Basically the plot of Our American Cousin. Now better known as the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed. Its about a loud obnoxious country bumpkin Yank who goes to England to inherit the family estate. It was written by an Englishman.
Antagonism goes back to Mrs Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and Dickens’s American Notes, both of which aroused furious resentment when they found their way back across the Atlantic. The New England Yankee who considered it all in a day’s work to cheat someone or out-manouvre them in business or commerce, and considered it just as admirable if anyone managed to do the same to him, is a common trope in literature of the time.
I must admit that I am constantly amazed that House is played by the same guy who played Bertie Wooster and Prince George. But, are there no American actors who can put on a convincing British accent?
Even Gilliam?
Especially Gilliam.
It depends. Ever since we started getting British TV over here BBC stock actors have been notoriously awful at American accents. Its gotten better but Doctor Who (new and old) is my cite.
The British actors playing Americans on shows that are made for Americans tend to be much better. Band of Brothers was full of actors who did fantastic jobs with their accent. Damian Lewis, Dexter Fletcher, Robin Laing, Ross McCall, Jamie Bamber are all pretty much perfect. Marc Warren, not so much.
If another example was required:
The BBC TV comedy Absolute Power series 2 episode 5 “Spinning America” with William Hootkins as the US Ambassador.
Well, there are restaurant critics here – I happen to know at least one and am acquainted with another – but it’s true you rarely see a negative review. They all seem to be PR pieces.
Bernard Trink, that long-time American expat who has been here about 50 years and is still doing book reviews in his 80s, told the story of his short-lived career as a restaurant critic at I think it was the now-defunct Bangkok World. One of his first assignments as such, if not the very first, was to cover a new restaurant opened by some high-society lady. It was awful, and he said so. She became very angry and publicly accused him of being a “hippie.” This was the late 1960s, and back then “hippie” was used as a general all-purpose insult regardless of your lifestyle or the length of your hair. And short-haired Korean War vet Trink was certainly no hippie in any sense of the word. The lady got her friends in high places to put pressure on the newspaper, and Trink was unceremoniously removed from the restaurant beat forthwith.
Speaking of “put on” accents, I recently watched a delightful little Japanese movie called Salvage Mice. All of the cast members were Japanese, except for the Big Bad Evil Guy, who was supposed to be an American. And while all of the Japanese actors’ lines were subtitled in English, they made the interesting decision to overdub the “American” actor’s lines (definitely overdubbed - lips didn’t match the words I was hearing; I assume the white actor spoke Japanese in the original release). Except, instead of finding an American to overdub the character’s lines, it was clearly a non-American speaking. The accent was fine, the grammar was perfect … but the manner of speaking was extremely odd to my ears, mainly because of how deep the guy’s voice was, but also because his diction/pronunciation was quite formal and proper. But the pitch of the guy’s voice was the main thing - I have a fairly deep voice myself, and know plenty of other guys with deep voices, but most of us don’t speak with such an exaggeratedly deep voice in normal conversation. This guy sounded more like a classic rock DJ using his “radio voice”. So it made me wonder if that was how we sound to Japanese listeners.
Im guessing you have never been to a footie match or met a chav…
Or taught in a British school or university!
Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow can do the accents well.
One stereotype about Brits I have sometimes encountered – George Orwell remarked on it more than once, though that was a long time ago now – is that the upper and upper-middle classes assume themselves the “real” Britons, and do not merely despise the classes below, but most of the time are subconsciously oblivious to their very existence.
The producer/s are often looking for unknown (to US audience) faces, plus they work cheap and have a rep for reliability and not being too precious.
p.s. stereotypes mostly serve the script.
I’m not sure that’s a stereotype, so much as an opinion that George Orwell happened to have. It doesn’t make much sense to contemporary British me, but as you say he wrote it ~70 years ago.
I don’t think there’s anything remarkable about rich people feeling superior to others – I’d say that travels across national borders – but it’s not something I would recognise as a stereotype.
And George Orwell liked to be particularly provocative so I wouldn’t take his comments as a sign of a true stereotype – he was equally rude about all the classes.
I don’t think we Brits have AN American stereotype - with all the American TV and films we’ve got we’ve got many:
American tourist: loud, crass, and in inappropriate shorts
American cop: fat, gun belt eats donuts
and so on…
American businessman could be anything from Don Draper to Montgomery Burns…