Ted Rusoff: The High Priest of Dubbing

by Harvey F. Chartrand

Harvey F. Chartrand is a busy freelance writer based in Ottawa, Canada. His stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Jerusalem Post, Shock Cinema Magazine, Take One Magazine, Scarlet Street, Filmfax and Horror-Wood. Chartrand's in-depth interview with actor Paul Picerni (The Untouchables, House of Wax) is featured in Filmfax's current issue (# 105). Chartrand is also the editor of Ottawa Life Magazine.

The expatriate American actor Ted Rusoff was born in Winnipeg in 1939, the son of screenwriter Lou Rusoff. As very few feature films were being produced in Canada at the time, Lou was lured to Hollywood in 1947 by his brother-in-law Samuel Z. Arkoff, a lawyer who would later found American International Pictures (AIP). Lou was put to work right away, first in radio (Night Beat) and then in the fledgling medium of television (Four Star Playhouse, Terry and the Pirates).

"Starting in the mid-fifties, my dad wrote or produced many pictures for AIP, including several in the horror genre, so I grew up surrounded by movie people," Ted recalls. "As soon as I got a driver's license, I was employed as the lowliest of production assistants on a number of their films, and appeared in lots of crowd scenes as an uncredited (and unpaid!) extra."

In the mid-sixties, AIP sent Ted (who was raised in a multilingual family and has an aptitude for languages) to Europe to oversee the dubbing of their films into French, German and Italian, all languages that he spoke. Ted worked in studios in Brussels and Munich, before settling in Rome.

Before his arrival in Europe, there had been numerous complaints from American distributors about the quality of the dubbing; now that someone from head office was close at hand, it improved dramatically. These were the halcyon days when AIP was producing feature films in Europe, including such drive-in classics as Terror in the Crypt, War of the Zombies, The Last Man on Earth, Planet of Blood and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. Ted Rusoff was involved in dubbing all of them. He also served as a dialogue coach on several of these European-made pictures, helping actors improve their pronunciation and inflections or learn their English dialogue phonetically.

"I knew nothing whatsoever about dubbing at the time, but apparently just having someone from the home office breathing down their necks made the vocal actors toe the line and the dubbings improved," Ted says. "I of course deserved no credit for this, but it was given to me and I accepted it graciously. I loved Rome, wanted to stay for a year or so, and sync work looked like a good way to support myself. I've been here now for 40 years. Since 1963, I have sync-adapted and directed the dubbing of over 500 films shot in many languages (including Finnish, Turkish and Korean), but mostly from the standard European languages into English, and a few into Italian and French. I have taken part as a dubber or vocal actor in over 1,200 films. Later on, I branched out into documentaries, cartoons and commercial voice-overs. As far as my live-movie career goes, I have appeared in 40-odd films, acting in a variety of languages (Italian, French, German, Aramaic, Danish, Greek, Russian and others).

"My movie career really took off when I had the stroke of good fortune of growing old! Casting directors went for my new look and I was often cast as priests, monks, elders and rabbis. Through the sixties and seventies, I was working so hard in dubbing - every single day, making a ton of money - that I didn't have time to go out and look for acting jobs in films. I only started doing that when the dubbing work slowed down in the late seventies. You'll notice that my acting resume starts in 1980. I've been lucky to get a lot of acting jobs in those 23 years."

Rusoff recently appeared as the strange owner of an occult bookstore in the Canadian-produced horror film Eternal, about the coming-back-to-life of Erszebet Bathory, the bloodthirsty 16th-century Hungarian countess who inspired the legend of Dracula. Filmed in Venice, Eternal was co-directed by Federico Sanchez and Wilhelm Liebenberg and produced by Wildkoast Entertainment.

I caught up with Ted Rusoff at a sidewalk café on the Via Veneto in Rome.

Harvey Chartrand: You teamed up with Edmund Purdom in the 1982 horror thriller Rosso Sangue (aka Absurd and Monster Hunter). Tell us about your role and about working with Purdom (cast as a priest) and George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori) as the monster.

Ted Rusoff: I played a doctor in a hospital, pointing to an X-ray of George Eastman's skull. I was explaining to Edmund the malformations I had discovered in the frontal lobe that would account for Eastman's strange behavior. Edmund and I s