Carolyn De Fonseca

Carolyn De Fonseca is an American actress and voice dubbing artist based in Rome. She is known for her sensual, breathy voice and has worked extensively as a voice actress for the English language dubbing of several hundred foreign (mostly Italian) films from the early 1960s and onwards. She is also the wife of actor/voice dubber Ted Rusoff, whom she frequently works with.

Carolyn first came to Rome in the early 1960s and tried to make a career for herself as an actress. She played a small role in the acclaimed "A Difficult Life" (1961), directed by Dino Risi, and had a decently sized supporting role as Chloe, the love potion maker, in the peplum "Damon and Pythias" (1962). She also had bit part roles in some big productions that did shooting in Italy, such as "Barabbas" (1961) and "The Pink Panther" (1963) but Carolyn never really found much success as an actress. However, with many Italian films being prepared for international releases, native English speakers were in demand to work with dubbing, and Carolyn quickly became a prolific and successful voice dubbing artist.

Some of Carolyn's earliest dubbing work was in the film "The Loves of Hercules" (1960). The film was post synchronized but its leading lady Jayne Mansfield did not dub her own voice, which led to Carolyn dubbing Mansfield's voice in the English version of the film. Subsequently, Carolyn would go on to dub Mansfield's voice in all of Mansfield's European films such as "Primitive Love" (1964) and "Dog Eat Dog" (1964). It was also Carolyn who provided Mansfield's narrator voice in the infamous quasi-documentary "The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield" (1968). Released after Mansfield's death, this mondo-style cult documentary consists of footage of Mansfield visiting various night clubs, beaches etc while narrating her experiences. Since Mansfield died before the film's completion, Carolyn performs the task of voicing Mansfield's thoughts and narration.

In the 1960s, Carolyn dubbed many leading ladies into English but eventually became more prolific in dubbing villainesses in various peplum and horror films. After a supporting role in the caper film "Midas Run" (1969) with Fred Astaire and Richard Crenna, she would give up her acting career and focus solely on dubbing films into English. She specialized in voicing bitchy, arrogant vixens such as the evil queen (played by Jany Clair) in "Hercules vs. the Moon Men" (1964), a bitchy tourist (played by Silvia Solar) in "Eyeball" (1975) and the deranged, violent inmate Albina in "Women's Prison Massacre" (1983). She would also typically dub exotic figures, or lust-craving upper-class nymphomaniacs such as a sex hungry asylum patient (played by Rosalba Neri) in "Slaughter Hotel" (1971), and a sassy, black nightclub performer (played by Carla Brait) in "The Case of the Bloody Iris" (1972). Carolyn would also sometimes deliver very over the top performances; dubbing the voices of sobbing and hysterical figures such as a paranoid asylum patient (played by Rossella Falk) in "Seven Blood-Stained Orchids" (1972), a sexually frustrated housewife (played by Carroll Baker) in "My Father's Wife" (1976), and a half-crazy drug addicted nun (played by Anita Ekberg) in "The Killer Nun" (1978).

As the Italian film industry was slowing down somewhat in the 1980s, Carolyn resumed her career as a film actress in various American films that were shot in Rome, while still continuing to work with dubbing. On screen she played Christopher Reeve's secretary in "Monsignor" (1982), had a fairly sized supporting role in the Pia Zadora flick "The Lonely Lady" (1983), played a comedic role as an American tourist in "Detective School Dropouts" (1986) and finally appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Sheltering Sky" (1990). On television, she appeared in the highly acclaimed mini series "The Winds of War" (1983). She also appeared alongside her real-life husband Ted Rusoff in the mini series "Mussolini and I" (1985), in which they play the parents of Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Petacci, and played a supporting part in the TV movie thriller "The Fifth Missile" (1986).

List of dubbing roles ("incomplete")

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