It’s like that in every part of Europe, and I suspect everywhere in the Old World. I think it would be the same if you were to look at native languages and accents in the New World.
Talking Irish rather than British accents but a group of Irish people on the Facts YouTube channel felt that Pitt did a good job in Snatch.
Alexis Denisof did even better with Wesley. I hear him with his American accent and it is really weird.
Yeah? I heard Theoden’s got a sweet jumper from 15’, and is devastating in the low post.
:smack: Yes, I was thinking of kings, because Theoden.
The weird bit is that Juliet Landau lived in England from early childhood to age 18 so you’d think she’d do better. I handwave it off that her character is batshit crazy and several hundred years old so she basically is her own population and speaks accordingly.
Apparently Brad Dourif has. The actors in The Lord of The Rings didn’t even realize he wasn’t British.
I’ve heard that Michael C Hall’s accent in ‘Safe’ was credible to at least some Brits, sounded British to me (American) but I guess that’s a lower bar.
Same token though some British actors fake good American accents (Bale was mentioned, he’s had a lot of practice). Other times it’s a good performance but the accent isn’t really that accurate or slips. Dominic West notoriously in The Wire but Idris Elba doesn’t sound like he’s from Baltimore either in that show (maybe the character isn’t supposed to be? anyway good performance not brilliant on the accent). My wife and I liked the actor Jason Isaacs in one of his recent British shows so we tracked down other works of his on Netflix. In the American ones like ‘Brotherhood’ and particular the abortive (but interesting) network show ‘Awake’, he’s still an enjoyable to watch actor, but his accent is not really that good. Especially the latter show where he’s supposed to be an LA detective. A stereotypical Rhode Island accent (‘Brotherhood’) is easier to fake because you can ham it up, it’s basically a foreign accent to Americans too. The ‘no accent’ (to American ears) of LA is harder to hit right and he doesn’t. But you ignore it after awhile.
You beat me to it :). Juliet Landau, hilariously, had much the same family background as Gillian Anderson.
But it appears from what I’ve read that she was making an attempt at some quasi-cockney for whatever reason, which I’m sure she never actually spoke as a child. Quite possible she has a decent, very mild English accent she might have pulled off, but she chucked it in favor of going broad and kinda fell on her face.
Yep.
I can map Navarro-Aragonese accents (and even their New World descendants) down to specific villages; 2.SiL and I both realized that the writer of a series of popular novels set in Navarre “couldn’t be from here” because of how she treats two specific words, turns out the writer is from neighboring Guipúzcoa (2.Bro had thought his wife was being a tad weird until it turned out I’d noticed the same details, at which point he declared his unconditional and eternal surrender for all language-related matters).
When I was in college in Barcelona, my Catalan dorm-mates spent Saturday afternoons when there was nothing on the TV discussing the geographical borders between the broad a and the narrow a, the muted s and the sonorous s.
While working in Seville I’ve had Andalusian coworkers dismember somebody’s “Andalusian” accent, others point out that in fact the accent in question was correct for a different location in Andalusia, just not for Seville; I can’t tell a Jaén accent from a Huelva one but people from Granada can. I can tell Lepe because I worked for a while with a guy who’s actually become infamous for his horrible communication skills, which include a Lepe accent so thick you need a cleaver to cut your way through.
And while I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one is which right now, I can certify that my Indian coworkers “Indian accents” were very different depending on what their other languages were, which in turn varied with where they came from. For us Spaniards, the Tamiles and the Marathis were a lot easier to understand than the Bengalis: note that all those are simultaneously different regions and different languages.
Not quite the same thing, but Christopher and Jonathan Nolan were raised together between London and Chicago, but have completely different accents.
Unless there’s a role I missed, I presume you’re talking about this. Discussion starts 0:28 in, his actual try is at 1:27.
Yeah. Game of Thrones accents are a mess, family members have completely different accents. One that I’ve seen praised is Liam Cunningham (Irish) doing what is effectively a Geordie accent.
What’s hilarious is I’ve lived in a youth hostel and so met tons of Brits and Australians who see pretty much no difference in US accents, while complaining about how US people can’t spot the differences in UK and Australian accents. Basically, we all sound like regular people on tv or cowboys on tv, and that’s it. We had a long, drunken, spirited discussion about this at the end of “Love, Actually” when a character returns from Wisconsin with a cowgirl sporting an LA accent and the non-Americans were all “what?” when we Americans started groaning.
(“Fargo” really threw them. I’ll never forget a British girl turning to me with an accusing scowl saying “There are people in America that talk like that, really?”).
The winner in this category has to be Daphne Moon’s family on Frasier. Each one has a completely different accent, and they all sound the same to Americans! :smack:
Littlefinger’s was a joke. He shifted between English, something different, Northern Irish and Irish (which he is) and back during not just the show, during a season and sometimes during an episode.
Non UK people wouldn’t notice it, but sometimes you’d go “Eh? He’s Northern Irish NOW?”
In one of the Sharpe’s Rifles sequels, Sharpe meets a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars who had been a loyalist from Virginia. The guy was kind of young, maybe 30 (and the story took place maybe 25 years after the Revolutionary War had ended) and he talked like Elvis.
There was a crime drama called Dempsey and Makepeace in the 80s. He’s a tough NYPD cop on special assignment in London, she’s local and HOT, they’re partners. The actor playing the NYPD cop, Michael Brandon, complained that they wanted him to “talk like a cowboy from Oklahoma.”
It’s fair to say that each of the two countries in question has limited fascination with details about the other country’s history and culture. We eat hamburgers, they eat steak and kidney pies.
I never watched The Nanny, but Daniel Davis is the guy who played Moriarty in a couple of Star Trek: TNG episodes, right? I had no idea he was American.
The Weasley family was the same…
Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos from the British program Mock the Week. These videos were all of the segment “Scenes We’d Like To See”, where the comedians who were the guests on the program that week had to come up with clever lines for situations that the host proposed. As far as I knew, the comedians on the show were British with an occasional North American, but I didn’t make any attempt to look up where any of them were from. I noticed that Ed Byrne, one of the more or less regulars on the program, had an odd accent. To me, it sounded like some mixture of a British and an American accent. I finally looked him up and discovered that he was Irish. Now, I should have been able to distinguish accents better. I’m American, but I lived in England for three years as an adult. I’ve been back to visit quite a few times. I’ve also visited Ireland twice for a total of three weeks. I wonder if it’s typical for an American to hear an Irish person (if the American has no idea where the person comes from) as being sort of British and sort of American.
It can be the case. A lot of Irish accents have some features that stand out as American to Americans and probably to a lot of English people (like rhoticism), and some features that might stand out as English-sounding.
It reminds me about past discussions about Alistair Cooke, an English writer and broadcaster who lived in America for many decades. English people thought his accent had turned American and Americans thought he had never stopped sounding English.
Complete fanwanking, but it fits that character, being a nouveau riche social striver who tries to fit in with royalty and isn’t as successful doing so as he thinks he is. But it’s probably not intentional.
That’s not necessarily inaccurate. I knew a family who all had different accents; the man was from New Zealand and the woman from Australia, each having the appropriate accent. They raised their daughter in England, though, so she had an Estuary accent.