Remembering Ted Rusoff

Ted Russof was born in 1939 in Winnipeg Canada. Ted was an American actor, musician, voice dubbing artist, writer of film-scripts, poetry, and fiction, opera-coach and stage-director, adaptor/translator from and into various languages of synchronized dialogue for the dubbing of films and cartoons.

 
As a dubbing director he is known for his extensive work for the English-language versions of foreign — predominantly Italian — films including numerous Euro-westerns such as “The Great Silence” (1968), “They Call Me Trinity” (1970) and “The Last Traitor” (1971).
 
The son of film producer Lou Rusoff [1911-1963], Ted started his career as a singer, appearing in operas, musical comedies, and on the road in various cities in the U.S.A. and Canada with his guitar during the folk-singing boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He specialized in songs in many foreign languages, including Ghanaian and Maori. He also appeared in nearly all the Gilbert and Sullian operas, doing a wide variety of roles. He toured with a trio called ‘The Catch Club’, along with his fellow music-students from UCLA, David Reznick and Larry Pack. He traveled to Europe in 1963 and, using his knowledge of languages, began overseeing the dubbings into Italian, French, and German of films that had been shot in English and produced in America by American International Pictures, the company that had been founded by his uncle, Samuel Z. Arkoff [1918-2001]. He worked as sync-adapter and dubbing director of more than 500 films, and as a dubber his voice can be heard in more than 1300 films, providing the voice for numerous leading men as well as many villains in a number of Italian cult favorites such as The Whip and the Body (1963), Deep Red (1975), Beyond the Darkness (1979) and many others. He has also worked extensively dubbing films into Italian and French, often supplying foreign languages or accents.
 
In the early 1980s, Rusoff started doing much work as an actor in film and television. He started out with supporting roles - often playing authority figures or religious characters such as priests, rabbis or monks.
 
Ted was hit by a car in early September of 2013 and died almost a month later in a Rome hospital on September 28, 2013 from injuries received in the accident. Ted was married to actress Carolyn De Fonseca who died in 2009.
 
Today we remember voice actor extraordinaire Ted Rusoff on what would have been his 75^th birthday.