Dubbed in Rome

  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...

For most fans of English dubbing in Rome, the names we most closely associate with this industry are Ted Rusoff, Carolyn de Fonseca, Nick Alexander, Frank von Kuegelgen, Edward Mannix, Susan Spafford, Pat Starke, Robert Sommer, Tony La Penna and others who spent some 40 to 50 years doing dubbing. The majority of people who were involved with dubbing in Rome were not on the scene for that long, however. If anything, the English dubbing world was like a revolving door of people – with some involved for a couple of years before moving on to something else, whereas others were only briefly roped into it while in town for some months. One dubber belonging to the latter category was Don Stoneman, a.k.a. E. Donnell Stoneman, a former New York stage actor turned director/producer who enjoyed a very short-lived foray into English dubbing when he was in Rome for a few months in 1963. What makes Stoneman’s brush with dubbing so interesting in spite of its brevity is that he chronicled his exper...