“I adapted to the differences between the two characters”

Little is known, but it was Pierre Arditi, then thirty years old, who was the French voice of Chistopher Reeve. He evokes the memories of this experience for “Télérama”, while TCM Cinéma devotes a retrospective to the American actor.

ABe careful, one “hero” can hide another. The actor Pierre Arditi was also, for a time, the official voice actor for Chistopher Reeve, notably for the first three Supermanbetween 1978 and 1983. On the occasion of a TCM Cinéma retrospective devoted to the American actor for the twenty years of his death, and in particular the broadcast of a documentary, Christopher Reeve: The Eternal Superman(October 25 at 8:50 p.m.), of which Pierre Arditi is the narrator, the latter was kind enough to share with us his memories of the experience.

How did you come to become the French voice of Christopher Reeve?
At the time, I often did dubbing. It was pretty well paid for the young actor that I was, and it allowed me to continue playing in the theater, where I earned a ton of money! Then, the discipline of dubbing intrigued and pleased me, I loved observing and deciphering the acting of the actors on screen. I noticed that Christopher Reeve didn’t play Clark Kent as his alter ego Superman at all. There was a lot of awkwardness in the body, a way of hunching the shoulders, of embodying a more shy type. I had fun adapting to these differences, in the range of my voice: clear, straight and sharp when he is in the skin of the iconic hero, and more hesitant, more adolescent, when he is Clark Kent.

Have you had the opportunity to meet Superman in person?
No, unfortunately. But, Christopher Reeve is part of my family, because I “went with him” for years. His work, his way of playing have become very familiar to me. It was like finding a friend from one dub to another: all three Superman, of course, but also for a very nice film by Jeannot Szwarc, Somewhere in time, and finally for Death trap, de Sidney Lumet.

What do you remember from this “distance relationship”?
I really liked him: he had this open-mindedness which allowed him to navigate all areas of cinema with the same appetite. He never despised Superman, nor the enormous notoriety that the character brought him, but he also sought very different roles, for example in The Vestiges of the day, by James Ivory. He was a remarkable man, as can be seen in this documentary. When I was asked to be the narrator, I warned that I didn’t have the same voice as before. It was much taller back then!

q Superman IIIby Richard Lester. Friday October 11 at 8:50 p.m. on TCM Cinéma.