The Wizard of Voices

Why hasn’t someone cast Jim Dale in the upcoming Harry Potter movie?

He’s already played every role in J.K. Rowling’s books--every wizard, witch and muggle (ordinary, non-magical humans), elf, snake, centaur, ghost and spider.

Dale, a British-born, Tony Award-winning, film, TV and stage actor, is the voice of Harry Potter--and 124 other characters--in the audiotape versions of Rowling’s series, published by Random House’s Listening Library.

To call Dale a “reader” of the books is like saying Monet was a Sunday painter. Indeed, while packaging for Books 1 and 2--”Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”--says “Read by Jim Dale,” packaging for Books 3 and 4--”Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”--gives him his due, stating, “Performance by Jim Dale.”

The audio versions might have sold like crazy anyway, considering the books’ runaway sales, but Dale’s tour de force contribution hasn’t hurt. The recordings are the top-selling children’s audiotapes of all time. The audio version of Rowling’s latest book, “The Goblet of Fire,” the fourth in her series about a boy wizard-in-training at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, has sold more than 400,000 copies. A typical children’s audio book sells between 2,000 and 4,000 copies.

Sales of the four audio books combined are a million and climbing, as more and more Potter fans, including those who have read every book multiple times, discover that Dale’s renditions provide a vivid new dimension to their Harry Potter experience.

“I would love to do the Harry Potter movie. Oh, that would be a joy,” said Dale, via phone from his home in New York. And,” he chuckled, “I’ve got a very good demonstration tape if they want to hear it.”

Talking to Dale is an exercise in shifting reality. His own voice, with its softly blurred Rs and dynamic cadences, is Harry Potter himself. Soon, gruff but kind Hagrid, the half-giant who serves as gamekeeper at Hogwarts, comes on the line, modeled after a beloved uncle, Dale said, “a very gentle man” from Cornwall, “one of the gentlest accents we have in England, those lovely rolling Rs.”

Then detestable Malfoy, an evil-hearted student at rival Slytherin House at Hogwarts, makes an appearance. His upper-crust, disgust-dripping drawl, Dale explained, is how someone might sound who has realized that he’s just “trodden in what the dog left behind.”

Soon, the deliciously high-pitched Scottish burr of brisk and benign Professor Minerva McGonagall takes over. Based on Dale’s elderly aunt in Edinburgh, the professor is quite pleased that her voice is one of the reporter’s favorites--”Oh, is it really, dear?” she pipes. “Oh, I’m so gratified.”

More of Dale’s own favorites make their way into the conversation, including two of the many ghosts that haunt Hogwarts’ ancient castle rooms: Nearly Headless Nick, the victim of a botched hatchet job in the 15th century, who sounds “veddy veddy John Gielgud”; and Peeves, a tattletale poltergeist, with the nasally whine of a bratty 5-year-old, based on a character created by British comedian Terry Scott.

“He was a friend of mine,” Dale said. “He was such a joy, a wonderful comic. He died a couple of years ago, and out of respect for his marvelous talent, I used his voice.”

Hogwarts’ respected headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, memorializes another late friend, John Houseman.

“Although it’s not an impression of John Houseman, it is very much based upon the way I remember John talking to me,” Dale said. “It has authority to it, gentleness to it, and knowledge to it. All of that came out in his voice.

“Isn’t it nice to be able to put your friends into something that will always be a memory of them?”

A Richly Varied Career

Dale’s ability to give distinctive voice to so many characters, however, comes from his own richly varied career. Now 65, he began performing at 17 as a joke-telling, physical comedian on the British music hall circuit. He was a pop singer in his early 20s, with producer George Martin (before Martin soared into legend by signing the Beatles).

Dale also wrote songs, earning an Oscar nomination for his lyrics to “Georgy Girl,” although he jokes that he had more failures than successes.

“I mean, I’ve sent more unknown singers on that short road back to obscurity than any other songwriter.”

Already a busy film actor by then, he joined the British National Theatre in 1970 and did a raft of plays as a classical leading actor; his long list of British and American films ranges from the zany, risque “Carry On” comedy series to “Joseph Andrews” and Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon.”

In 1980, Dale triumphed on Broadway in the Cy Coleman musical “Barnum,” opposite Glenn Close, winning critics’ kudos and Tony and Drama Desk awards for best leading actor. His New York stage career spans more than 20 years, garnering him a slew of other major theater awards. In 1997, he was nominated for a Tony award for his lead performance in “Candide.”

It was in 1998, following Dale’s long run as Fagin in Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of “Oliver!” at the London Palladium, that Listening Library publisher Tim Ditlow, acting on a “wonderful suggestion” from a friend at a dinner party, decided that Dale, “British, but not too British” for American ears, was a good candidate for the voice of Harry Potter.

Rowling had final approval, which she enthusiastically gave, Ditlow said, after hearing a sample of Dale’s work on “Sorcerer’s Stone.”

“She was very concerned,” Ditlow said, “just as she was with the movie, that it wasn’t going to be an American voice. She was adamant from the beginning that she wanted to have that kind of control.”

Rowling has been involved with all the recordings, “constantly,” he said, even decreeing that Dale change an Irish accent to a Yorkshire one, for the announcer of the Quidditch World Cup in “Goblet.” (Quidditch, Hogwarts’ competitive sport played on broomsticks, is big in the world of wizards and witches.)

“It was much better the way she suggested,” Dale said. “You see, to me, she can do no wrong. She knows where she’s going, she’s explored every stone in this wonderful landscape, this wonderful world of hers. The reason the novels are good is because it’s great writing and wonderful storytelling, so anything she suggests, I’ll go along with.”

The secrecy and heavy security surrounding the July 8 release of “Goblet” extended to the audio version as well, and made the taping a challenge.

“We were handed the manuscript so late, and it was under so much security that we had to work straight through Memorial Day weekend,” Ditlow said. “We worked for about 10 days in a row, and we were contacting Jo [Rowling] on a regular basis.”

“I would record 100 pages,” Dale said, “and then go home and read another 100 pages and invent the characters.” Trying to find so many different voices in such a short time was no small challenge. He “literally had to get into the mind of every little character, every major character, and see the story through their eyes, whether they’re goodies or baddies, whether they’re elves or spiders.

“I was going crazy at night,” Dale said. “My wife could hear me screaming in the other room, saying, ‘Where are you? Come out, wherever you are. . . . Who are you?’ ”

It helped that Dale had grown up in the middle of England, (Northamptonshire and Warickshire), where he heard “all those wonderful rustic accents” nearly unchanged since Shakespeare’s time, he said. Having been a teenage stand-up comic with a repertoire of colloquial jokes helped too.

It must be said that Dale’s prodigious facility with accents hasn’t impressed everyone. He and Ditlow relish relating how one critic took Dale to task for his Welsh centaurs.

“Jim and I were cracking up,” Ditlow said. “What accent should centaurs have?”

“Did [the critic] want an Israeli centaur, a Pakistani centaur?” Dale said, chuckling. “Why shouldn’t they come from Wales? There’s lots of forests out there; they could have been hidden there for donkey’s years.”

Scale Rates for Readers

Dale isn’t exactly sharing in the Harry Potter windfall, despite extraordinary audio sales. (“Goblet,” at 20 1/2 hours long, 17 CDs or 12 cassettes, sells for $39.95; the other books are six and seven hours long, priced from $33 to $35.)

Under American Federation of Television and Radio Artists rules for the payment of audio book performances, readers are paid certain scale rates; there is no precedent within union rules for a bonus rate when an artist’s above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty performance helps catapult an audio book to unprecedented success.

“Dale gets a celebrity rate,” said Ditlow, “the same as Derek Jacobi, for instance, gets reading an adult audio book.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you just got 25 cents per book?” Dale asked. “Unfortunately, in the audio book world, nobody gets any sort of thing called percentages. It all boils down to so much per hour; that’s how much salary you get.” Still, “rules are rules are rules,” he said.

But the lack of trickle-down Harry Potter economics isn’t stemming Dale’s enthusiasm for the books. He’s delighted that the “Sorcerer’s Stone” audio book was nominated for a Grammy this year, though it didn’t win, and he’s eagerly awaiting the next nominee list, hoping “Goblet” makes it. And, although Dale is looking forward to being back on the New York stage next year--he has two projects in mind, but prefers not to name them--he’s eager to do the last three Potter books in the series. He’s also branching out: His performance of Susan Cooper’s young adult fantasy novel, “The King of Shadows,” was released by Listening Library in July, and Ditlow has begun getting “Can you get me Jim Dale?” requests from his authors.

“I’m like a kid,” Dale said. “I cannot tell you how nice it is to hear nice things said about something that you really feel good about, when you’ve really worked hard, and you think, damn it, I did a good job.”

There’s another reason Harry Potter is close to his heart, though. Dale, who has three sons--he lost his only daughter to leukemia--is grateful that his five young grandchildren (one of whom, 11-year-old Alfie, auditioned for the movie as Harry’s friend, Ron) will always have his performance of the books to remember him by.

“They’re going to have a whole series of the most magical books on tape that their grandfather did. That’s such a thing to leave your grandchildren. It couldn’t be better, could it?”