Chris Pratt has received praise for doing a VERY specific Essex accent.
I can do a passable Jason Statham and James Mason.
I’ve heard RDJ, Gwenyth Paltrow, Renee Zellwiger and Meryl Streep do a good job.
Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones and Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in Lord of the Rings weren’t terrible, I thought. Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes wasn’t bad. Same with Renee Zellwegger in Bridget Jones.
Scottish actor Iain Glen’s Irish accent sounds pretty bad to me.
This has always intrigued me, actually. We’re talking about a place with maybe a third to half the square mileage of Texas. Yet there’s about a million differently identifiable accents. On their best day Americans might be able to spot five or six ‘so-called’ American accents. It’s like we could spot the difference - and have it have meaning - between Charleston, Columbia and Greenville accents here in South Carolina. It’s bewildering to me.
I love this series! It’s fascinating and informative. However, Singer got at least one critique disastrously wrong.
He was completely off the mark in his deconstruction of Sam Rockwell’s Ozark Mountain accent in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. TLDR; Rockwell studied a real Missouri sheriff’s speech for his role, and Rockwell nailed it.
At least, Rockwell nailed the accent of the guy he was imitating. As for the “Ozark Mountain Accent,” there isn’t one. I live on the top of them (seriously, my town is the highest-elevated incorporated community in Missouri). Give me ten locals and you’ll hear ten accents. My mother-in-law, for example, speaks mostly General American with a slight twang. My landlady has a considerably stronger twang, but still wouldn’t pass for Southern. And my landlady’s sister sounds like she just crawled out of a cave in northern Georgia.
NO ONE around here, however, talks like Rockwell did in the movie.
Yes, it was so bad I forgot her name. I think Cordelia stuck in there because it was someone I didn’t like that I grew to…
The thing about Drucilla’s accent is that it wasn’t even consistent. It was all over the place. The army in the Uk is a big mixing pot for accents, you find someone you know has gone to the army, and their accent is a mixture of three different ones when they come back. This was Drucilla, she shifted between really bad versions of a number of accents.
The only other “English Accent” I can compare was the Trevor Leeds, the Uncle of the Charlize Theron character in Arrested Development. He was supposed to be “British”, but the accent to me was so clearly Australian to me. So blatantly, that I assumed that it MUST be a parody or in joke. Nobody yet seems to have “got” that joke. But it is of such a level that I’d say it was similar to Drucilla’s.
And the actor was actually Canadian!
Area is not the thing here, it’s history, tradition and population size. Texas has half the population than the UK, and has only been sizeably populated for about a century. By a vast and diverse set of immigrants who’s common connection was Texas.
The UK is twice the population size and has 400 more years of modern age population, and limited transport meant that the fiercest rivalries and wars were often with the town down the road, with different speaking sorts… Accent distinction being a source of pride.
And note that most of the recognizable American accents (New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Rhode Island) are from the East coast, which has been inhabited longer, compared to newer areas that have a similar accent across a wide geographical range (Western, Midland, North Central), and which are all pretty similar compared to the East coast accents.
Are there any American actors who have accurately imitated a British accent?
Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins?
They weren’t doing British accents. They totally nailed Westeros and Shire accents respectively.
Dinklage has been cited by others as an example of a terrible accent on this board before - but I agree with you, he’s not bad. He can sound a bit like, I don’t know, he’s putting a lot of effort into every syllable? But that can be explained as idiosyncracy - I know posh native speakers who talk like that.
I think he’s also taken to task Brad Pitt for a “Kentucky” accent? Well Brads lived in Missouri and Oklahoma…so I didn’t think whatever he was doing in Inglorious Basterds sounded bad.
Dinklage’s accent never bothered me because his character isn’t British, he isn’t from anywhere on earth so there’s no specific accent that he’s “supposed” to sound like. But his accent is certainly NOT an authentic-sounding British accent.
Well don’t forget about Southern accents. One can easily tell the difference between, say, an Appalachian accent and a Savannah accent and a Louisiana accent. Some of that is how long those areas are inhabited, but part is also migration to these areas was arrested for a while and only now has increased in number (so traditional accents have not been overwhelmed by accents of other areas quite yet - though in places like Atlanta or Charlotte that has come a bit faster).
Bernard King, who played Theoden in The Two Towers, has talked about the wrap party for the film, when he didn’t understand why Brad Dourif - Wormtongue - was affecting a cheesy American accent. Dourif is, of course, American; he just stayed in voice character all through the filming, and King assumed he was a fellow Brit.
Bernard Hill played a king. Bernard King played basketball. They are not the same person.
Daniel Davis, who played Niles the Butler in The Nanny, is from Arkansas.
Allegedly, his coworker, Charles Shaughnessy, who was actually born in London, received complaints about his English accent.
Maybe he was switching back to his Deadwood accent.
It’s the same with dialects and languages in general. Land area is not the important factor. Important factors are a stable population over time and relative isolation from surrounding areas.
English has spread across North America too recently for those small, distinctive pockets to form in many places. As you note, where there is some degree of distinctiveness, it’s in longer-established English-language settlements on the East Coast.
And also notice that America’s accent regions are largely horizontal across the continent. Because that’s how the populations mostly spread.