Narrators

When asked to do an interview for AudioFile, Robertson Dean exclaims, "Oh yes! I looooooove to shoot off my mouth." Yet, what distinguishes his work is a judicious use of understatement and careful pacing. Rob brings to his narration not only significance but dignity and depth. "I like to absorb and relate mind-expanding nonfiction, finding a way to make a story active and engaging." In fiction, he can make a character come alive with just a few well-chosen strokes. "The overall tone obviously varies a lot from title to title--from clipped to heartfelt," says Rob. "But no matter what the tone, I'm really just trying to tell a tale with love and care."

Rob was raised in Connecticut, trained at Yale Drama School, and appeared on Broadway before migrating to Los Angeles, where he has split his time between live theater, TV, and the occasional film. Then, in 2003, he began narrating audiobooks for Blackstone and discovered that he was good at it and that he enjoyed it. In 2006, he lent his sonorous, classically disciplined bass-baritone to a dozen titles for Books on Tape, which run the gamut from The Last of the Mohicans to a recent biography, MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY . For his efforts on titles such as Robert Dugoni's JURY MASTER , Jay McInerney's THE GOOD LIFE , and Kyle Mills's FADE, AudioFile reviewers have praised him for being "right on the money," "authoritative," and "masterful." Rob's own favorite for the year is JOHN'S STORY by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins: "It's a simple story of how the evangelist came to write his gospel and Revelations." He says it was a real challenge to voice the apostles, the angels, and Jesus Christ: "I found myself creating a heightened vocal world, where everyone spoke their famous lines with absolute certainty."

At this writing, Rob is performing onstage in Shakespeare's As You Like It and working on two audiobooks at once. For BOT, he's recording Stan Pottinger's THE BOSS , "a thriller set in the Texas oil business; big, colorful characters; rock-solid storytelling, mostly in the first person, which I love." Simultaneously, he is portraying the god Apollo for Blackstone in the world's first audio recording of Aeschylus's 2500-year-old ORESTEIA trilogy. "Nothing beats playing a god," he sighs. "It almost makes me feel that my delusions of grandeur are justified."--Yuri Rasovsky, 2006 Narrators Yearbook