You’ve Heard the Man with a Thousand Voices
But have you seen him? Reading this New York Times account makes me want to see every film in which this actor played a part.
Robert Rietti began his long acting career as child, appearing in Depression-era films and stage productions in his native England, and his career continued into the 21st century when, among other roles, he appeared as an Italian scholar in “Hannibal” (2001), a sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs,” one of the myriad international characters he affected over hundreds of films, plays and radio and television broadcasts.
His career, he often said, was satisfying and rewarding, though he had a fairly serious complaint, which he explained in an interview in the 1990s with the British magazine Empire.
“I get a bit upset when people don’t know I’ve got a face,” he said.
Indeed, Mr. Rietti, who was 92 when he died in London on April 3, was far more often heard than seen. A polyglot with a gift for mimicry, he was a prolific voice dubber, an actor called in to rerecord dialogue in the postproduction phase of making a film.
Perhaps the director was unsatisfied with the sound quality of the original recording and the original actor was no longer available. Perhaps a technical foul-up garbled the sound. Perhaps a foreign actor was deemed incomprehensible in his nonnative tongue. Perhaps the dialogue itself simply needed improving.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Rietti, who became known as “the man with a thousand voices,” was a go-to guy, whose voice emerged from the mouths of hundreds of others in dozens if not hundreds of films.
Among his often uncredited movie contributions, was a Spanish accent he dubbed for the actor Lionel Jeffries in “The Secret of My Success” (1965); he voiced the Russian-accented dialogue in “Doctor Zhivago” for the German actor Klaus Kinski; he mimicked the voice of Orson Welles playing Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” (1971); and he completely redubbed the role of General Marenkov, a Soviet defector, in “Avalanche Express” (1979) when the actor Robert Shaw died before the film was finished.
