George Guidall

George Guidall is an American actor and audiobook narrator born on June 7, 1938, in New Jersey. His family surname is Shapiro; the name Guidall is a stage name derived from a permutation of his Hebrew name, Gedalyah. His father worked as a pharmacist, and his four brothers pursued careers in medicine, while Guidall chose to enter the theatre. He later earned a master's degree in social work in his fifties, balancing daytime counseling work with evening acting engagements. He learned of audiobook narration through a fellow actor and went on to build a prolific career in the field.

Guidall's Broadway career spanned from 1969 to 1999 and included appearances in The Price, Cafe Crown, The President's Daughter, The Wrong Way Light Bulb, and Cold Storage. Beyond Broadway, he received an Obie Award for his performance in the Off-Broadway production Cinders.

As an audiobook narrator, Guidall had recorded more than 1,270 audiobooks as of November 2014, a total believed to represent a record at that time. His narrations include two recordings of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the first completed in 1986 and a second recorded in 2014. He has described the Pynchon novel as among his most demanding projects, requiring approximately one month of full-time daily work. Guidall typically completes a standard audiobook in three to four days, working from a small basement studio in Irvington, New York. He lives in White Plains, New York.

His approach to narration involves reading each book in full before recording and focusing on conveying both information and emotional content through his performance. He has received two Audie Awards, one for John Irving's A Widow for One Year and another for Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, as well as a Special Achievement Award from the Audio Publishers Association recognizing lifetime achievement. He has also presented talks at libraries under the title "The Art and Artifice of Audiobook Narration."