There are a lot of American shows where a main character is played by an Brittish or Austrailian actor who speaks with an American accent. Often they do this so well that most of the audience doesn’t realize they are not, in fact, American.
Some examples:
Hugh Laurie - House
Jamie Bamber - Battlestar Galactica
Stephen Moyer - True Blood
Damian Lewis - Band of Brothers, Homeland (and actually, I actually thought his Brittish accent, which I assume was his actual speaking voice, sounded really fake in the film Your Highness)
Are there any examples of American actors speaking with flawless local accents on Brittish or Austrailian TV shows? Madonna doesn’t count.
This will very quickly turn into people saying how awful Laurie and Bambers’ accents are!
I can think of some pretty good movie roles where Americans have put on good British accents (Bridget Jones, Iron Lady immediately springing to mind, but there are many more).
Connie Booth wasn’t bad. She sounded like a Brit who’d lived in the states for a while.
Renee Zelwegger was very good too. She got the intonation brilliantly, as well as getting the accent about 98% there, but there was one vowel that was consistently wrong. IIRC it was the ‘aw’ sound that you hear in ‘water’ in English accents, which is something that my American ex-gf had problems with too.
I haven’t seen The Iron Lady yet so I’ll reserve judgement on Meryl Streep these days - though her rendition in the trailer sounds pretty amazing - but the stuff I’ve heard of hers in the past has been damn good.
The winner is Gwyneth Paltrow. Her English accents are stunningly good. I say that in the plural because she has done more than one - in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love. In the latter I heard one solitary vowel slip and no more. Utterly convincing.
Why no men, I wonder? Is it because we English are seen as effete?
I took the OP to be asking about Americans in UK TV/films, not Americans playing Brits in American TV/films, but in US TV I am led to believe Alexis Denisof’s was pretty good in Buffy/Angel.
Gilliam Anderson is flawless in her British TV roles, although she did grow up in London which is clearly cheating. I agree that Gwyneth Paltrow is excellent. Rene Zellweger had a pretty could stab at it, although if you study her accent too closely it does sound a little laboured.
I thought Paltrow was brilliant but something about Zellweger seemed off to me, a little bit over the top. Perhaps I haven’t been around enough Sloane types.
David Anders in Hero’s was very good as was Philip Winchester in Strike back. Both so good that I was really surprised to find out they were not English. You often hear Americans in US programs doing English accents and even when they are pretty good there is normally something a little off but with these two I was genuinely surprised when I found out they were American.
Strike back is actually really mixed up as a program when it comes to nationalities as the main English guy is played by an American and the main American guy is played by Australian.
I was never surprised to find out Jonathan Hillerman was American. There is something not quite right about his accent. It’s almost a caricature of a particular type of English accent.
I think he gets points for consistency though as whatever accent it was he could do it well. I think of Spike in Buffy as similar. It’s not really an accent from any real place but the delivery is consistent even if it was not accurate to any particular real world accent.
I won’t say that Hugh Laurie’s, Jamie Bamber’s, or Andrew Lincoln’s American accents are bad. They just sometimes sound labored. Although, when he sings New Orleans-style blues, Laurie sounds completely natural.
I am curious how many of these fit the OP. I know Buffy, Magnum PI, and Sherlock Holmes were American. What about Shakespeare In Love, The Iron Lady, and the others?
I’ve mentioned this before, but speaking as an Australian, I don’t have nearly enough eyes to roll to express how eye-rollingly terrible Streep’s attempt at an Australian accent was.
