I’ve only heard one actor in a movie set in Pittsburgh sound like he was from there - Michael Keaton in Gung Ho. Probably because Keaton is actually from the Pittsburgh area.
Kurt Russell nailed Herb Brooks’ Minnesota accent in Miracle.
Uma Thurman’s Japanese in Kill Bill Vol. 1 sounded very much like she tried to learn the lines phonetically.
Tried.
Badly.
Bruce Willis’ pseudo-Canadian accent in The Jackal was wincingly, painfully bad.
I’m curious what posters from the UK think about the British accent used by James Marsters from Buffy. I only recently found out he was American - I was completely fooled.
Well they usually lambast his usual one… but considering Spike the character is FAKING that accent it’s okay. The lower class brit accent he uses is a put on, to disassociate himself from William the Bloody.
Are there any posters here from Manchester who can tell us if Jane Leeves’s accent as Daphne in Frasier sounds authentic? I wouldn’t know, but I’d like to find out.
I think Bob Hoskins’s American accent in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is darned good. However, the attempts at an American accent by all the Monty Python actors really bite.
Yeah, I’m from SW Missouri, close to Oklahoma & Kansas, & my grandma’s from SW Ohio–so my accent changes based on my mood. Or less. This occasionally surprises people.
Here in town, some people sound like they’re from Northern Texas, some have generic plains accents, some have a hick accent…and head 50 miles up into the hills, & there are all these twangy hill people who wonder what part of the country I come from.
Whatever.
Well,
A) Northern Arkansas is hill-country while southern Arkansas is more like the Deep South.
B) It’s all more “Southern” than my own Missourian twang, (which is more Southern than a standard Midwestern accent), but it’s not all alike.
Steenburgen is a bit closer to Hick than to Tidewater or Deep South, to put it real broadly. Not that you know the difference.
Regarding Fargo…
That movie came out after I had lived away from here for a few years and when I saw it in the theaters I thought the accent was dead on. A few years after I had returned to Minnesota I saw it again and the accents were off just far enough to grate on my last nerve.
Jean Lundegaard is actually from Fargo, and the other three are from Minnesota. I’d hope they’re accents would be spot on. 
In the movie “Taking Lives”, set in Montreal (which we can tell by the beautiful establishing shots of the Château Frontenac :rolleyes: ), all of the supposedly Québécois characters are speaking European French.
Plus there’s a scene where the SQ lands a helicopter in Moncton, New Brunswick. With 20 minutes’ notice.
Which one? I grew up in various parts of Arkansas, and there was a time when I could tell you what county someone was from, with a high degree of accuracy, just from listening to them talk. There’s the Mississippi Delta accent you hear along the river from Helena south, a different one you hear in the Crowley’s Ridge region, yet another as you get into the eastern foothills of the Ozarks (Woodruff, Jackson, White, and Independence Counties) – often referred to as a “suggins” accent, with its own vocabulary and idioms, an Appalachian-type accent in the remoter areas of the Ozarks, and at least four or five others.
Mary Steenburgen, in fact, was born in the same town I was: Newport, Arkansas, in the heart of suggins country, though she mostly grew up in Little Rock. She attended my alma mater, Hendrix College, for one term before concluding, with the agreement of the faculty, that she could learn a lot more about acting in New York than at Hendrix – the college conferred an honorary doctorate on her a few years ago. But, just because she’s from Arkansas doesn’t mean she nails Southern accents from other areas. A whole lot of us consciously decide to lose the accent, and it can be tough to get it back authentically.
Callie Thorne’s Detective Ballard on Homicide, despite being named after a Seattle neighborhood, is definitely not from Seattle.