Along these lines, how good is the accent of Jamie Bamber, Apollo in Battlestar Galactica?
(I honestly can’t tell. Having a German mom, growing up in Canada, and now living in the US, accents are completely mixed up in my brain.)
They must have the lock on radio drama, then. Years ago the BBC World Service aired a play on the last days of Maj. Glenn Miller (who, btw, has been much more of a legend in Britain than in America for many years now). Glenn, a Nebraskan-Coloradan, and his drummer Sergeant Ray McKinley, a Texan, were both played with dese-dem-and-dose New York gangster diction. This despite plenty of surviving recorded speech from both Miller and McKinley.
Glenn once wrote an instrumental called Dese Dem and Dose, but trust me, you don’t care about that.
In general, it’s very good. I knew he was English before I started watching, so I can’t help but listen for mistakes – I’ve heard him make only a couple of slips (“anything” with a short I sound in the second syllable; “been” with a long E sound, that sort of thing), and sometimes his vowels sound a little New York-esque to me (like when he says “Kara,” the first A sounds oddly flat) – but overall, his accent is convincing to me. He even keeps it steady when he gets emotional, which is impressive.
How far from Baltimore is “D.C. Area”? My dad grew up in Dundalk, I lived just south of Baltimore for 20-some odd years, and my brother and his family still live in Locust Point (remember the docks in season 2? that’s Locust Point), and I don’t remember hearing anything in McNulty’s voice that made me feel like I wasn’t at home.
John Mahoney is another English actor who can do 'Mercan. His voice as Martin Crane on Fraiser was excellent.
Does he really count, he has been here for longer than I have been alive. He served in the US army at 18 or 19 I think. He must have been here before that. He starting in acting in the US afterall.
Thanks for a great link! (did you know that House is my TV boyfriend?)
With the day that’s in it here’s Hugh and Stephen dealing with trick ot treaters
I live about 50 miles from Baltimore, but I grew up in Glen Burnie. I know Locust Point. 
I bought the entire series on DVD and my SO and I watched all of the episodes straight through (i.e., when we were watching TV we were watching The Wire), so maybe I was just able to hear the occasional “hmm, not quite right” more easily. In general, though, the Baltimore accents on that show impressed the hell out of me!
Aw cm’on. Hugh Laurie is an American, born and raised. It’s astonishing to me how many of you folks on the other side of the pond claim him as British, considering just how embarrassingly phony his English accents are.
I think she had a dialogue coach, but listen to her singing that little ditty after the night of passion with Rhett…I guess she could talk Southern, but she sang Engligh.
I was a little surprised to learn Damian Lewis is English; his accent is very, very good.
In fact, the only English actors I can think of whose American accents don’t sound right to my ears are Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver on The Riches.
His accent is spot on.
I didn’t know who he was before I saw House and when I heard him speak in his normal voice I was shocked. I had NO idea he was faking it. It’s that good.
I think Laurie is superb re his accent. It’s not just the accent, it’s the word choice, the emphasis, the pacing of his speech.
In contrast, I always thought that there was something about Rachel Griffith’s (6 Feet Under) speech. It didn’t sound natural and turns out she is from Australia. Oddly, I didn’t get that with the guy who plays Chase on House. Rachel seemed to bite off the very last bit of her last syllables somehow. There was a forced air about it. I got used to it, but she didn’t seem American to me until about end of season 2.
I think Ozzies, Brits etc do our accents better due to exposure: they’ve seen all our sitcoms and cop shows etc. Not all that many Brit shows come across the Pond (can’t think of an Oz or Kiwi one). They have more exposure–we get the over the top plummy landed gentry or the street smart Cockney and not much else.
eleanorigby writes:
> In contrast, I always thought that there was something about Rachel Griffith’s (6
> Feet Under) speech. It didn’t sound natural and turns out she is from Australia.
> Oddly, I didn’t get that with the guy who plays Chase on House. Rachel seemed
> to bite off the very last bit of her last syllables somehow. There was a forced air
> about it. I got used to it, but she didn’t seem American to me until about end of
> season 2.
Jesse Spencer (who plays Chase on House) is an Australian playing an Australian character, so he’s not doing any accent except his natural one. I just looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered an interesting fact. He has two brothers and one sister, and they are all doctors.
:smack: I knew that. I was very tired last night–Chase on House does speak with an Aussie accent. Gah.
I didn’t catch this when it first aired, but Hugh Laurie was on an episode of Friends.
Princhester writes:
> I watched a bit the other day. It’s odd seeing an English guy acting in a US
> show where his Englishness isn’t a part of it. Normally, you only see English
> guys playing English characters. Is there some particular backstory to it besides
> just him being a good actor who got the part on his merit as such?
I don’t think anybody has pointed this out so far, but it’s quite common on American TV and in American movies to have British, Australian, New Zealander, Irish, Canadian, etc. actors playing American characters. It may be more common than having them play characters from their own countries. As I’ve noted in several threads on the SDMB, it seems to me that about twenty years ago the teaching of accents (for English-speaking actors playing English speakers from another country) got a lot better. I don’t know if this means that acting schools or dialect coachs or whoever got more serious about the matter, but it’s quite clear to me. As recently as the 1980’s, the accents in TV and movies were often pretty shaky. At some point actors began to be expected to do accents from other countries well if they wanted to do those roles.
Going to that point, a big complaint about the TV mini-series The Thorn Birds is that they had English actors all playing Australians/New Zealanders, with the exception of Bryan Brown. Maybe they thought an American audience couldn’t tell the difference.
And The Thorn Birds came out in 1983, so it was before the time when accuracy in accents was required.