She was born and raised in Pasadena, Calif., but I’ve never met anyone from California who talks like her. To me it sounds like Jon Stewart’s impression of Queen Elizabeth (helllllooooo). So what is her accent? Have you ever met anyone who talked like her?
Pasadena was a very posh area when Julia Child was born, and she was born in a well-to-do family. I have the impression that at the time the wealthy and educated placed special emphasis on elocution. So I would call her accent ‘Upper-class American’, and that it was enhanced by her high voice.
Make that ‘Upper-class, Early-20th Century American’.
Seriously, for the longest time, I thought she was British! I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t.
I didn’t know she wasn’t until 10 seconds ago. She may just have had a made up aristocratic accent like the Kennedys.
Same here. I had no idea she was American until this thread. Go figure. :dubious:
The Kennedy’s had an aristocratic accent?
There used to be an east-coast upper-class accent that has almost completely vanished. William F. Buckley, Katherine Hepburn, FDR, and others are examples. It was influenced by english accents, but it was it’s own thing, and marked the person as born and bred to the elite. People without it might have money and power and connections, but they weren’t a member of the club.
That’s all gone now, and members of the elite tend to speak newscaster english. Compare Christopher Buckley’s “normal american” accent to his dad’s idiolect. Julia Child was one of the last people to grow up speaking that way, but her idiolect went off in a whole different direction.
For examples on film … well, old film, of course … you could try Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie. I don’t think she sounds like Julia Child but to our ears, it sounds refined and sort of foreign.
Jon Stewart’s Queen Elizabeth voice sounds like one of the voices Robin Williams tries while playing in drag in Mrs. Doubtfire.
The first time we saw Dame Edna Everage on TV, Mama Zappa said “Oh my God! Julia Child is a man!!” 
I knew one woman whose accent was a very mild version of Julia Child’s, but I don’t know where that woman grew up.
I think you can add George Plimpton to that list, too.
I guess Barbara Walters would be another person whose accent sounds quasi-British, even though she’s American.
She speaks that way to overcome a speech impediment, though, so it’s not really the same. I don’t know much about her background.
It depends on your definition of ‘made up’. As I said, and as others have cited, there was a particular accent prevalent among the elite.
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The Kennedy accent is Boston; but possibly an upper-class variation thereof.
I thought of Pheobe Dinsmore, the Diction and Elocution coach in Singin’ In the Rain. My grandmother and her sisters, whose family wasn’t even close to being as affluent as Child’s all had such lessons, along with instrumental and vocal music lessons, and dancing lessons.
We used to have play tea parties and we (my grandmother, great-aunt, sister, and I) all had “great lady” alter egos and we spoke in a similar way. She often shared tips from those lessons, or a recital piece memorized 45 years earlier.
One set of my grandparents grew up with 2 different regional accents. They were very conscious of not wanting to sound like “rubes” or “hicks”. They carefully eliminated the accents. They didn’t go as far as adopting the Katherine Hepburn speech pattern, but definitely equated their original accents with sounding less refined.
I don’t think they arrived at that conclusion without some help from the surrounding culture.
Too true!
About 15 years ago, I was watching TV with my mother-in-law. The show featured Dame Edna.
And I shouted “That’s it!!! Julia Child is a MAN!!!”.
Having posted this, I see that my spouse just posted the identical anecdote 
Mid-Atlantic is the usual term for the accent being discussed here. Perhaps Kelsey Grammer is one of the few prominent contemporary examples.
Why it's died down is an interesting question. I would imagine it was primarily nurtured in elite private schools which are still around. Probably the growing influence of mass media over the course of the 20th century as well as a steady increase in social mobility played a big role in its decline.
I always heard it as aristocratic Bostonian - not Irish Bostonian like the Kennedys. You know, the Cabots speak only to the Lodges, and the Lodges speak only to God. That might have come from the fact her show came from WGBH, but I lived in Boston for four years and didn’t change my mind.