You must have missed his, “And put the Jews on the bar-b!”
Anthony LaPaglia is Australian, but I’ve read interviews with him in which he claims that he’s worked over here in the US for so long, using an American accent, that he no longer can speak with an Australian accent in real life.
I’d like to ask any Northern Irish dopers about Ciarán Hinds’ accent.** I can hear in his pronunciation a few vowel and consonant sounds that I can identify Northern Irish, but his accent seems a lot mellower (for lack of a better word…I guess I mean more like RP English) than most of the Northern Irish people I’ve heard, and I wonder if all of his work using various English accents has infiltrated his natural speaking accent at this point. To me (non-linguist), the one vowel sound that instantly tells me the speaker is from Northern Ireland is the “ow” sound – they swallow their "ow"s so that “how” sounds something like “high”. In this interview at around 1:10, he says the word “around” without that typical NI “ow” sound. That makes me think something has happened to his accent to make it less regional.
I don’t know. Am I wrong?
**Edit: Oh hey, one of the comments to this video says, “Shame though his Belfast accent is now just about obliterated,” so am I correct?
Is RP actually anybody’s natural accent? I figure it was something they pick up in public school. Her accent sounds like lower middle class English to me.
In the United States, most younger middle class people sound pretty similar. A strong regional accent usually indicates an older person or an lower class background.
Slight nitpicking of the nitpick:
The Ukrainian language doesn’t have any definite articles, so I’m guessing the people who live there don’t really care one way or the other. Besides, the people in the Netherlands and the Philippines — both sovereign countries — don’t seem to have a problem with the.
ETA: Or the United States of America, for that matter.
Patrick Stewart was a working class Yorkshire lad who had his Northern accent beaten out of him in acting school. He claims he can’t do his original accent anymore except as an affected accent like any other.
Hugh Laurie may not talk like House in real life but his real accent has become quite Americanized over the years.
I saw an interview with her in which she said she lost her natural accent years ago.
If you want to hear her speak Australian, get ahold of Sirens. It was made in Australia before she moved here (i.e., the U.S.).
Huh, I had no idea. Ray Stevenson is another one, Belfast-area to Newcastle-area at 8, not sure what his real voice is, although he’s not listed as NI/English by Wikipedia like Branagh is.
And I always thought Christian Bale was fully Welsh. To be fair, I don’t watch any talk shows or interviews, so it can take awhile to pick up on these things. There have been quite a few actors who I had no idea were not American, English, etc.
It’s a somewhat different issue with Ukraine. The name basically means the borderlands and implies the Ukraine is just the outer part of Russia - a view Ukrainians find derogatory.
The modern spin is that the name means “my country”. (While you can translate the name that way, all the evidence is this is not the traditional meaning.)
Her accent, when she’s not acting in those two roles, is modern RP, which is the same as the middle class English spoken in the home counties. Millions of people in the South-East grow up speaking that way.
Mel Gibson doesn’t even have that much Aussie blood. His paternal grandmother was Australian. Even his father, Hutton, was born in the U.S. and raised in Chicago. His mother was from Ireland, so he actually has dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Ireland.
Does John Barrowman really sound that American？ He sounds noticably different from most Americans. I think the term for it is “mid-atlantic”
Yes, RP is my native accent, I grew up in Oxford.
Jonathan Harris–“Dr. Smith” from Lost in Space–affected a British accent most of his life, but was born in the Bronx. No real explanation for it; he apparently got stuck in that gear and stayed in it.
I read an article about Mahoney a few months back and he says he can only do his original UK accent if he’s speaking to one of his relatives. Then it floods back. Otherwise, all US, all the time.
A recent thread in GQ has me wondering if Arnold Schwarzenegger, when speaking German, sounds Americanized to German audiences.
FWIW this video of Arnold as a young man being interviewed in German, he basically sounds to my ears like he does now but just speaking a different language.
Yes. (the blonde one, obviously)
I’ve only ever seen him play Captain Jack, but I noticed that his American accent was so good, I was sure he had to be American. And I’m American, too.
I guess it was “too good.”
OK, but I don’t see how deleting “the” makes “borderlands” less derogatory. Especially when the country’s native language doesn’t include “the.”
I have heard Catherine Zeta Jones’s Welsh accent after she returns from visiting home, and the same with Pierce Brosnan’s Irish accent, but generally they use an English accent in day to day life, I think.
Doug Bradley, best known as Pinhead of *Hellraiser *fame, is from Liverpool but in his movies and interviews has not a trace of a Scouse accent. I can only assume it was beaten out of him in acting school.