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.
In the 1970 historical epic “Waterloo”, which starred Rod Steiger as Napoleon, Mr. Rietti recorded all the dialogue for the British actor Jack Hawkins, who played Gen. Thomas Picton, because Hawkins had lost his voice to throat cancer.
He spoke in many films for Hawkins, but in “Waterloo,” which had dozens of speaking parts and thousands of extras, Mr. Rietti said he had voiced 98 different characters. His son, Jonathan, who confirmed the death, said that his father’s unusual contribution to the film was the result of a technical problem or an accident that had made much of the original soundtrack unusable.
Perhaps Mr. Rietti’s best-known voices were those of the villains from James Bond movies. Adolfo Celi, the brawny actor who wore a black eye patch as the villainous international criminal Emilio Largo in “Thunderball,” had an Italian accent that was deemed too thick for English audiences to understand, so Mr. Rietti stood in. In “For Your Eyes Only,” he is the vaguely German-sounding voice of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a cat-loving Bond archenemy played by John Hollis, in one memorable scene giggling threateningly as he takes 007 (Roger Moore) on a harrowing, remote-controlled helicopter ride. In “You Only Live Twice” (1967), he voiced a Bond ally, Tiger Tanaka, a Japanese agent played by Tetsuro Tanba.
The dubbing craft, Mr. Rietti said, was different depending on whether the task was to voice an entire movie — in which case he had more leeway to create a character of his own, or to fill in selected dialogue.
“It’s a little bit like vocal cartooning when you’re asked to match somebody’s voice,” he said. “If they only want certain sections redone and they’re keeping the main part with the original voice, you’ve got to be so close to it that nobody’s going to notice the difference.”
Mr. Rietti’s father, Vittorio Rietti, was an actor and music teacher from an Italian banking family; his mother, Rachel Rosenay, was Russian born. They met in Alexandria, Egypt, where both lived briefly at the end of World War I, and intended to move to the United States. But during a stopover in London, Vittorio found work, and they stayed.
Their son Lucio Herbert Rietti, who would later take the name Robert (and sometimes to sound less Italian in professional circumstances used the last name Rietty), was born in London on Feb. 3, 1923. He began acting before he was 8 years old — his father encouraged him after hearing him recite from memorized scripts — and was so in demand as a child stage actor that he stopped attending school and, during the Depression and beyond, supported the family financially.
During the early part of World War II, because of his Italian heritage, he was confined in an internment camp, but upon his release he joined the British Army and served in its entertainment corps. After the war, his family said, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked prolifically in radio with, among others, Welles.
Mr. Rietti married Tina Shalom, a dental hygienist, in 1958. She died in 2008. In addition to his son Jonathan, an orthodox rabbi, he is survived by another son, Benjamin; two daughters, Anya Rietti and Liana Bar; 29 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Mr. Rietti appeared, face and all, in numerous films, including as an Italian monk in the horror film “The Omen” (1976) with Gregory Peck, and as a master piano teacher in “Madame Sousatzka” (1988), with Shirley MacLaine. By then he had long since become something of a dubbing factory, directing all the postproduction voicing on many international films. But his life as a dubbing artist began serendipitously, as he was doing a routine revoicing of a minor part or two in a 1948 film, “Call of the Blood.”
“The director suddenly realized he had need of the leading actor to change dialogue, and he wasn’t available,” Mr. Rietti recalled in a British television interview. “So he asked me, do you think you might be able to imitate him and get away with it? I tried and it seemed to work and he was happy. From then on the word spread, and I kept being called to revoice other people, important people, who weren’t able to come and do their revoicing themselves.”
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