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David Case (Audiobook narrator)

David Case (born April 25, 1932, London, UK, died Oct 1, 2005, El Sobrante, CA., USA), also known as Frederick Davidson, was an English-born actor who became a prolific and award-winning narrator of audiobooks.

Life and Career

Born in London, Case attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and while in England performed regional theater, as well as radio and television acting. He eventually emigrated to the United States, settling in the San Francisco Bay area, where he helped run an antiques business and also directed community theater. Through his theater contacts, he was recruited to perform audiobooks for the company Books on Tape. He remained free-lance, working for several audiobook companies under different names, perhaps most prominently for Blackstone Audio under the Frederick Davidson moniker. Other names he used professionally included Edward Raleigh, James Nelson, and Ian McKay.

Case recorded over 700 audiobooks during his career and was one of the first inductees into Audiofile magazine's "Golden Voices" hall-of-fame. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he developed throat cancer and was forced to give up his narration career around 2000. He died from the disease in 2005.

Recorded Output

Case's specialty was British literature and British-themed works. He was admired for his ability to reproduce an impressive variety of accents and mannerisms of speech from throughout the British Isles and the Commonwealth, giving a strong sense of place and social status to each of the thousands of characters he interpreted. He recorded most of the works of Anthony Trollope, whom he considered his favorite writer, partially because of the wide variety of characters and the possibilities for dramatic interpretation. He similarly recorded works by such giants of British literature as Charles Dickens,William Makepeace Thackeray, John Galsworthy, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, and W. Somerset Maugham.

He also performed contemporary British fiction, such as Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. He recorded episodes in a number of popular book series, such as the Jeeves series by P.G. Wodehouse, the Rumpole of the Bailey series by Edward Mortimer, the Inspector Morse series by Colin Dexter, and the Richard Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell.

His non-fiction recordings included William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill The Last Lion, and Simon Schama's history of the French Revolution Citizens.

In addition to British-themed works, Case also was active in recording world classics, including works by Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. His recordings of European literature included Cervantes' Don Quixote, Hugo's Les Miserables, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. One area Case mostly avoided was American literature and American-themed works - he never felt fully comfortable with American accents, despite living much of his life in the U.S.