By 17, he was touring Great Britain as a standup comedian. Stage-struck at birth, he began training at age nine in everything from tap, ballet, ballroom and eccentric comedy dancing to tumbling and judo. In fact, prior to Potter, Dale's stock in trade had always been a robust comic physicality. I never really thought my voice was anything special," Dale admits.
" I was born with a very broad accent in the center of England, which is Shakespeare country, these small communities that have dialect that goes back 300 or 400 years, and it took me a long time to get rid of that. "There's a whole new generation out there that don't know me to look at but they know me when I speak, and that can be quite funny."įunny because, unlike those mellifluous, immediately identifiable voices from the British stage (Gielgud, Burton, et al.), Dale once considered his voice one of his biggest obstacles. "I've been acting for 50 years now and the last eight or nine years, more kids have gotten to know me than ever did when I was a young man," the 71-year-old Dale says from his Manhattan apartment.
As the sole performer of the entire Harry Potter canon on audiobook, including the seventh and final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Dale is more likely to be swarmed by fans who suddenly recognize the voice of young Harry and some 130 other characters than Dale himself, the show-stopping, Tony Award-winning song-and-dance man from the 1980 Broadway musical hit, Barnum.
The crowning irony of British actor Jim Dale's stellar career is that he will best be remembered for having been heard and not seen.
0 kommentar(er)
