Alex Jennings is an English actor of stage and screen, made a CBE, whose career is rooted in the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Screen audiences know him as Prince Charles in Stephen Frears's film The Queen (2006) and as the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, in the Netflix series The Crown.
On WebToTell he appears as a reader, not a writer. The words of Crime and Punishment are Dostoevsky's. Jennings supplies the voice in the abridged Penguin Audio recording, which runs a little over five hours. His other audio work is wide. It includes Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, a Naxos recording of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the Edge Chronicles, the fantasy series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell.
The stage is where his honours come from. He has won three Olivier Awards, for Too Clever by Half (1988), Peer Gynt (1996) and My Fair Lady (2003). That makes him the only performer to win in the drama, musical and comedy categories. In 2014 he played Willy Wonka in the London stage musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
If you came here from Crime and Punishment, start with that recording. It is a compact way to follow Raskolnikov through the St Petersburg slums and into his duel with the investigator. Because it is abridged, listeners who want every chapter should look for a full-length edition. Fans of the voice could try Nicholas Nickleby next, for a much larger cast of characters.
