Ted Rusoff

Ted Rusoff (born 1939 in Winnipeg, Canada, died in 2013 in Rome, Italy) was an Canadian actor, voice dubbing artist and dubbing director known for his extensive work in the English language dubbing of foreign films (mostly Italian ones).

He was the son of writer/producer Lou Rusoff, the brother-in-law of Samuel Z. Arkoff, and he was the husband of actress/voice dubber Carolyn De Fonseca, whom he frequently worked with.

Rusoff traveled to Italy in the 1960s and started working on overseeing the English dubbing of various European films produced by American International Pictures, which had been founded by Rusoff's brother-in-law, Samuel Z. Arkoff. Since 1963, he worked as sync-adapter and dubbing director of more than 500 films, and as a voice-dubber he dubbed more than 1000 films - providing the English-dubbed voices of numerous leading men as well as several villains in a number of Italian cult favorites such as The Whip and the Body (1963), Deep Red (1975), Beyond the Darkness (1979) and many others.

Since the early 1980s, Rusoff also did much work as an actor in film and television. He started out with supporting roles - often playing authority figures or religious characters such as priests, rabbis or monks. His earliest film roles were in Joe d'Amato's gory horror film Absurd (1981) and in Marco Ferreri's Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), based on the works of Charles Bukowski. He also acted together with his wife, Carolyn De Fonseca, in the Pia Zadora starring vehicle The Lonely Lady (1983), and he and Fonseca played the parents of Claretta Petacci in the tv mini series Mussolini and I (1985).

Throughout the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, Rusoff acted in some low-budget B-movies such as Catacombs (1988), where he plays a monk; Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989) with Lou Ferrigno, where he plays the keeper of the torture chamber; and the Jean-Claude Van Damme flick Double Team (1997), where he again plays a monk. However, he also had small roles in many acclaimed films such as Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), the tv movie Cellini: A Violent Life (1991), in which he played Pope Paul III, and Tinto Brass' The Voyeur (1994). Rusoff also played the chief elder in Mel Gibson's controversial epic The Passion of the Christ (2004) and played the character Strabo in two episodes of the first season of the popular tv series Rome (2005-2007).

Personal life and death
Rusoff was married to his long-time colleague, voice actress Carolyn De Fonseca, until her death in 2009. He died in Rome, Italy, on September 28, 2013, more than a month after being hit by car.