About This Blog

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Hi!

Welcome to this blog, which is aimed at readers with a particular interest in the English language dubbing industry in Rome during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

As a long-time fan of Italian cinema, the English dubbing of these films has always fascinated me. So many of the same voices can be heard in film after film, but always comi
ng from the mouths of a different actor. These people were good! Damn good! And I wanted to know who these people were, but there just wasn't any information to be found about them anywhere.

Thankfully, many of the dubbers from the golden age have since been identified, but there are still a lot of unsung dubbing heroes who have never received the recognition they so richly deserve. With this blog, I seek to rectify this, and I'll be covering as many as possible of the golden age dubbers and provide as much information as possible on their careers, complete with dubbing filmographies and video clips of their work. I'm also going to write about basically everything related to dubbing in Rome.

I hope you'll enjoy this blog, and perhaps learn some new things. Feel free to comment! It's always fun to hear from others who share the same interest.

Johan Melle

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Interview with Dan Keller

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  The English language dubbers of Rome in the 1960s and 70s had a large and versatile pool of talent to choose from, but there was one area that was to prove problematic time and again: child dubbers. There simply weren’t many available, which sometimes forced the dubbing directors to cast adult females trying to impersonate children’s voices. One of the few genuine child dubbers who was active in Rome during that era was an American teenager by the name of Dan Keller . From the late 1960s on, Dan was the go-to guy for young boy voices, and in this exclusive interview he shares some wonderful and insightful memories of his time in the dubbing salas of Rome.   Johan Melle: Can you start by telling a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and how you and your family came to live in Rome during the Hollywood on the Tiber era in the 1960s?   Dan Keller: That story is told here . The short version is, in 1961 my family went to Rome for a year and stayed for 12.   JM: Ho
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The History of English Dubbing in Rome

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  For my very first post on this blog, I’m going to try to dig into the history of the English dubbing scene in Rome. Now, if you think that sounds overly ambitious, then you’re right! A comprehensive history of English dubbing in Rome cannot be told in a mere blog post. I am, however, going to do my best to at least get the basics covered by tracing the industry back to its humble origins and taking a closer look at how it expanded, the working methods, some of the biggest challenges faced by the dubbers, the dubbing organization ELDA, and some of the key players – hopefully, in a way that will provide interested readers with a good understanding of how English dubbing in Rome worked back in the golden years of the 1960s and 70s. Before we can fully delve into the history of English language dubbing in Rome, however, it is necessary to first a closer look at the Italian language dubbing practices of the time and their origins.   Italian dubbing traditions Italy is one of the
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Uti Hof

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  Did you think that all the English dubbers in Rome were Americans or Brits? Well, think again! There were actually surprisingly many dubbers who were not native English speakers, and one of the most memorable of them all was Uti Hof (1936-2022), a sultry-voiced German actress who made a career out of dubbing seductive European temptresses and femme fatales in a long line of Eurospy, giallo and WW2 actioners in the 1960s and early 1970s. You may not have heard the name before, but anyone with an interest in these kinds of films will for sure know Uti’s voice. Just check out the video below for a selection of some of her most memorable dubbing roles:     Uti was born in Germany on March 11, 1936 and grew up there with her parents and several siblings, including her twin brother Goetz. Like so many other young girls, she dreamed of being an actress, and in the early 1960s, Uti moved to Rome to try her luck in the blossoming Italian film industry of those days. There she found work in
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