The profession of Leonid Veniaminovich Volodarsky does not imply fame. He is not a singer, not an actor, not a politician, not an athlete, but a translator. But many people know him well: if they don’t remember it in their faces, they will certainly determine it by their voice. It was this man who opened the world of foreign cinema to us. He is one of the first pirate translators in the Soviet Union to have voiced over five thousand films.
Biography
Leonid Volodarsky was born on 05/20/1950 in Moscow. His father, Veniamin Iosifovich, taught English at the M. Torez Institute of Foreign Languages, and his mother, Valentina Iosifovna, was a German teacher at school. The boy followed in the footsteps of his parents, already at the age of four he began to study English. After receiving secondary education, he entered the same university where his dad worked. In addition to Russian, she speaks four languages: English, Spanish, French and Italian.
In his youth, Leonid Volodarsky twice broke his nose, in an accident and in a fight, as a result of which his voice acquired characteristic features - became nasal. Subsequently, he was called a "translator with a clothespin on his nose." And there was also a legend that he distorted his voice on purpose to avoid KGB repression.
Movie translations
In 1968, Leonid Veniaminovich began to translate films and work at film festivals. When video cassettes came to the market in the late 1970s, video pirates began to resort to his services. Because of this, Volodarsky was often summoned to the KGB, the prosecutor's office and the police as a witness. He translated films the first time and simultaneously.
According to the synchronist himself, he does not like to watch a movie with his translation. Many directors and film reviewers also criticize Leonid’s voice and pitch. In their opinion, he lacked artistry, and the nasal intonations did not convey the emotions of the actors.
2000 years
Films with Leonid Volodarsky as a voice actor must have been watched by every adult and child in the early 2000s. In 2001, he translated Gladiatrix, a joint Russian-American project. In 2002, he voiced the picture “Enthusiast Highway” by N. Lacissa. In 2004, he read the voiceover in the series directed by S. Marev "Special Forces in Russian 2".
In 2005, on the initiative of the writer S. Lukyanenko, made a parody of the movie “Night Watch” by T. Bekmambetov. The work was called "Night Bazaar." Lukyanenko explained this by saying that he wanted to do a humorous voice acting before Goblin.
In 2006, Leonid Volodarsky read the voiceover in Stepanich’s Spanish Voyage, directed by M. Voronkov. In 2008, voiced the film T. Keosayan "Mirage". In 2010, he made the author’s special translation of S. Stalonne’s The Expendables tape for release on DVD and Blu-Ray. In the picture, the synchronizer imitated old translations of the VHS era.
In 2012, Leonid Veniaminovich voiced “Django Unchained”, and in 2015, he performed the dubbing of the half-hour film Kung Fury. In addition, he made a one-voice translation of The Suffering video game and the series Customer Is Always Dead.
