In the trailers for the movie The Brothers Grimm, U.S. born Matt Damon and Australian Heath Ledger both speak in lower-class British accents. I find this annoying considering that the Brothers Grimm lived in what’s now Germany and probably wouldn’t even have recognized a modern stock-company lower class British accent.
In Affair of Honor, a movie about Captain Albert Dreyfus starring Richard Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss (of the two s’s) speaks in an affected English accent throughout in spite of the fact he’s playing a Frenchman.
Of course this has long been a standard of little-theaters/college-theater, where I’ve seen everything from Medea (set in ancient Greece, of course) to The Lion in Winter (set in France long before there was anything like the current British accent) all performed with majorly affected attempts to sound like Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench, but you generally expect more from big budget movies.
What are some other movies where the star tried an accent that not only sounded fake but had nothing to do with the character’s nationality?
Well, this has been posted time and time again, but how about Picard, of Star Trek: TNG, having a British accent, even though the character is suppose to be French. Hell, what about all the Romans in old films sounding British?
I am willing to bet that in Brothers Grimm the choice for their accents was made by Gilliam the director. He’s smart enough to KNOW that the accent is wrong but he’s also smart enough to know it would just sound silly. German accented english for an entire movie? Man… no one would watch that without stabbing out their ears.
I think people in theater and movies and what nots just go for an “OTHER” accent. Because if they didn’t there would be just as many complaints about the lack of accent.
There was a thread some time back dealing with useless Southern accents and it had some good examples of people who oughtn’t to have been cast because they’re so awful. Oddly some of the most acceptable ones were by British actors!
For me, unless the actor grew up in the South, as opposed to just being born there and moving away, there’s no way to do it justice. Examples are too plentiful to mention. Billy Bob Thornton, Reese Witherspoon, Joanne Woodward, for starters, fill the bill. Most others don’t.
With the thing about using various English (i.e., British) accents for most foreign and period accents (with the possible exception of Spanish and French) my suspicion is that we’ve been conditioned to think that’s the way those folks would talk if they spoke English, and since their real language would be unintelligible to the average movie goer, the phony British accent is the default.
I was watching Dr. No the other night and noticed that the “Chinese” accents a couple of characters had were absolutely horrible. I’ve seen that movie a dozen times, but it really jumped out at me this time.
I saw it, too, on AMC, and was blown away with how absolutely weak every aspect of that movie was. Car chases, character motivation, shitty effects on that spider, silly exposition. Only thing decent about it was Sean had his hair or a damn nice rug. Otherwise, a star and a half max.
The most laughable use of accents I’ve seen is in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where the actors spoke English with a Czech accent (how successfully I don’t know). Look, either speak with an accent that English speakers use, or put the movie in Czech and use subtitles, but don’t choose the worst of both worlds.
I’ve been told that most of the actors in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon speak in the wrong regional accent, as does Benicio del Toro in Traffic, and that native-speaker audiences found this odd. But I don’t speak Chinese or Spanish so I’m not sure.
As for Picard: maybe the French don’t speak English with British accents now (though I’ve met some who come close), but with practice, by the 24th century they’ll sound just fine.
Perhaps the OP is asking too specialised a question, because it’s already gone off the rails –
Picard’s accent, while not appropriate to his French background, is not faked, which is one of the requirements of the OP.
Costner’s accent in Robin Hood, while faked, is not inappropriate to Robin Hood’s Englishness, the other requirement of the OP. Same with the Dr No. characters. The Chinese accents might have been awful, but they were supposed to be Chinese characters.
I read that in You Only Live Twice, they dubbed most of the Asian actors’ lines. I assume that they did the same in Dr. No.
On Zeldar’s point: I recall once in a thread about The West Wing someone complained about Emily Procter’s “phony southern accent”. Which I found odd since she’s a native of Carolina and graduated from ECU. I think many Americans don’t know what a southern accent really sounds like or are familiar with just one form and don’t know of all the regional variations. People in Western Tennessee don’t sound anything like people in Eastern Tennessee, at least to me.
Any movie, set in Boston, containing actors that aren’t from Boston.
If you aren’t “from here” you can’t do the accent. Period.
Granted, I’m from here, but trained out the accent years ago. I often get grief about claiming that I’m a “native” as I don’t have the accent… until I’ve had a few big drinks, or I’m working on 20 hours or so without sleep.
Dennis Quaid, in The Big Easy, plays a native New Orleanian and “accordingly” puts on a Cajun accent. However, nobody born and raised in the New Orleans area speaks with a Cajun accent (which is found in rural areas about 100 miles west and southwest of the city). There are several legitimate New Orleans accents – some of which approach the stock Brooklynese – but Cajun is not one of them.
I’m sure making the mental leaps from “New Orleans” to “Louisiana” to “Cajun!” was convenient – but it was intellectually lazy, IMHO.
You do have a good point. My Dad was a traveling salesman, primarily in Alabama, but his stint in the military during WWII gave him access to folks from all over. He had the knack I’ve heard others have of being able to localize accents as close in as county (and in some cases even town) all over the country! The generic “Southern accent” is only grating when somebody outside the region tries too many “y’all” (especially in the singular) and “mistah” r-dropping effects, but there are some who botch even that. The number of Southern actors who have tried hard to adopt the “standard” mid-Western accent, only to wind up playing Southerners (maybe even being typecast that way) is one of the oddities of Hollywood.
Maybe another thread could be devoted to the Southerners you wouldn’t suspect of it to the people you could swear are Southern but aren’t.
I thought Jude Law (U.K.), Brendan Gleeson (U.K.), Ray Winstone (U.K.) and Nicole Kidman (Au.) all did good southern accents in Cold Mountain, for example; it was odd watching them do readings from the book on the “Music of Cold Mountain” special becaue they had their natural English/Irish/Australian lilts.
An example I’ve mentioned on SDMB before that irritated me was when a thoroughly pointless TV remake of The Miracle Worker was done a few years ago. It featured Lucas “Slingblade” Black as Helen’s brother.
Black is a native north Alabamian, as was Helen’s brother, but for some odd reason they had him in speak in a “I’ll set up heah on the poach and hahv me a julep while the dahkies serenade me” upper class accent (which sounded very fake in the first place, plus the fact that the Kellers weren’t a moonlight & magnolia family) when his own natural voice would have been perfect.
Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil was also abysmal accent wise (except for Kevin Spacey- I have known Southern men who spoke just like that). I honestly get the opinion that many dialect coaches have never heard true Southerners speak. (Johnny Depp was in a movie that never came out a few years back in which he trained with a dialect coach in Irish accents, then got to Ireland to do location shooting and couldn’t find a single solitary Irishman who sounded remotely like the “frosted Lucky Charms, they’re magically delicious” accent he’d been affecting, so he basically told the coach to go screw and mimicked the locals instead.)
For the first category (southerners you wouldn’t suspect): Alabama’s own Kate Jackson, Courtney Cox, Wayne Rogers, Dean Jones, and Mississippi’s James Earl Jones
People you’d swear were Southern but aren’t: Robert Duvall (The Apostle and A Family Thing were both pitch-perfect accentwise), Jean Smart, Jodie Foster (there’s something just really southern about her to me)
If the dialogue coaches would actually go to the South and listen to people talk, that would probably fix this problem. Having lived in central Texas, eastern Georgia, and south and north Louisiana, I’ve heard all sorts of accents, some more comprehensible than others, and none of them really like the fakey “Southern” you hear in movies.
You’ve broken the code, I suspect. That phony accent is a relic of whenever the first “Southern” talkies came out and when Hollywood was casting people like Bette Davis to be magnolia belles. It would be a real neat search to locate that earliest example. It had to be way before GWTW, and I’d bet by at least a decade. But since my movie watching doesn’t include all that many oldies of the “Southern” persuasion, I can’t offer many examples.
I do think it’s neat that the first role Robert Duvall had that I noticed him in was as Boo Radley in TKAM, which except for Gregory Peck had some real life Southerners in it. They were cast that way.
As I recall, Robert Mitchum did a fair amount of growing up in the South although he was from Connecticut (I think – I could check IMDB but won’t) and most of his “Southern” roles were fairly convincing.
Re: Picard’s accent: I think there’s some fanon (fan canon) explainations saying this is somehow due to the Eugenics Wars/WWIII wiping out most of Europe’s population, as most Europeans you ever see on the show have British accents.(IIRC, Dr. Bashir on DS9 was supposed to be Russian, despite his overwhelming Britishness, right down to joining O’Brien for Battle of Britain reenactments in the Holodeck) Chekov is one of the few exceptions, as apparantly the Breadbasket of Russia was spared whatever event lead to Britain’s apparantly conquering the near-entirety of Europe.
Of course, maybe Picard was just schooled abroad, or affected the accent to screw with peoples’ heads (always keep 'em guessing!)
As for Costner’s accent, it wasn’t faked, and that’s what miffs people. He’s just speaking with a Costner accent, which is a decidenly un-English accent. Apparantly he tried to fake an English accent, and the director/producers told him to never do it again
If we can count cartoons (and just to get my post back on topic) BattleTech features one character (Cero) who’s accent changes about 5 different times through the course of the show, with no explanation whatsoever, and none of them done particularly well.
