Robert (Lucio Herbert) Rietti, actor, born 8 February 1923, in Paddington, west London, son of Victor, a well-known character actor, and Rachel (nee Rosenay), he came from Italian-Jewish stock. His family, originally from Ferrara, had lived in England for 200 years and one of his ancestors was Rebecca Rietti, Benjamin Disraeli’s grandmother. Film and television actor, Robert Rietti, best known for his voice. On-screen appearancesin John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and the ITV series The Avengers, his regular work came from dubbing the dialogue of actors whose command of English was limited or who could not make the final stages of recording a soundtrack.
Robert Shaw died in 1978 and Rietti dub ded his voice in parts of three movies for which Shaw had not completed the recording. After a diagnosis of cancer compelled the removal of Jack Hawkins’s larynx in 1966, Rietti provided the spoken words for some of his films. In Treasure Island (1972), he revoiced every word spoken by Orson Welles as Long John Silver.Rietti had a significant involvement in the James Bond series, providing the voice of the secret agent John Strangways in the first, Dr No (1962), and Adolfo Celi’s voice as Emilio Largo in Thunderball (1965). He even dubbed the Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice (1967) and John Hollis as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only (1981). In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, he also appeared before the camera as one of the staff in a casino.In the film Waterloo (1970), for instance, he was heard talking to himself four times in the course of providing no fewer than 98 voices, one of them for Hawkins as Sir Thomas Picton. He made more than 6,000 radio broadcasts, frequently reading his own short stories or tales from the Bible. For more than 20 years he would end my own BBC Radio London, and then LBC, programme You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, with a reading from either the Old Testament or the Talmud. For a number of years, he also broadcast to the US for the BBC in what was billed as an answer to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America.He had his own company. He was nominated for a Golden Reel award in Hollywood for dubbing much of Sergio Leone’s gangster movie Once Upon a Time in America. In 2000, he was nominated for the Bafta special award for outstanding work.
He was also active as a writer. He translated the entire works of Pirandello into English and published a number of anthologies, including the collection A Rose For Reuben: Stories of Hope from the Holocaust (2006). He edited the drama quarterly Gambit.
He died 3 April 2015
