Actually, it was a condition of Van Dyke’s participation in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that he NOT attempt a British accent. Clearly, neither you nor the tour guide have seen it recently.
It’s Mary Poppins where Van Dyke does the horribly bad English accent.
Right you ahr, Guvnah!
I should point out that Hillerman was from the Panhandle of Texas where the thickest of the Texas accents are from. When he was growing up, American English was a foreign language.
One of the great ironies of his acting career was that he worked very hard to lose his Texas twang, working with languages coaches and language tapes..And when he got his big break, it was…you got it, doing a thick Western accent in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.”
I heard an interview over the weekend where Van Dyke pointed out that when he did Mary Poppins, they assigned him a dialogue coach named Pat O’Malley, who didn’t know anything more about authentic Cockney than Van Dyke did.
There’s an amusing episode in which McNulty is going undercover at a bordello to try to bust a sex trafficking organization, and they decide they want to him to pose as British. So McNulty starts trying to do an awful British accent. It’s very meta, a Brit actor playing an American faking a lousy Brit accent. That’s got to be a tricky thing to do and still sound believable, but West pulls it off.
I think Hugh Laurie did something similar in House.
I don’t think Buckley’s accent was fake. His father will an oilman down in Mexico and he got tired of his children jabbering in Spanish around the dinner table. He didn’t receive and formal instruction in English until he was 7 in London and he attended high school at the Catholic preparatory school Beaumont College in England.
The actors playing Americans on MI-5 (Spooks) have atrociously bad accents, but the worst is Genevieve O’Reilly, who plays Sarah Caufield, the CIA agent in love (or at least pretending to be) with Lucas North. She’s Irish and seems to be trying to do some sort of New York accent, with a little Boston and Atlanta thrown in.
That is the WORST accent I’ve ever heard!!! Hilarious.
I saw Aidan Gillen (Carcetti) on DVD in a British series called Identity. I’ve also seen his Wire episodes quite recently. In Identity it seemed like he kept going back & forth from an Irish accent to an American accent. And it was more American than Irish to my ears.
He’s a nice chap, but he’s sometimes a pretty terrible actor. I thought he was good in the Carcetti role but despite his accent.
Something I just found out recently. I was watching a documentary about Australian filmmaking and I learned that there was a long period when there literally was no Australian film industry. There was a period of over ten years when there was not a single film produced in Australia. The only movies made in the country were a handful of American and British films that were shot in Australian locations but they had to bring in their entire crews because there were no local crews.
I’m so used to English speaking people from other parts of the world doing spot on American accents that it’s rather jarring when I encounter a poorly done one. An example that always sticks with me is from an old British production of Sherlock Holmes. There was a character who was supposed to be a gangster from Chicago. He was played by an Irishman doing a terrible attempt at a “cowboy” accent. What made it even funnier is that it seems perfectly plausible that a gangster from 1890s Chicago might have an Irish accent anyway.
I specifically looked up a video clip of the show to see her speak. Her accent is so bad it’s something special. There’s some New York (sort of like a stereotypical Jewish Long Island accent), some generic imitation Southern, some non-regional diction (newscaster American), and plenty of Irish in there too. I’ve never heard someone use four radically different accents in one sentence before.
Here’s a clip.
Coming from a different angle, as a Brit listening to that it sounds like she keeps forgetting to put on her accent, remembers halfway through a sentence and instantly jumps to the other side of the Atlantic.
It sounds to me like she’s trying to do Julia Roberts’ accent. Which is probably a poor idea because Roberts is a native Georgian who’s lived in New York City and Southern California - she does not have a typical American accent. She can carry it off because it’s her natural accent but anyone trying to imitate her is just going to sound confused.
I’m not so surprised by the bad American accent in the old British production of Sherlock Holmes, assuming that this was from forty years ago or so. There really was less care about accents back then, as I’ve said. The sloppiness of the accent of the character Sarah Caulfield though is inexcusable though. These days it’s expected that the accents are correct. The actress, the casting director, and the dialect coach should have all been fired.
It’s fascinating that what would sound like big differences to Americans can blend together for Brits.
For some perspective on what her accent sounds like from an American point of view, imagine she was an American imitating a posh BBC received pronunciation accent, but kept slipping back into her American accent. Then imagine she switched to a thick Scottish accent every other sentence. Then imagine she pronounced about half a dozen words with a Cockney accent so exaggerated it would be inappropriate for anyone not playing a chimney sweep in a production based on a Dickens work.
As others have mentioned, when Brits do American accents, much of the time it works as long as you don’t think about where the character is from. The US is a big place, with lots of different accents and lots of people who don’t talk like you.
Sometimes I’ll watch a show, and something will just be pinging in the back of my head as “not right” with a particular character, something I can never put my finger on. Oftentimes they’ll turn out to be British (such as Jamie Bamber playing Apollo in Battlestar Galactica, though at the time, I just assumed that what was pinging that sense in my brain was that the character was a bit of a prick in the miniseries.)
Now, if I know an actor is not American, I will be more “tuned in” for anything that may sound “off” to me, which, as mentioned above, could include any given real American accent if I’m not familiar with it, so even actors who are pulling off flawless accents might still sound weird to me if I know they’re from Wales or Scotland. John Barrowman, for instance.
ETA: For the record, I really wish Hugh Laurie would stop using that goofy fake English accent in movies. ducks and runs
I just thought of another example. I thought Gabriel Byrne gave a good performance in The Usual Suspects, but I did notice his accent slipping several times.