There’s not a trace of England left in Alistair Cooke’s accent at all. He sounded entirely American to us. It was some years before I learned that he was British.
Archetypal Englishman?
Leslie Howard (whose origins weren’t English at all - nothing more English than the recent immigrant family anxious to fit in)
Ray Davies
Ronald Colman.
Yeah, he doesn’t sound like anything these days.
Ooh, ooh … David Mitchell!
Slight tangent:
My dear friend, Suzanne, grew up in and around Dublin; she and her husband emigrated to the U.S. about 25 years ago (when they were both in their mid 20s), and have lived in the Chicago area since.
A few years ago, Suzanne remarked to me that she no longer has an Irish accent. To my ears, she certainly still does, though it’s certainly not as thick as some that I’ve heard, and I would wager that any American would say that she has some sort of a “British Isles” accent, even if they couldn’t specifically place her as Irish. I asked her why she thought so, and she said that her relatives (who are still back in Ireland) had told her that she now sounded American (and, to their ears, she likely did). A few decades living in the U.S. have attenuated her accent enough that she no longer sounds Irish to the Irish, but she also doesn’t sound American to Americans; I would imagine that the same thing happened with Cooke, who moved to the U.S. in the 1930s.
George Sanders and Christopher Lee
Looking it up I’m surprised to see that Sanders may not be English at all by heritage.
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Rob Brydon also screams “typical Englishman” … And he’s Welsh, I think…
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Very Welsh. I mean he can sing and everything, disqualified.
I thought Frank Thornton of AYBS looked like central casting’s idea of an English gentleman.
I considered him, obviously, but I think his tendency to overly logical digressions is rather uniquely his own and not typical of anyone, or anything. I mean, even if you think the archetypal Englishman is eccentric, Mitchell is still eccentric in his own way. He’s a half-bubble off plumb in a direction only he has discovered.
I remember when Sir Richard Burton was interviewed about the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and was asked “What, as an Englishman, you think about the whole thing?” and he calmly said, “Well, first of all, I’m Welsh…”
Peter Cushing? :dubious:
I’m not talking about hisangry logic(although the delightful sheer pettiness of some of his soapboxes is, IMO, very English) - I’m talking about his actual un-chinny face (compare him to Webb)and Oxbridge accent.
Oh well if we’re going there …
Maggie Smith
Yeah, when someone pointed out that Daniel Craig was the “first English James Bond,” I was taken aback – but apparently it’s true, by certain narrow definitions of Englishness (I think it was like Roger Moore is technically Welsh, etc., etc.)
Roger Moore’s a Londoner, none more English than he. (Timothy Dalton is Welsh though)
Nigel Bruce (old school)
Martin Freeman (present day)
Patrick (“Steed”) MacNee has already been mentioned several times, but I’ll add my support.
Barry Nelson was the first James Bond and he was an American.
Quite. I wonder what the writer meant. Moore’s been in tax exile since 1978 – first Switzerland, then Monaco – but so what? Maybe they were just wrong. I swear that’s what they wrote.
