She also did, to my ears, a great British accent in Miss Potter.
Sigh. Maybe that’s because he wasn’t playing a South African. Everyone I’ve read who knows what an accent from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) sounds like said his character’s accent was spot on.
Three, actually–Poppy Montgomery is from Melbourne.
Both William H Macy and Francis McDormand did excellent accent work in FARGO.
When Steve Barton was doing CATS in Austria, the creative talents of Phantom of the Opera wondered if he could play Raoul. They asked if he could sing in English.
Barton was born in Texas and raised in Utah!
Lennie James, who plays Robert Hawkins in Jericho is a Londoner. You can hear him using his real accent playing a bishop in the most recent series of Spooks (MI5). I think he sounds good, and obviously flies well enough under the radar that no-one has mentioned him as an Englighman doing an awful American Accent.
Poppy Montgomery (Sam Spade) in Without a Trace is Australian.
Oh, and my mother is (white) Zimbabwean and I couldn’t bear to watch Blood Diamond because Leo’s bad accent ruined it for me.
Likewise, I can’t watch most non-Irish actors attempting Irish, especially Northern Irish, accents. They rarely sound good, but that’s because I know what I should be hearing, so when I don’t it is like nails on a blackboard.
Janet McTeer is another British actress who does flawless American accents. Her slow soft southern drawl in “Tumbleweeds” is one of the best I have ever heard.
John Barrowman isn’t Welsh - he was born in Glasgow, Scotland.
Here’s a link where you can find the various parts of a Doctor Who Weakest Link special featuring JB and David Tennant, speaking in his native accent. And K9.
I don’t think it’s so much a case of “doing an accent” anymore, it’s now the only accent she uses - even when back here.
Agreed, but his English accent as Dr Watson in The Seven Percent Solution was…not so good. Well, nobody’s perfect.
:o Mea maxima culpa!
goes off to drool happily over Barrowman and Tennant
Mel Gibson, too.
What did you think of Nicole Kidman’s in The Interpreter?
I’ve heard very few foreigners do convincing Australian accents - they mostly grate horribly. But Helena Bonham Carter was absolutely perfect in ‘Til Human Voices Wake Up’.
On the Australian accent - I’ve noticed that some Australians who go overseas pick up traces of accent very quickly. Like a friend who went to the US for about three months and came back with a noticeable American accent - not that you’d mistake him for a native, but he didn’t sound Australian any more. And then it switched back again after a few weeks. Maybe we’re just more malleable that way.
Forest Whittaker did a totally amazing London accent in The Crying Game better in fact then many British actors whos attempts often sound like caricatures .
But you could certainly tell that he wasn’t a Scot ,his accent sounding quite comical even to English ears.
Going waaaay back (because I do) Vivian Leigh, a Brit, played a pretty convincing Southern accent in Gone With The Wind, while Clark Gable didn’t even try. Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes also didn’t attempt a Georgia accent. He sounded just as he had in Mutiny On The Bounty.
Gawd! If MOTB was released after GWTW, somebody here will no doubt know it. 
Wait, does that mean that you didn’t watch the movie and were judging his accent by the trailer? Because his character was born and raised in Zimbabwe, but he had lived (and “worked” if smuggling is considered working) in South Africa for several years.
I know that sounds like I’m moving the bar depending on the complaint (“but the character isn’t from South Africa! but the character lived in South Africa!”) but it’s not really. The character WAS born and raised in Zimbabwe, and he DID live and work in South Africa for a few years. As has already been pointed out, a lot of people born in one country who go to live in other countries pick up traces of the current accent. Heck, I can visit London for a week and come back with unfortunate traces of an English accent (the accent isn’t unfortunate, it’s wonderful, but an American unconsiously imitating an English accent is unfortunate, witness the shit poor Madge gets). It even happens among regions. My sister, who was born and raised a flat-voiced Kansan, picked up a Southern accent after living there for a few years. My brother and I teased her mercelessly.
I don’t really need to defend Leonardo Dicaprio. He’s a brilliant actor and I’m sure he did his accent homework, but even if it’s not perfect, even the best actors can’t always get it exactly right as this thread shows. My original post was to counteract the mistaken notion that his character was born and raised a South African, yet constantly got shit for doing a “bad South African” accent. If people can’t stand to watch movies where a character’s accent isn’t perfectly correct, they’d miss out on a lot of good movies. To watch Blood Diamond, the whole movie, which, while not without major flaws, was engrossing and fascinating, was to (for me) forget and accept his accent within the first few minutes of his character being onscreen, and being too interested in his character to nickpick to death.
MrDibble, I didn’t know that Charlize Theron no longer uses her native accent when she goes back to visit South Africa. I’ll bet she gets a lot of shit for that.
I would say much better than nice. I would say flawless. Much better than Hugh Lurie for instance. In fact there were a bunch of Brits that did great accents in BoB. Just look at the cast in IMDB. There were a lot of surprise Brits in the cast. Most did great jobs.
I had no idea about Lennie James. He is quite good.
As for Alexis Denisof, his real American accent sounds fake to me.
I wonder if Anthony LaPaglia and Poppy Montgomery have to speak in their Merkin accents between takes just so they don’t lose track.
BTW, Anthony’s brother Jonathan does a more convincing Yank accent.