Funny that you should mention THAT example. Because Lecter sounds somewhat Mid-Atlantic to me. Of course, this is coming from someone who can basically -and roughly- distinguish five or six American accents. And I’ll probably lump a lot of them together when I have to make an educated guess. So I don’t know, maybe there IS an American accent somewhere that’s just like Lecters.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned George Plimpton in regards to the Frasier accent. He even gives Buckley a run for his money.
And, Coldfire, I’d haveta say The Rolling Stones, and plenty other Brit bands of the Sixties, were totally copping not only Black American vocal styles, but the music as well.
Going waaaayyy back to the post by Fear Itself:
The actor who played Thurston Howell III (who’s name escapes me) said in an interview that he was basically doing his FDR imitation – which there was little other demand for by the mid-'60s.
– Beruang
Bob Hope was English by birth, but he must have arrived while very young, since he does not have a “Mid-Atlantic accent”.
And is Barbara Walter’s accent phony Brit?
If also seen British programs with horrible attempts at stereotypical American accents? I suppose its revenge for all the horrible “'ullo guv’nah” accents we have been using for decades in our (Hollywood) movies.
But couldn’t we work out an exchange program of unemployed actors to remedy this?
Tonight I got to see a video of a Rolling Stones concert from 1968. It was so interesting to see what they were like then. They were slightly disturbing and not laddish or blokish the way a lot of English bands are today. They were more dark and decadent. Anyway, they were very much about sex. As I was watching Mick Jagger sing Sympathy for the Devil I thought of this thread because he was singing with such an outrageous American accent. I thought of the other times I’d seen remarks here about how English people rip off American music styles. But the thing is: people only copy things because they find them advantageous in some way. Therefore the American accent must be about sex. I remember having a conversation with someone once in which I pointed out how a lot of men in the music world didn’t project masculine images while a lot of women projected androgynous muscular images. I mean women like Susie Quattro, Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde as opposed to Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, Don McLean etc. He said simply: They (the men) want women to like them. They trill like nightingales because women like that and that’s the only reason. And that’s really how everything works - just like that. Begrudingly, I’ll say that the American accent is an attractive accent. It probably got that way because Americans discovered it attracted members of the opposite sex.
In True Romance, Gary Oldman played the character of a white guy who imagined himself black. His confused, muddled accent was just right for the part.
I didn’t say it wasn’t “right for the part”, Jomo. I just said it was obviously not a genuine American.