Rob Inglis

• 1. Introduction

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  Rob Inglis spent six intense weeks in a New York recording studio in 1990, giving voice to hundreds of characters across one of the longest novels ever written. The result was the first unabridged audiobook of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. One reviewer later described listening to his narration as exactly like hearing a beloved relative read aloud a book they had already read to you as a child. But the Tolkien recordings were only one chapter in a life that moved across continents and across nearly every form of performance. How did an Australian actor born in 1933 come to be the definitive voice of Middle-earth? And what else did he make in the decades before and after those six weeks in New York?

• 2. From Australia to England

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  Robert Keith Inglis was born on the 9th of March 1933 in Australia, and moved to England in 1955. That transatlantic shift placed him at the centre of British theatrical life, and he went on to appear with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre. His roles ranged wide: the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet, and Mr. Bumble in Oliver!.

  His television work ran across several decades. He played Ned Kelly in a short film, The Stringybark Massacre, in 1968. He appeared as Chief Sub in the long-running series Play for Today in the late 1970s, as Professor Doom in Wizbit in 1986, and as Alan Clark in Casualty in 2002. Each role landed him in a different genre, a pattern that reflected his restless range.

• 3. A Playwright's Range

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  Inglis did not only perform other people's words. He wrote his own. His play Voyage of the Endeavour, staged in 1965, drew on the journal of Captain James Cook. Canterbury Tales, from 1968, brought Chaucer to the stage through dramatised readings. That same year he wrote Men Who Shaped Australia, for Better or for Worse, a one-actor work examining significant historical figures.

  A Rum Do, from 1970, was a musical built around the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. Erf, from 1971, was a one-actor play set in the twenty-first century. His subjects moved between continents and centuries, from colonial Australia to an imagined future, and his willingness to write for a single performer on stage would prove a skill he returned to repeatedly.

• 4. One-Man Stages

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  The one-man format became a signature. In 1983 Inglis adapted A Christmas Carol for a solo performance. His version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde earned him a striking notice: critics called him "one of the wonders of the Fringe." He adapted works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Orwell for single-act performances.

  At the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1979, Inglis worked as a theatrical producer with secondary school students on an ecological drama titled "What are you doing, strange creature?" Around sixty young participants, known as "Discoverers," spent months developing the script, songs, staging, and programmes together. The project translated ideas on conservation of the environment into visual forms, from first idea through to final performance.

  His later theatrical work included a play about Lisa Pontecorvo, the daughter of geneticist Guido Pontecorvo. It toured small theatres and community centres across England in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, the Arts Council awarded him a grant of 16,000 pounds to write Regent's Canal, a Folk Opera, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the digging of the eight-mile canal.

• 5. The Tolkien Recordings

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  Before anyone asked him to stand in front of a microphone, Inglis had spent years standing alone on stages performing Tolkien. His one-man stage dramatisation of The Hobbit won the Festival Times Best Solo award in 1981. It was through those performances that Recorded Books noticed him and asked him to narrate an unabridged edition of The Lord of the Rings.

  The recording happened in an "intense" six-week period in 1990 at Recorded Books' New York studio. The Hobbit followed about a year later, in 1991. Inglis described his preparation as involving guidance from acting colleges and dramatic societies to perfect the many character voices. Of the experience itself he said: "There is much in the original writing that suggests how a character should be brought to life. It's quite strange. At times it felt like Tolkien himself was talking to me through his prose, telling me how things should be."

  The music for the songs came from three sources. Inglis composed some himself. Some had been composed by Tolkien. Claudia Howard of Recorded Books composed the rest.

  The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, published in 2006, described the Hobbit recording as "a remarkable performance in which he provides distinctive voices for the various characters and sings the songs in the story." It noted that in The Lord of the Rings, "his voices for the characters are less dramatic and there are no sound effects."

  Laura Miller, writing for Salon.com, put it this way: Inglis "strikes precisely the right note in his narration. It is an old-fashioned audiobook narration, one that feels more read than performed, although the voices of the many characters are all well-developed. It's ever so slightly prosy, and the sensation conveyed is exactly like listening to a favourite relative read to a beloved child the same book he (beautifully) read to you when you were a child."

  The Lord of the Rings recording became one of Recorded Books' best-selling titles. Both recordings remained available only on physical media, either CD-ROM or tape, until 2012, when they were released in digital format. Inglis also narrated the first three books of the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  His reading of The Hobbit held a particular distinction: until Andy Serkis released a new recording in 2020, Inglis' version was the only commercially available unabridged edition of the book.

• 6. Later Years

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  As of 2012, Inglis was living in Somers Town, a district in central London. He died on the 23rd of May 2021. He was 88 years old. The cause of death was not disclosed publicly, and reports suggested he may have died in Australia.

  He had spent nearly seven decades writing, directing, acting, and narrating across two countries and dozens of forms. The Regent's Canal Folk Opera commission he received in 2012, with its celebration of a 200-year-old waterway, suggested that even late in life he was still finding new subjects worth putting into song.