Rob Inglis

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Rob Inglis – portrait photograph.

Inglis was born in Australia but has lived and worked in England for many years. As of 2012, he lives in Somers Town, a district in central London.[2]

His plays include Voyage of the Endeavour (1965), based on the journal of Captain James Cook; Canterbury Tales (1968), dramatised readings from Chaucer; Erf (1971), a one-actor play about the twenty-first century; A Rum Do (1970), a musical based on the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie; and Men Who Shaped Australia, for Better or for Worse (1968), a one-actor play dealing with significant historical figures.[1] His more recent works include a play about Lisa Pontecorvo, the daughter of geneticist Guido Pontecorvo, it played in small theatres and community centres around England in 2010 and 2011.[3] In 2012, he was awarded a £16,000 Arts Council grant to write Regent's Canal, a Folk Opera, a musical that celebrates the 200th anniversary of the digging of the eight-mile Regent's Canal.[2]

He has adapted works to stage for one-man performances of A Christmas Carol (1983),[4] and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for which Inglis was called "one of the wonders of the Fringe."[5] He has also adapted Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tolkien and Orwell to one act performances.[6] Inglis has appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, playing characters such as the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet and Mr. Bumble in Oliver!.[6]

Inglis' TV appearances including as Ned Kelly in The Stringybark Massacre (short, 1968); as Chief sub in Play for Today (TV series, 1978/79); as Professor Doom in Wizbit (TV series, 1986); as Alan Clark in Casualty (TV series, 2002).

Inglis has narrated audiobooks by Tolkien (described below), and the first three books by Ursula K. Le Guin in the Earthsea Cycle.[7]

In the 1970s and 80s, Inglis wrote, produced and acted in one-man stage dramatisations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.[8] These performances have been described as "award winning".[9]

It was through his one-man stage adaptions that he was noticed by Recorded Books and asked to narrate an unabridged edition of Lord of the Rings (1990) and soon after The Hobbit (1991).[10][11] It was one of Recorded Books best-selling titles[12] however prior to 2012 it was only available on physical media (CD-ROM or tape) at which point it was released in digital format.[13] Laura Miller of Salon.com said

"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."[13]

Until Andy Serkis' 2020 recording,[14] Inglis' reading of The Hobbit was the only unabridged edition of the book ever made.[15] The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006) called it a "remarkable performance in which he provides distinctive voices for the various characters and sings the songs in the story".[15] The encyclopaedia says of The Lord of the Rings, "his voices for the characters are less dramatic and there are no sound effects".[15]

In a 2001 AudioFile interview, Inglis says they recorded Lord of the Rings in an "intense" six-week period in 1990 at the New York studio of Recorded Books.[16] They then recorded The Hobbit about a year later. Inglis prepared with guidance from acting colleges in dramatic societies to perfect the many character voices.[16] Inglis says, "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."[16] Inglis says he composed some of the music for the songs himself, some music was composed by Tolkien, and Claudia Howard of Recorded Books composed the rest.[16]