Spaghetti Western Voices ~ “A Stranger in Town”

As we know most of the Euro-westerns were co-productions from Italy, Spain, Germany and France which incorporated British and American actors to gain a worldwide audience. The films were shot silent and then dubbed into the various languages where they were sold for distribution. That means Italian, Spanish, German, French and English voice actors were hired to dub the films. Even actors from the countries where the film was to be shown were often dubbed by voice actors for various reasons such as the actors were already busy making another film, they wanted to be paid additional salaries for dubbing their voices, the actor’s voice didn’t fit the character they were playing, accidents to the actors and in some cases even death before the film could be dubbed.

I’ll list a Euro-western and the (I) Italian, (S) Spanish, (G) German and (F) French, (E) English voices that I can find and once in a while a bio on a specific voice actor as in Europe these actors are as well-known as the actors they voiced.

Today we’ll cover “A Stranger in Town”

[(I) Italian, (S) Spanish, (G) German, (F) French, (E) English]

The Stranger – Tony Anthony (I) Cesare Barbetti, (S) Juan Vicente, (G) Klaus Kindler

Aguilar – Frank Wolff (I) Renato Turi, (S) Jose Antonio Alaya, (G) Arnold Marquis

Corvo – Raf Baldassarre (I) Massimo Foschi, (S) Eduardo Diez, (G) Rainer Brandt

Maria 'Maruka' Pilar – Gia Sandri (I) Lydia Simoneschi, (S) Montse Galve, (G) Gisela Reißmann

Marinero – Aldo Berti (I) Manlio De Angelis, (S) Alvaro Gonzalez Toledo, (G) Lutz Moik

Captain George Stafford – Lars Bloch (I) Luciano De Ambrosis, (S) Enrique Gracia, (G) Hans Wiegner

 

Lydia Simoneschi  (1908 – 1981)

Lydia Simoneschi was born in Rome on April 4, 1908. She was the daughter of Carlo Simoneschi, had been a famous actor and director of Italian silent cinema. Still very young she decided to be an actress, making her debut in Camillo Pilotto's theater company and acting in various shows around Italy and Europe; In 1932 she made her debut as both a voice actress and a film actress, but her inconspicuous physical appearance did not favor her in the latter sector: she therefore had a modest career in the cinema, acting in only six films between 1932 and 1959 and always confined to small supporting roles, but her persuasive and sophisticated vocal qualities opened the way for her to become a successful voice actress.

She married a South Tyrolean officer of the Royal Navy, Franz Lehmann, from whom she had a son Giorgio: however, she was widowed in 1942: immediately after the loss of her husband she abandoned the theatrical scene, devoting herself exclusively to the much more remunerative work of dubbing actress. In the last years of activity she also worked as a dubbing director. In 1949 her second son, Gianni, was born from the union with her brother-in-law Luigi Lehmann.

Her great versatility as a voice actress is highlighted, for example, in Pietro Germi's film “Un maledetto imbroglio” (1959), in which she dubs both a young Eleonora Rossi Drago, co-star of the film, and the elderly Nanda De Santis. Lydia also dubbed several characters in animated cinema (especially in Disney productions), most of the time playing good characters, such as fairies, but she was also a Magician in “The Sword in the Stone” (1962).

From the second half of the sixties she thinned out her dubbing activity and if before she had regularly dubbed famous actresses, most of the time much younger than her and in leading roles, from that moment on she was almost always hired to dub middle-aged actresses or older than her, often semi-unknown and in secondary parts, if not even extremely marginal: for example, she gave the voice to Muriel Landers in the part of Mrs. Blossom, who utters a single short sentence within the 1967 film “The Fabulous Dr. Dolittle”.

This downgrading to voice actress of elderly or secondary characters is evident in the film “Uncle Tom's Tales”: if in 1950 Lydia had given the voice to the protagonist Ruth Warrick, in the 1973 redubbing it was instead the voice of the grandmother played by Lucile Watson. The two most obvious exceptions are undoubtedly the Russian Princess for a “Night” (1968) and the Italian “La bella Antonia”, first monica and then dimonia (1972) in which Lydia Simoneschi lends her voice respectively to Vera Titova and Luciana Turina, 40 and 38 years younger than her. In all she dubbed over 5,000 films.

Lydia Simoneschi died in Rome on September 5, 1981, at the age of 73.