Dale’s performance in “Barnum” and a few other Broadway shows. (In Britain the audiobooks are produced by Bloomsbury, and Stephen Fry, the actor, author and comedian, reads them.) Timothy Ditlow, the son of the company’s founders, was at a dinner party with a group of avid theatergoers who recommended Mr. Dale the part of reading “Harry Potter.” Back in 1999, Listening Library, then an independent company, acquired the United States audiobook rights to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, for just $15,000.
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Dale, 71, was born in central England and has had a long and storied career as a stand-up comedian, a pop singer and an actor in everything from the British “Carry On” series of films and Shakespeare at the National Theater in London to Broadway productions of “Joe Egg” and “Barnum,” for which he won a Tony Award. “Let the child find out for himself by opening this gift.” Dale, whose apartment could easily make a Hogwarts professor feel at home with its eclectic collections of Victorian cake decorations, pewter plates and Persian swords. “For those people who say, ‘C’mon, Jim, how does it end?,’ it’s like parents who say: ‘There’s a surprise gift for you in the next room. Dale really believes that readers - and listeners - should discover the end for themselves. Dale signed a confidentiality agreement so that he will not breathe a word of the plot.īut after spending eight years creating more than 200 voices for all the characters in the “Harry Potter” books, Mr. It is not quite four days until Harry Potter’s legions of fans can procure a copy of “Deathly Hallows” - in hardcover, CD or cassette - and find out for themselves exactly who does what to whom. “It’s a surprise ending,” he said on Friday, during an interview in his Park Avenue co-op. Everywhere he goes, people want to know What He Knows. His grandchildren, who visited from England after he completed the recording, literally twisted his arms trying to get him to divulge a clue.
Dale, the veteran Broadway actor turned voice of Harry Potter, finished recording the audio version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the colossally successful series by J. Jim Dale is either one of the luckiest men in America or one of the most tortured.Ī little less than two months ago, Mr.