Very pseudo – she attended Spence School (upper-crust Manhattan) and did a year at UC Santa Barbara – alma mater of myself and Two Trouts.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with Kevin Costner playing Robin Hood in his own accent. The film is set before the split between British accents and American accents; American accents were largely developed from the accents of British and Irish people who lived after Robin Hood.
Anyway, if you’re going for authenticity, Robin Hood would have spoken completely differently from anyone in England today, living as he did around the time of the great vowel shift.
I was living in the UK when both Doors and Shakespeare in Love came out, and the verdict was largely quite favorable when it came to her accent’s believablity (especially since she was virtually the only American in either of the casts).
Eddie Izzard does a pretty good British accent. 
Take that back - that’s fighting talk 
Here’s a Monty Python sketch where everyone’s trying to do an American accent and fails badly. Graham is especially funny with his Texas accent. Lots of “idears” floating around.
LOL, splunge. Forgot about that one. Seemed like the “yes men” kept forgetting to do American accents, if that’s what they were supposed to be doing. Accents or not, comedy genius.
There are people from northern New Jersey who will say “idear.” That accent sounds very New Yorky to outsiders, but I can hear the different between someone from Fair Lawn and someone from Canarsie. It’s a weird thing for the Pythons to focus on. Gilliam certainly doesn’t sound like that.
American actors don’t usually get the Texas accent right, though.
I’m not British but I thought Renee Zellweger’s accent was good in BJD. She was taught a plummy accent for the role so if it’s too plummy that’s the director’s fault and as someone else said, Bridget Jones could be from upper middle class background and therefore the accent they used *could *be believeable I think.
Ditto Gwyneth Paltrow though she can only do posh it seems to me.
Regarding Irish accents they’re usually terrible when Americans try them. Tom Cruise in Far and Away - cringe
Julia Roberts in Michael Collins - better but still shaky
However, Kate Hudson in About Adam - not exactly a huge blockbuster of a film, probably unheard of outside Ireland - was excellent accent-wise as a South County Dublin ‘princess’. This type of girl does speak with an odd mid-atlantic tone though so maybe it wasn’t too hard for Kate to imitate. However, this was before she made it really big and I didn’t even know who she was when I saw that film. I honestly thought she was Irish.
Hmm, well I suppose the writers did their best, but somebody who went to Eton would have been a commissioned officer in the army, not a mere NCO. And “Jonathan Quayle Higgins III” - that roman numeral is decidedly Not British. In fact we use it ourselves as comedy shorthand for the spoiled offspring of moneyed American families.
Funny, I always thought the roman numeral usage in names came from British culture.
Renee as Bridget was just divine. I don’t care for American Renee - she is sour-faced and speaks funny, but English Renee just makes my heart sing. I just want to hold her and tell her that she doesn’t have to be a sexually repressed single professional and that I love her, wobbly bits and all. YEAH!
[noparse]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8qw3oWvDpo. One of Hugh Laurie’s prototype American accents[/noparse] (YouTube, probably NSFW due to usage of “Ass” and “Goddamned”)
Ah, but there’s the rub. For approximately half of the film, Costner used his own American accent. The other half of the film, he had a ludicrously bad English accent. I’ve always wondered if I could determine the order the scenes in Robin Hood were shot just by gauging the level of Costner’s accent. Presumably he started off trying the English accent and eventually gave up. By that time it was too late to go back and reshoot the earlier scenes. Blimey!
There’s another version of “idear” up here, as well as “arnt” = aunt.
But underneath her clothes, she’s covered in scales!
Ah, sorry, I’d forgotten that.
Not a Yank, but Mike Myers’ Scottish accent doesn’t make me cringe, which means he can do it pretty well. I particularly like him in So I Married an Axe-Murderer, there are people like that in Scotland.
The first time I saw a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode with him in it, I asked my friend “Why is this guy doing a bad Billy Idol impersonation?” I honestly thought that the character was meant to be an American trying (and failing) to sound English. Well, okay, to be fair I could recognize that it was supposed to be an English accent, which is better than some people can manage, but it’s certainly not a convincing one.
Ewan McGregor is an example of a British (Scottish) actor who can’t do a convincing American accent. I think very highly of McGregor as an actor, but his American accent is pretty cheesy. This weakness became a virtue in Down With Love, where it was actually supposed to be a cheesy fake accent.
I don’t know if it counts as British, actually I forget what the hell it was supposed to be, some crazy gypsy people-speak, but the dialect Brad Pitt did for Snatch was supposedly absolutely perfect (apparently those crazy gypsy people are real?)
Sure was funny anyway (“aye caravin’ fer me mum”)
You’re talking about the Travelers. (Thought I should jump in on this before somebody else contributes the ethnic slur instead.)
Woah, that’s bad. Though, seeing that, I think there are actually a bunch of Python characters that I had no idea were supposed to be American… I always just figured it was an English accent I’d never heard (seeing as I’m really only familiar with upper-crust, cockney, and piiiiiiirate/West Country).