some part somewhere. We got on well and I started his sons off on their careers when the two unruly teenagers from Little Italy arrived in Rome hoping to get in somewhere…

I probably did most of my films in Via dei Villini and its associated studio that backed onto Fellini’s home. I was walking to work one morning with a friend who nudged me, “Look who's heading our way, it’s Federico Fellini”, and when he reached us, he said “Buongiorno, John” to me. “Fellini knows you?” my friend asked, and I nodded with a smile. I knew him since I first came to Rome when I met him for casting of 8½ (1963) and he wrote a part for me I was unable to do because it coincided with my contractual month on Ischia doing my miserable bit in Cleopatra. Wouldn’t you know? However, they say it’s bad luck to work for Fellini so I didn’t feel so bad!

Of course, there were dozens of smaller studios that turned out good work that were cheaper by the hour. We always worked where our producer had done the Italian version, it made things more convenient. The biggest recording studio of all was International Recording. I was privileged to be cast in the American boxed set LP of Caedmon’s Coriolanus with Richard Burton and a very starry line-up. It was recorded in the latest stereo technique and we were directed as if in a play with moves to get the full effect. I of course was only playing messengers and such but I had scenes with Kenneth Haigh, Michael Hordern and lots of other starry names of the time. We were all awarded a certificate of excellence from the American Shakespeare Society! I did a few more albums for them later recorded in London. But the best was the one recorded in Rome at International Recording. Even when I worked at the Old Vic we didn’t have such a glamorous collection of actors.

 

The spoken word album of Coriolanus (1962).

 

JM: Thanks so much for sharing all these memories with me, John.

 

JG: My pleasure. I love having my memory jogged.

 

This, unfortunately, is where my chats with John came to an end. We had planned on continuing, but John’s eyesight was failing him and he was having a hard time reading off computer screens, plus a lengthy email he had written to me never made it into my inbox, and our communication largely fizzled out after that. Whenever I found John in a small, uncredited on-screen role, though, I would make a video clip and posted on his Facebook wall, which he very much appreciated.

One of the films I posted a clip from was the crime film Assassination (1967), directed by Emilio Miraglia and starring Henry Silva. John himself had this to say about the film:

“I had quite a good part, as a drug dealing musician in a band working in a night club. I never saw it and don’t even know what sort of music I’m playing as it was dubbed in later! I had at least two nice scenes with Henry Silva, dialogue in both and several still photos to prove it. Apparently, it’s now a cult movie as it spawned a new series of film noir in Europe.”

I’m not sure I’d have recognized John if I hadn’t known he was playing that part, as he looks quite different behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and dubbed by someone else. I posted this clip of John’s role on his Facebook wall in August 2018:

“These things do come home to torture one, don’t they? I don’t think I worked more than a couple of days on that one! Do you know where it was dubbed? It wasn’t very good. They were hoping for cool, I’m sure, but my God, I look silly playing an instrument with my elbows!!! But thanks for putting the clip in, it’s fun to remember stuff like that,” John commented.

That was the last time we spoke. John was not on Facebook much after that, and sadly passed away three years later. I am glad I was able to get to know this kind, witty and generous man, even if for just a short while.