Was watching Luigi Cozzi's insanely silly HERCULES (1983) yesterday evening and coudn't help but notice that during the opening narration, the voice giving us the lowdown on Hercules' origin and "the beginning of creation", was awfully familiar to me as the same voice pounding on about Varelli's Three Mothers at the start of INFERNO (1980).

Where else have I heard this narrator's strong voice work and who exactly is he?

Didn't the radio actor who did the voice of "The Shadow" do the narration in the English version of INFERNO?

Err... you mean Orson Welles?

He means Bret Morrison, the last actor to portray The Shadow on radio. Morrison was a frequent voice artist on Titra-produced soundtracks in the '50s through the '70s.

Morrison was also the voice of Gian Maria Volonte in the Dollars movies.

Later: Umm, though the actor I'm thinking of may have been Bernie Grant.

I spent so long trying to figure out which of several more or less similar voices was the Volonte one that they've all fused even after the answer was apparently revealed.

What's more, several of the candidates all died recently, Morrison in the last year or so, I believe, and Grant (who was married to the woman who voiced Claudia Cardinale in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, I seem to recall, as well as being a soap opera star) and Jackson Beck (voice of Bluto most famously, but tons of other work) in the past twelve months. All could do an Irish brogue, and a resonant Wellesian Shadow voice, and, adding to the confusion, they sometimes appeared in the same productions, as with a Green Hornet record a friend of mine tracked down featuring Beck and Grant (and in multiple roles, but none of them named on the album, which merely listed them as featured artists)

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I'd have kicked myself if it had been Welles and I'd never noticed it.

The idea of Welles being on a dubbing track is not all that far-fetched. When I interviewed Harriet White Medin, she told me that she once worked as a voice actress on an English track that Welles directed and participated in, incognito. The movie was THE YOUNG CARUSO with Mario Lanza. Given Welles' background in radio and his ability with voices, and that he resided in Spain and Italy much of the 1950s and '60s, dubbing English tracks for foreign films could have offered him a major source of income at a time when his whole life seemed to be about generating income for his various independent film projects. Needless to say, this is one aspect of Welles' career that none of his biographers to date has touched upon.

That's funny, I was just about to post a question about this voice actor. While watching THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS yesterday, I noticed that the voice of the elderly man with the violin is identical to that of the narrator in INFERNO. It's a very distinctive voice.

And isn't the old crone with the thick glasses (CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS) dubbed by the same voice that dubs Clara Calamai's character in DEEP RED?