Dubbed in Rome

  Being a ‘dubbing detective’ can oftentimes be a very complicated job. It takes a lot of time, effort and patience to familiarize yourself with a voice to the point that you can trust yourself to be able to positively pick it out in any and all types of roles. And that’s just one part of it! There are many other challenges one is frequently faced with when doing research on dubbing, and one of them is trying to pinpoint exactly when a given dub was actually recorded. Now, a lot of the time, English dubs in Rome were recorded in close proximity with the original production of the films, but there are also several examples of dubs which were recorded up to several years after the film was originally made. Sometimes, because an actor in the film who was unknown at the time of production later ended up becoming famous and thus greatly increasing the film’s marketability. Other times because a certain type of film became very popular; prompting producers to try to make some money o...

  At one point or another, most of the English language dubbers in Rome appeared in front of a camera. After all, many of them originally came to Rome as hopeful actors, before finding that dubbing could provide them with a steadier income. A lot of the dubbers only ever appeared in small film roles (usually early on in their careers), though there were a few dubbers who appeared regularly in front of the camera and who divided their times equally between Cinecittà and the various Roman dubbing studios, with Frank Latimore, Edmund Purdom, Roger Browne, Michael Forest, Craig Hill, Tony Russel and Rodd Dana being the best-known examples. Most of the time, the dubbers provided their own voices for the English language versions, but not always. Sometimes, even the dubbers themselves ended up dubbed by other dubbers. Lack of availability was usually the reason for this happening, though sometimes it also happened that an actor was not capable of a certain accent that the character...