Dubbed in Rome

One of the really great advantages of the DVD and Blu-ray era is the possibility of presenting films with different language options, and this is certainly essential for Italian cinema, whose practice of shooting without live sound and extensive use of actors of different nationalities makes it challenging to say which, if any, language version could be considered the definitive one. It’s therefore a good thing that movie fans have the choice of watching their giallo, peplum, western, crime and Eurospy movies in either English or Italian. Unfortunately, the same is not true of the more prestigious Italian films, since a great many “serious” movie fans turn their noses up at the concept of dubbing and only want to watch films in their original language – thereby ignoring the fact that classic Italian movies were all completely post-synchronized from scratch, and so they’re still watching a dubbed film, only in Italian rather than English. Nevertheless, it has long been a trend now...

  Out of all the countless films dubbed into English throughout the years, one of the most famous of them all is for sure Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical tale Amarcord (1973) which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Many of the great English dubbers of Rome can be heard in the film, but the central role of the young schoolboy Titta (played on-screen by Bruno Zanin) was however not dubbed by any of the of the Rome regulars. Instead, Titta’s voice was provided by the very successful American theatre actor Robert Lydiard, and in this newspaper article from The Miami Herald (September 11, 1980) that I’ve managed to dig out, we get the full story on how Lydiard’s voice work on the bizarre talking-dolphins thriller The Day of the Dolphin (1973) brought him to the attention of Fellini. Enjoy!   An Actor’s Resumé: ‘Speaks Dolphin in Five Languages’ by Bob Curtwright, Knight-Ridder News Service   Bob Lydiard is an actor whose...