Jim Dale is Mum on Harry Potter Ending

Posted on July 17, 2007

Jim Dale has a familiar voice to audiobook listeners: he has narrated every one of the Harry Potter audiobooks that are sold in the U.S. (Stephen Fry does the U.K. versions for Bloomsbury). Dale has already read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but he's not talking about the ending.

A little less than two months ago, Mr. Dale, the veteran Broadway actor turned voice of Harry Potter, finished recording the audio version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the colossally successful series by J. K. Rowling. So that means that he knows how it ends.

His grandchildren, who visited from England after he completed the recording, literally twisted his arms trying to get him to divulge a clue. His wife is still in the dark. Everywhere he goes, people want to know What He Knows. "It's a surprise ending," he said on Friday, during an interview in his Park Avenue co-op. "Let's say that." Gee, thanks. It is not quite four days until Harry Potter's legions of fans can procure a copy of Deathly Hallows - in hardcover, CD or cassette - and find out for themselves exactly who does what to whom. Mr. Dale signed a confidentiality agreement so that he will not breathe a word of the plot. But after spending eight years creating more than 200 voices for all the characters in the Harry Potter books, Mr. Dale really believes that readers - and listeners - should discover the end for themselves.

"For those people who say, 'C'mon, Jim, how does it end?,' it's like parents who say: 'There's a surprise gift for you in the next room. It's a bicycle,'" said Mr. Dale, whose apartment could easily make a Hogwarts professor feel at home with its eclectic collections of Victorian cake decorations, pewter plates and Persian swords. "Let the child find out for himself by opening this gift."

Not everyone shares Jim Dale's ethics. The entire Harry Potter manuscript has reportedly been posted online. We're not linking to it. If you feel you must ruin the surprise, just Google it yourself. Because we're not looking at anything spoilerish until after we've read the book this weekend.

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