Italian actor, singer and comedian Oreste Lionello has died. According to the fabtastic ‘Jazz news‘:
ROME — Oreste Lionello, an entertainer and film dubber who was Italy’s “voice” of Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis and other comic stars, died in a Rome hospital today.
Lionello, 81, was a star in Italy’s important entertainment industry of movie dubbing. Relatively few Italian cinemas show films in the original language, so moviegoers often only know the voices of Hollywood stars through dubbers like Lionello.
Italian actor and director Pier Francesco Pingitore, who did cabaret acts with Lionello, said the dubber died Thursday morning after a long illness. No details were released about the illness.
Besides Allen and Lewis, other actors who were dubbed by Lionello included Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman and Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
Lionello on occasion answered his phone by saying, “I am the voice of Woody Allen.” For those who had seen Allen’s films only in Italian, hearing the real voice of Woody Allen could be jarring. Lionello’s dubbing captured all of the neuroses and sarcastic tones in Allen’s speech.
Early in his career in entertainment, Lionello worked in theater as a comic actor and in cabaret, where he was noted for his imitations of veteran Italian politician Giulio Andreotti. Lionello also worked successfully as an entertainer on Italian TV in the 1970s and 1980s.
But it was in dubbing that he earned his greatest fame.
This actually doesn’t say much about Lionello’s acting career, but he was quite a well known figure on the Italian stage, and also appeared in a good 70 or so films. Some of his most famous roles were as ‘the professor’ in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Arthur the photographer in The Case of the Bloody Iris, so he’s quite a recognisable face for anyone with an interest in the giallo genre.
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