I thought the main character for House MD is an American.
It was some good length of time after I saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit that I realized that Bob Hoskins isn’t American.
Same for Paul Blackthorne in The Dresden Files. Whether or not his Chicago accent is any good is up for debate, but at worst he sounds like an American trying to sound Chicagoan.
I know people think Bronson Pinchot sucks. I personally love the man and think he does accents *very *well.
Christian Bale has an amazing American accent. And the fact that he chooses to maintain his accent when interviewing and doing publicity circuits in America make it even crazier. He’s just amazing overall, anyway.
Sigh.
Robert Duvall does a great good ol’boy accent (The Apostle, Family Thing), western (Lonesome Dove) and German The Men Who Captured Eichmann, and while I’ve no idea how “accurate” his was his “mick Kraut” guy raised in a Sicilian household in Brooklyn was convincing to me in The Godfather.
Patrick Stewart does great accents. I’ve seen him play American, a variety of English social classes, French, German, and most hysterically the outrageously gay British director in Jeffrey (“ooooh… get her!”).
I was surprised to see Daniel Davis as the English judge in The Prestige even though I loved his English accent as the butler on The Nanny. In real life he’s from Arkansas. When the show was on he used to get fan mail asking him to help co-star Charles Shaughnessy sound convincingly English (Shaughnessy’s English).
Marion Ross of Happy Days fame is great: she does a convincing Texan, Bronx, Jewish immigrant grandmother, and Southerner in addition to Mrs. C’s non-accent.
The least impressive accents to me come from dialect coaches like Robert Easton and Howard “Major Hochstadter” Caine from Hogan’s Heroes (he was a dialect coach in addition to being an actor). They sound like cartoons. Johnny Depp fired a dialect coach who was training him to sound Irish on a movie that was ultimately dumped because he said none of the people in the place where they were shooting (which was where the movie took place) sounded a thing like the guy.
Oh, and another least impressive to me: Meryl Streep. She has two stock accents: “not-from-here” and “Jewish-not-from-here”.
Wait, Christian Bale’s not American? The guy from Batman Returns?
And from wikipedia, he was also the kid from Empire of the Sun! Who knew? I never would have pegged him as non-American. Wow.
Two great accents on The Wire.
Dominic West is from the UK, and Councilman Tommy Carcetti played by Aidan Gillen is from Ireland. Great Baltimore accents.
Forgot to mention “Stringer Bell” is also from the UK.
I had no idea that Christian Bale was British (Welsh?) either.
Thinking that he was American, I thought he -like many Yank actors-did a lousy job with his Englishy accent in The Prestige.
Go figure.
Well, the particular English accent he was attempting in The Prestige may have been far from his own natural one, and thus he might well have ended up producing something lousy. So perhaps your criticism was still accurate.
Whoa. That’s amazing - I’m going to have listen closer to them next time.
And that’s Mayor Carcetti to you :D.
- Tamerlane
…I’m going to walk around in a daze for the rest of the day, muttering “Holy shit” softly to myself every now and then.
(Stringer Bell, maybe, I could understand. But McNulty? Holy shit… Holy shit… I cannot believe it. Holy shit…)
Most Australian actors seem to be good at accents. Nicole Kidman, Anthony Lapagia, Russel Crowe, Heath Ledger. Why is that?
James Marsters as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an actor I was surprised to learn was American. He said he based Spike’s accent on Anthony S. Head’s real voice (i.e. not the one he used for Giles).
You wanna work in H’wood (where the real money is)? You gotta have a convincing American accent.
And a slight hijack on Christian Bale…he also played the young boy in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Henry V. The one who told Pistol et al. that Falstaff was dying.
I know! I was even more shocked by the mayor being from Ireland.
http://www.hbo.com/thewire/cast/characters/tommy_carcetti.shtml
Brad Pitt and Carey Elwes do pretty good accents.
Minnie Driver does a pretty good job with accents. A native of London, she did a standard American accent in Grosse Pointe Blank, and she is doing a pretty good Southern accent on The Riches (on FX).
Leo DiCaprio did a fine Southern accent in The Aviator, seemed to handle the African accent well (to my ears anyway) in Blood Diamond, and handled the Boston accent in The Departed.
It must be interesting when she and Eddie Izzard break character on the set. Although I concede Eddie doesn’t really sound American when he’s filming.
Even more impressive to me is Alexis Denisof, another American, who did one of the best English accents I’ve ever heard as Wesley Wyndham-Pryce (my favorite fictional character) on Buffy and Angel. He studied in England and probably honed it over there, but you would NEVER know the guy is American until you see him as the sleazy newscaster on How I Met Your Mother.