Both Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe do flawless American accents.
Yes, Toni Collette does a great American accent. Rachel Griffiths (Six Feet Under) is another Australian that does a very good American accent.
And they appeared together in Muriel’s Wedding (with their natural accents).
I’m not sure that Simon Baker can do a good Australian accent anymore.
I generally like Ewan McGregor as an actor, but he’s not very good with American accents. This worked fine in Down With Love, where his character was supposed to be faking a rather over-the-top American (Southern) accent, but in movies I’ve seen where he’s actually playing an American he hasn’t been very convincing.
In Velvet Goldmine, where most of the main cast was having to do accents other than their native ones, he really seemed bad in comparison to Toni Collette (who’s already been mentioned in this thread). She’s done convincing American accents in other movies like The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine, but Velvet Goldmine required her to do both an American accent and an English accent as imitated by an American. I thought she was very good at both.
To speak of Dr Who of another era, Nicola Bryant played Peri Brown during the fifth and sixth Doctors’ incarnations (the Doctors played by Peter Davison and Colin Baker respectively, by the way).
She had, hands down, the worst American accent on the face of the planet. Her idea of an American accent was to do a Valley Girl, “Oh wow!” and then instantly revert to her native Britspeak.
I, for one, was highly insulted. I mean, John Nathan Turner got a real Australian in Janet Fielding to play Tegan Jovanka. Why the hell do less for the first American assistant?
The British actress Anna Friel in Pushing Daisies, Australian actresses Yvonne Strahovski in Chuck and Poppy Montgomery in both Unforgettable and Without a Trace all do excellent American accents.
Ha. I opened this to post about Poppy Montgomery and Anna Torv (Fringe). Most of the time they’re very good, but sometimes the 'A’s are weird, which is why I know they’re both from Australia.
Definitely agree on Damian Lewis. There was another guy in Band of Brothers - can’t remember his name or the character’s (the Jewish one) - whose Brit accent came as a great surprise in the “making of” segment.
Sorry to post again so quickly, but I forgot to add this:
I lived in Scotland for a couple of years in the late 1970s and was floored at the awful American accents that flourished on British television, mostly but not always in comedies. In the sitcoms, the American invariably had either a ridiculous “Texas” or a ludicrous “1940s New York Jewish” accent. In the dramas, the character was invariably an insufferable U.S. federal agent and the accent would just have the vowels drawn out painfully.
Things are much better these days. British actors all seem to work very hard to learn the generic middle American news broadcast accent. Most don’t fare so well when they try to do regional accents. Tim Burton’s film Big Fish is one of my all time favorite movies* despite the fact that neither Albert Finney and Ewan McGregor have believable southern accents.
*It would be a guilty pleasure but for some reason I’m not the least bit ashamed of how much I like it
Gillian Anderson from X-Files does an American accent so well that I never realized she normally speaks with a prominent English accent until I saw her on a talk show.
She is American though. She lived in the UK during her girlhood and lives there again.
Alex O’Loughlin on Hawaii Five-0 is Australian. He’s pretty good at the American accent except for an occasional little R problem, exacerbated when it’s near a diphthong. Example: “powerful.” The writers should just avoid that word because he can’t do it.
It blew my mind to find out Hugh Laurie was British. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him make a mistake on the show.
I’ll vote for Hugh Laurie and and Peter Sellers. I never would have suspected they wer
Yeah, she left the UK at around 14 or so (I think). She was also a punk rocker for a while, there’s pictures of her young with spiked hair. She says she got teased a lot in US schools for her accent so she actively strove to lose it even before becoming an actor. Minnie Driver has a thick British accent but is mostly know (and thought of) for her American roles.
Christian Bale still gets me, he not only has a British accent but was in several big films as a child actor speaking with this normal Brit accent (Empire of the Sun, Henry V). He seemed to disappear as a teen actor and just reappeared all grown up and American (and crazy) in American Psycho.
Mel Gibson was an American born in Peekskill, NY. His family moved to Australia when he was around 12 years old.
I remember an interview with Anderson where she says she flips between British and American accents depending on where she is. I think she must have both British and US citizenship – born in Chicago to British parents and raised in both the US and the UK. I think that makes her a special case.
Laura Fraser - Lydia on Breaking Bad
Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton in the movie Warrior. If you’ve seen the movie, below is a clip of what they really sound like.
Stephen Graham, who plays Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire, is from Liverpool, but you’d never know it from watching the show. His Brooklyn accent might be a bit broad (although I’m not sure what Capone actually sounded like), but it’s by far one of the better regional accents I’ve heard from British actors.
I’ve generally been impressed with UK floks doing American accents, and I suspect they’re much better than Americans doing UK accents. Bob Hoskins in Roger Rabbit has already bgeen mentioned, and I was surprised by it, too. It wasn’t until I re-saw some of his older work in his normal accent that I was blown away.
As I’ve remarked before, Leo McKern (Rumpole of the Baily, #2 in The Prisoner) apparently couldn’t do a good North American acent. He tried to do a Canadian once, and his method was—to–talk—extremely–slowly–and—draw–out–e--v–e--r–y----word. Not at all convincing.