James Marsters does one of the best English accents done by an American - almost indistinguishable from the real thing. In contrast the girl who plays his vampire girlfriend (can’t remember her name) is excruciatingly bad.
Also among the worst - Anthony la Paglia as Daphne’s brother in Frasier. Awful.
One bit of practical advice…
British RP has one more vowel phoneme that isn’t found in American. Any American who wants to do RP has to learn this vowel. It’s the “short o” in words like got, hot, spot. For Americans, this vowel is either the ah of father or the aw of caught. The RP vowel is neither of these. It’s more central than the aw sound, more rounded than the ah sound. It’s like an ah vowel with a slight amount of lip-rounding. Seems like a small distinction, but it makes a big difference in how you sound.
Well it all depends upon the ‘thing’ that you are doing. What is your background and the background of the target audience.
To pull of RP (Received Pronunciation) accent will be very difficult indeed - I would imagine that most non-British attempts would imidiatly sound fake. At least, they would to anybody who is British.
In fact, if you don’t have much time, any specific British accent is probably going to be a problem.
TV and films are OK, but often feature accents and modes of expression ‘softened’ for UK national and international appeal. Your best working resource is probably British radio although radio programs may be dominated by RP and/or a wide range of regional accents making it hard to focus on one in particular. Ideally, you will need some coaching from a true Brit.
The British are very linguisticly sensitive. For better or worse, the moment sombody opens their mouth, the typical Brit is summing up place of birth, social class, education level etc. To get your fake accent past a real Briton, it will have to be really good.
If your target is British and you just want to fool somebody, you task may be easier if you settle for an accent of an Englishman who has lived abroad - this could easily explain why your accent is hard to place. Burmuda might be a good bet, or perhaps the Falklands or Hong Kong.
If your audience is not British, a good approach may be to explain that you are from some fictious or little known part of Britian which might conceivably account for any discrepancies - eg. the Isle of white, the isle of man, channel island, border country etc.
I just want to second what Jomo said - if you can get the short “o” vowel right you’re halfway there. Gwyneth Paltrow can do it, and her RP accent (e.g. Sliding Doors) is very good. John Hellerman (?), the guy who played Higgins in Magnum, didn’t get it, and as a result never sounded English to me. (Was he actually supposed to be English, btw?)
You don’t mean to say that was seriously supposed to be an English accent?! Please tell me that was a joke . . .
And I’d also say that Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love does a good accent.
N.
I’ve been able to do an Aussie accent since 7th grade. Upon consulting with several Australians, I have it on good authority that the accent is perfect.
I do a decent BBC, but I lack enough slang to really pull it off. I’ve got a “Hollywood Brouge”, both Irish and Scottish.
German accent (region unknown) as well.
I’ve recently picked up a Phillipino accent. Manilla, specifically. Stupid boss.
It’s something I’ve always been able to do. I can usually identify most accents when I hear them, and if I’m on phone with someone with an accent I have to consciously keep from parroting it back at them.
And yeah, I recommend regional movies. It’s a start, at least.
Speaking of Frasier, John Mahoney who plays Martin Crane does a great impersonation of Daphne in one series 3 episode.
But then he was born in Manchester! His American accent seems flawless to me, so I think it is possible to do 'em perfectly, just very difficult.
I’ve travelled the whole US from top to bottom and Crazy to Crazier. I would only say there are about 5 or 6 easily distinguishable accents to my ear. But from the months I’ve spent in the UK, I would say I can recognize maybe 10 or so differences from Cornwall to Kent.
As to Doper accents I know of - Tansu has a distinctive accent, but I’m not sure what it would be called - she lives in Cumbria, but I don’t know where she was raised. It sounds very, very much to me like “Upper-class Received Pronounciation” to me - like she’s a BBC announcer. Fierra, on the other hand, has a very light accent, and even before we really knew each other that well, sounded somewhat East-coast US. She was born and raised near Birmingham.
I have near-as-dammit RP (hammered into place at drama school), and I have taught (or at least tried to teach) an American girl to do an RP English accent for a Shakespeare play. The bits that tripped her up (and the common mistakes I’ve noted with US actors trying to do English accents) were:[ul][]The ‘r’ following a vowel. We just don’t say it. Stupid, but there you go. “Car” is pronounced “kah”, “there” is pronounced “thae” etc. etc.[]The short ‘o’ sound, as in “hot”. It’s very, very short (and mentioned above, I see).[]Hard ‘t’ sound within words. “Thirty” - many Americans pronounce this akin to “thurdee”, whereas English RP would be: “thu-tee”. My friend just couldn’t get “watery” right.[]There is an intermittent use of the short “a” sound. Most Americans (unless they’re from the South) would say “hat” or “cat” similarly to an RP speaker, but “Saddam” comes out more like “Sahdahm” to my ears. I would say it with two short "a"s.The neutral vowel (can’t do the character) that just sounds like an “uh”. E.g. “Othello” - the first O is the neutral vowel, the second is a long “oh”.[/ul]
Sparrow writes:
> Also among the worst - Anthony la Paglia as Daphne’s brother
> in Frasier. Awful.
You do realize that Anthony LaPaglia is Australian, don’t you? He’s an interesting case. It seems to me that the ability of actors (from English-speaking countries) to do the accents of characters from other English-speaking countries improved considerably about ten years ago. Before then I found that it was easier to tell when an actor was doing an accent that wasn’t natural to him. Now I frequently don’t learn what country an actor is from until I’ve seen them in several movies. I presume this is because somewhere around ten years ago acting schools began offering considerably more rigorous classes in accents.
This has been particularly noticeable with Australian actors doing American accents. This is why there’s a slew of Australians right now who are doing lots of American movies. Anthony LaPaglia has done something really interesting. Most of the Australians regularly working in American films have chosen to do something like a Midwestern American accent. Apparently LaPaglia though asked somebody something like, “Suppose my Italian grandparents had immigrated to the U.S. instead of Australia? Where would they most likely have ended up and where would I be living now?” Somebody must have told him, “Well, one possibility is that would have immigrated to New York City. Your parents would have lived in a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens and you would be living in a nice neighborhood in nearby Long Island.” So he’s perfected this dead-on Italian New Yorker accent. I don’t know why the casting director on Frazier decided he could do a Manchester accent.
Yes, all true. In fact I’m from Liverpool, but don’t have a very strong accent myself. I could say much more about local/regional accents but it would be hijacking the thread too much.
I agree he’s got a very good accent - you can hear the mistakes, but only if you listen out for them. It doesn’t belong to any particular region, but you could say it’s London-influenced RP. There are lots of really bad ones. Even Daphne doesn’t have a Manchester accent (Jane Leeves is from Surrey).
There’s plenty of good advice here, but I still think it depends where your own accent is from and where you would like it to go. Have we established that you’re from NI Dunmurry?
If so, and if you want a generic English accent, choose an English TV show, then pick a single character with plenty of lines, tape the show and repeat them back to yourself. Better still if you can tape your own voice and listen to that being played back too.
The best Americans doing a British acccent? Spinal Tap.
It even fools us Brits even those of us from Squatney.
Most Americans are shocking at english accents, thimk Johnny Depp in from hell.
Should also big up Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers.
It’s meant to be Mancunian? I’d wondered why, given that Daphne was meant to be vaguely Northern, that her brother had some sort of sarf-eastern accent (not that’s it’s convincing, I just assumed that’s what he was aiming at).
She doesn’t sound English to me. Mid Atlantic perhaps, though I have heard Llloyd Grossman described as such, and they certainly don’t sound the same!
I didn’t realise that Polly in Fawlty Towers was supposed to be English. I assumed she was an American.
If it’s meant to be an English accent it’s right up there with Dick Van Dyke.
I do a great deal of theatre, and I’ve found that when doing an accent, LESS IS MORE. Putting a little English “twinge” in your accent does much more than you think. When trying to sound English, concentrate mostly on your vowels and the different inflections in some words.
After that, concentrate on the different inflections in sentances. When asking a question, Americans inflections go up, while Brit’s inflections typically go down.
Well I thought her accent was good. 
Maybe I’ve been away too long.
Connie Booth isn’t English?
I think it is a combination of her mannerisms aswell as her accent that makes her passable as English.
Dick Van Dyke did the worst ever english accent in Mary Poppins.
Sean Connery is the MASTER of accents 
Born in Indianapolis, mostly raised in New Rochelle, New York.
Wherever did you get the idea that Peter Lawford was from Florida?
He was born in London in 1923 and began as a child actor there. He made his first movie in England in 1930, and his first American movie in 1938. He did not become an American citizen until 1960.