There are a LOT of examples of American actors trying to sound English and doing a horrible job. Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins” was just the tip of the iceberg.
Now, I confess, as a Yank who’s spent very little time in Britain (a bit more in Ireland), I’m not always good at telling when an American actor’s foreign accent is convincing. But when a Cockney accent is as embarrassingly bad as Dick Van Dyke’s, even I can tell it in a second!
There are a FEW examples of British/Scottish/Irish/Aussie/Kiwi actors doing ridiculously bad American accents- but not nearly as many. And when a Brit gets American accents wrong, it’s usually because he/she tries too hard to eliminate ANY trace of ANY accent from his/her speech… and as a result, ends up sounding like a robot rather than a human being. Everyone in Monty Python (Terry Gilliam excepted!) is guilty of this. None of them could ever do an American accent to save his life!
All things considered, Sean Connery may have the right idea: if you don’t have a gift for foreign accents, just use your regular voice, and hope you’re likeable/charismatic enough that the audience will overlook your natural accent!
But all in all, I’ve found that most good British (et al.) actors do American accents very well. Some even do excellent American REGIONAL accents, far better than most American actors from different parts of the U.S. I’ve been “fooled” many times by British (and especially Australian) actors.
Perhaps it’s a matter of financial necessity. A British actor can make a LOT more money in one bad American movie, one silly commercial, or one lame American sitcom than he can in two years on stage in the West End. So, the Brit, Irishman or Australian has a lot of incentive to master American accents, so that he can come to Hollywood for a while and make enough money to go back home and do some projects that genuinely interest him.
Can anyone of UK origin tell me if the accent that Jane Leeves (Daphne Moon) does in Frasier is anything like a Manchester accent? I’ve no way of telling if she gets it right or not.
That is, assuming anyone of UK origin ever watches Frasier.
Daphne’s accent is a perfect Manchester one, and everyone is always surprised when they hear her talk in interviews and realise she’s from the home counties.
Plenty of people here watch Frasier - all the best people do, anyway.
I’ve had the chameleon effect (convergence) a fair bit lately around people I fancy. I start talking like them, and it’s very annoying - to me, I don’t think they’ve actually noticed. More often I experience divergence, especially among groups I don’t actually want to fit in with. Most of my Essex neighbours think I’m very posh, or occasionally foreign (I get ‘Eastern European’ a lot, even though I only lived there for a year and a bit and that was several years ago).
Frasier has been discussed before in threads about accents. It used to be one of the most popular programmes on the channel that shows it, but it’s notorious for bad accents. Nobody in Daphne’s family has a Manchester accent, in fact some of them seem to get through about four per show. At this point somebody usually adds that John Mahoney is actually from Manchester, but his IMDb entry says he was born in Blackpool (which is still close enough to Manchester for him to know what the accent should sound like).
I suppose Jane Leeves is using a southerner’s standard attempt at a generic northern English accent, but anyone from the north west would know it wasn’t right.
OK, I’ll take your word for it. I don’t know many people from up there, and I haven’t watched Corrie since I was a kid.
Her brother’s accent is terrible, I can attest to that. It’s so bad - and so much the wrong region - that at first I thought it must be intentional in a postmodern humour way, but that’s not very Frasier. What do you think of her Mum’s accent?
Who asked about Spike’s accent? He is pretty good - doesn’t make most of the usual slip-ups and never sounds unnatural, like many actors doing accents - but he does go Yankee now and then. Still, that would actually be in character; his human self had a posh accent (which wasn’t very well done, btw), and the cockney accent was adopted after he was vamped, plus he’s been living in the US for several decades. It still sounds better in the show if his accent is consistent, but they have a get-out for when it’s not.
The 90’s Britpop acts like Pulp and Blur sang with regional British accents, as did Madness in the 80’s. It was one of the things I liked about them.
Actually most of the actors on Corrie don’t have Manchester accents either (elsewhere in the north west, Yorkshire, but not Manchester very often).
Millicent Martin (Daphne’s mum) is from Romford. Nothing more need be said.
I agree Spike’s accent is much better than average. You can spot the mistakes if you try, but that hardly seems fair. The only bad accents I really object to are the ones where you can’t concentrate on the story because the jarring voices get in the way. You can also bet any money you like that there’s an unemployed actor somewhere who could have done the job perfectly using their own voice.
I sing in my church choir, and we’re constantly told to pronounce words as if we were British. (It’s not actually British; not at all, in fact. I’ve never heard someone actually speak singing diction.) This has led to my growing up thinking American accents sound ugly when sung. I think the biggest reason we do it is for the pronunciation of "r"s. Twenty people singing “Chrrrrrrrrrist” is going to sound gross. I don’t think it’s as big of a deal in solo singing, though.
Agreed. I also get annoyed because the mistakes they make are so elementary that a good dialect coach should have been able to teach them how to avoid such mistakes. Wonder how I’d go about becoming a dialect coach?
Which of course worked brilliantly for Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. He was the only damned character who didn’t speak with an accent. Proving, I suppose, that Robin the Hood was a Yank! A-ha!!
I don’t watch Buffy that often but I agree, there’s one actress who plays (I think) Spike’s vampire girlfriend,can’t remember her name - tries to do a cockney accent but it’s if anything even worse than Dick Van Dyke’s!
IMHO (and I’ve recently been goign through the Buffy DVDs from the beginning again), James Marsters’ accent was a bit too unnatural in the beginning but over time has improved a lot. These days I would even say it is quite impressive. Practice DOES make perfect!
I am sure there was an episode where he pretended to do a bad American accent, which I thought was excellent. American actor playing a Brit doing a bad American accent.
American actors don’t only do British accents badly; many of them also often suck at regional American accents. Take, for example, Charlize Theron’s ridiculous Southern accent in that stupid Bagger Vance movie, or the bad Gloucester, MA accents in The Perfect Storm.
Singing diction (especially choral singing) is completely unrelated to spoken diction in any language, including English. The biggest obstacle for American choirs to overcome is to get rid of the heavy Rs; this is obviously not a problem for British choirs whose members don’t naturally speak with heavy Rs (although I’ve been told that Irish choirs do have to work to minimize the R sound).
It’s not so much a case of American accents sounding “ugly” as it is that they’re distracting (as any regional accent would be, including any of the many British ones). Regional accents do have their place in choral literature, but it’s pretty rare that you use them.
As I mentioned on the other page, I recently had to teach some British choirs to sing with American accents; it’s much harder to add in the Rs when you’re not used to doing them than it is to get rid of them when you are.
Practice also has a nasty habit of coming back to bite you in the arse.
I’ve been out drinking with him a couple of times when he’s been over on this side of the pond and he occasionally slips into Britishisms without realising it. Its quite funny actually.
As far as accents in Buffy/Angel go i like James’, but i think Alexis Denisof’s is better - he’s from Maryland/Seattle (Although admittedly he spent some time over here).
I think what helps with a convincing accent is the vocabulary.
Anyone can try to fake an accent, but no matter how good it is you are never going to believable if you still walk around saying things like “sidewalk” and “soda.” Because those verbal clues give away the fact that the speaker is foreign.
A decent accent with good vocabulary is much better. Even if the accent isn’t 100% accurate, the listener is less sure that the person isn’t British because the vocab is good. The listener may be inclined to believe that the accented person merely has a regional or unusual local accent that the listener hasn’t heard before.
If only
He’s not over here often and we only hook up occasionally if he’s in London. We’re occasional drinking buddies of convenience - i’d be lying if i said we were good mates.
He did ring Garigirl on her birthday for me though - i got major brownie points for that!
