Dubbed in Rome

  Robert Braun was one of the all-time great English language character actor dubbers. He worked as a dubbing actor in Paris in the 1960s before relocating to Rome at the end of the decade and continuing his career there through the 1970s, thus making him one of a very select few to have worked extensively with English dubbing in both Paris and Rome. Unfortunately, he’s also one of those extremely mysterious dubbers of whom there’s not even a picture available, but his marvellously eloquent Richard Burtonesque voice – which can be heard coming from the mouths of quirky older characters in a great number of Edgar Wallace krimis, spy and horror pictures, spaghetti westerns and what not – should be very familiar to fans of such cinema. Below is a sample of some of his most famous dubbing roles from his glory years in Paris: Unfortunately, there’s practically no biographical information whatsoever available on Robert Braun, with the commonality of his name making him almost impossibl...

  With this post I’ll be taking a closer look at the English language dubbing industry in Paris. A bit off topic for this blog you might be thinking, but as it happens, there was quite a bit of overlap in terms of dubbing personnel between the dubbing scenes in Rome and Paris, and that, coupled with the fact that a significant number of important films from both Italy and the rest of the world were dubbed into English in Paris makes the Parisian dubbing world worthy of closer study. Unfortunately, English dubbing in Paris is, if anything, an even more esoteric subject than English dubbing in Rome, with very little effort having been made to preserve its history or to identify its participants. It is therefore high time to try to rectify that situation. Just like Italy, France is traditionally a ‘dubbing country’, having adopted the practice of dubbing films into French rather than subtitling them ever since the 1930s. The first few wavering steps to get an English dubbing indus...