About Helene Hanff
Helene Hanff (1915–1997) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the 1940s and ’50s she wrote plays and television scripts in New York City, but found little success until her best-known book, 84, Charing Cross Road, was published in 1970. The book was a smash hit and has been adapted for the radio, stage, film, and television. Hanff also wrote a number of books for young readers, including The Movers and Shakes and Terrible Thomas.
About the Narrators
Barbara Caruso, winner of numerous Earphones Awards for narration, is an accomplished actress. A graduate of London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she was a featured player in the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has played starring roles on Broadway and in theaters across the country. She won the Alexander Scourby Reader of the Year Award for her performances of young adult fiction and has more than one hundred audiobook narrations to her credit.
Barbara Rosenblat, one of the most awarded narrators in the business, was selected by AudioFile magazine as one of the Golden Voices of the Twentieth Century. She has received the prestigious Audie Award multiple times and has earned more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards. She has also appeared in film, television, and theater, both in London’s West End and on Broadway.
Christina Moore is an actress and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator. As an actress, she is best known for her roles in the television series That ’70s Show, Hawthorne, and 90210. She is a founding member of Bitches Funny, an all-female sketch group that has performed in New York City and Los Angeles.
Davina Porter has been enthralling listeners for over twenty-five years with her ability to mine the psychological depths of the characters she reads and bring them convincingly to life. In 2006, she won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Female Narration and in 2004 for Best Inspirational Literature Narration. She has been honored as an AudioFile Golden Voice and has won nineteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. As an actress, she has appeared on stage at the Vineyard Playhouse and the Square One Theater, among others.
Jill Tanner was
a principal actress with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival for eight years and
has appeared in many classical and new American plays. She has been in
productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in most major theaters in the United
States.
John Franklyn-Robbins (1924–2009) was an English character actor of stage and screen. A prolific Shakespearean actor, he trained at RADA and proceeded to work at the Manchester Library Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic early in his career. He played a diverse number of roles ranging from Ariel in The Tempest to Macduff in Macbeth. His prestigious stage career included stints in both the West End and Broadway. He also worked for both the BBC and ITV in their early formative years and went on to appear in such classic television series as The Avengers, The Baron, Z-Cars, Callan, I, Claudius, Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Simon Prebble, a British-born performer, is a stage and television actor and veteran narrator of some three hundred audiobooks. As one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices, he has received thirty-seven Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie in 2010. He lives in New York.
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.