Interview with Jim re Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

NEW YORK -- Step in, please, and don't forget to pick your jaw up off the floor.

See the papier-mâché elephant balancing on a tightrope. The Victorian hatpin, the turquoise sheen of its 21 hummingbird heads catching the light. Ceiling-to-floor pre-Raphaelite tapestries. Miniature wooden clowns. Tiffany chandeliers casting a warm glow in the museum-toy shop that is Jim Dale's Manhattan apartment.

And then stand back as Dale, the rubbery English actor, capers around, performing impromptu sketches about his wondrous and whimsical objects.

"Ah," he says at last, settling into a 19th-century Hall-porters chair. When he and his wife, Julie, come up in the elevator, he says, "We pull up the drawbridge, and this is our castle in the clouds."

If it is not quite Harry Potter's magical domain, then it is Hogwarts-by-the-Hudson. This castle is presided over by a man who is part blithe spirit and who, it now becomes clear, was perfectly cast to narrate the series' audiobooks, including the latest, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for which Dale created 127 speaking voices.

"When they sent me the first book, I thought, `I wish it had been around when I was a kid,' " says Dale, who has acted on stage and films, been a disc jockey, a pop music and television star in Britain, and the lyricist for Georgy Girl.

He has done all kinds of entertaining, except narration.

He remembers thinking, "Oh, well, I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it, so why not?"

So precisely imagined is Dale's reading of the Potter tales' best-selling compact discs and cassettes that the rare quibbler did so on Dale's fabulist terms:

"One critic said, `Why in God's name did Dale think the centaurs come from Wales, he gave them all Welsh accents!" "Clearly," says Dale, his face alight with merriment, "he didn't know the Welsh are famous for their centaurs! In every football team they have a 'centaur forward' and in every city there is a 'Centaur For Performing Arts' and a 'Town Centaur' Wales is full of them!"

Hard to imagine Dale, a die-hard audience man, alone in a recording booth.

"I visualized the reactions of children listening," says Dale, who has five grandchildren. "Stunned silence here! So hold the pause for two, three, four. ... This line is a laugh, more than a giggle, so pause, two, three or their chuckles will drown the next line. I'm lucky to have forty years experience of stage comedy to back me up."

But with the exception of a celebrated "Travels With My Aunt" off-Broadway, and "Candide" on, Dale hasn't been on the American stage very much since Candide in 1997.  His one huge success recently was back in his home country England. He played Fagin in "Oliver!" for over a year and a half at the London Palladium to rave reviews. 

Now he makes his own rules. "I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I won't work in another country for a year any longer." he says, "because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can't bear to be away from her." So Dale brings Hogwarts to life, tramps around a lovely country home, and works on his next big Broadway musical destined for Spring 2006.

Jim's Biography