As far as British actors doing Southern accents well, don’t I remember that the contemporary Southern accent is only a few steps away from the 17th century English accent? At least, a professor of mine mentioned that if we could hear Shakespeare and Marlowe speak, they’d sound “Southern” to us.
So I caught this movie on Bravo or something. I think it was Lantana, and it had Anthony LaPaglia in it. You know, the guy from Without a Trace?
Except in this movie he’s got the lamest, fakest Australian accent you’ve ever heard. I almost couldn’t watch him I was so embarrassed on his behalf.
Then I looked him up on IMDB, and he was born in Australia. :smack:
I’ve got to say that’s a pretty silly criticism. If they lived in what is now Germany, it wouldn’t make any more sense to have them speaking German-accented English than it would be to have them speaking British-accented English. If you’re going for accuracy, then you do the whole thing in German with English subtitles.
Instead, they’re going for the mood, I guess. So you pick an accent that to English speakers, sounds lower-class and European.
The most clever example of this was in Disney’s version of Robin Hood, which has gotten a lot of complaints on this board but I think was ingenious. Even though it was set in England, they picked southern American accents for the Merry Men because to American audiences, that suggests “rural” more than an authentic rural British accent would have. Plus, of course, it let them capitalize on the whole “south will rise again” thing that was going on in the late 70’s.
I’ve read that when anime is dubbed, for characters that have Osaka accents in the original, they translate it as a southern American or Texan accent. Supposedly, Osaka-area accents sound “rural” to Japanese speakers from Tokyo.
Australia has different accents across it, like anywhere else. My mum grew up near/in Melbourne and sounds almost British while my brother’s adapted to the yobbo Queensland accent and sounds loike Steve Irwin.
Well, they might sound a little more “Southern” to you than what you think of as a modern English accent, but I doubt they’d be that close. If I had to guess, I’d imagine that if we could somehow magically hear how Shakespeare actually spoke, it would sound like neither nowt nor summat.
I’ve seen variations on this claim made for a variety of American accents and dialects, and I think the best that can be said is that some US dialects have retained some vowel sounds, words, and constructions that have since become uncommon or disappeared in most English accents.
I hope this isn’t a hijack. If so, please ignore it.
Back when Gangs of New York was a hot topic I recall quite a bit of fuss being made of the accent that Daniel Day-Lewis was using. The explanation I heard that was somewhat puzzling/amusing was that in his research (which is one of his hallmarks) Lewis had located this document, or a whole group of them, that explained all about the mixture and history of peoples living in that area in that period. From his readings he deduced that whatever group it was still living in some section of the city (and it may have even been that they were living in some other area outside the city) the way they spoke would be the one to emulate for his accent.
Along similar lines, although this is much closer to a real hijack, the language (not accents as such) used in HBO’s Deadwood series is supposed to be of the period in question.
Just assuming those researches with their findings happen to be correct, and applying that same reasoning to “dead” languages, how is it we now have “experts” who can provide proper pronunciation for such things as Mayan, ancient Egyptian, and maybe others in that realm that haven’t had a living speaker in centuries if not longer?
The biggest example I can think of that I feel kind of funny/weird (not funny ha-ha) laughing at was the Carl Sagan exercise in pronouncing the hieroglyphs for “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra” on the otherwise outstanding Cosmos series from the 80’s.
At times I get the feeling I’m being whooshed by such arcane research.
Next thing you know somebody’s going to assure us that Jesus spoke Shakesperean (or at least Elizabethan) English.
If this was a hikack, it’s done now.
I planned to post on this very issue! (I got sidetracked with the Daniel Day-Lewis thing). I forget the source, but some researcher(s) came to the conclusion that, due to the isolation of the society from other influences, the accent of the hill people in Appalachia (how much of that region I can’t recall specifically but at least in the Southern Appalachians of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and perhaps other sections of South Carolina and Georgia) was/is very close to the language of the England (and other areas of Britain) their forebears had migrated away from in the early migrations to what’s now USA territories.
If you factor in the fact that the music of that region descends with little interruption from Irish, Scots, English and maybe even Welsh regions of the British Isles, borne out by much research by musicologists and "song catchers’ working that region since the days before recordings took over for them (see the Carter Family for a big for instance) then the accent descendance from that era makes a fair amount of sense.
Perhaps the Bluegrass and Old Style singing still being fostered by the likes of Ricky Skaggs, Alison Krauss and others, and the “shaped note singing” so prominent in Cold Mountain might be seen as a lens into the past. In any case, it has a heritage that is well above scorn and derision.
I am firmly of the belief that most hollywood voice coaches have never actually heard half of the dialects they attempt to teach their clients. But that’s fine, because neither have the American audiences.
Brad Pitt manages Norn Irish…but it’s a generic Norn Irish that skips through vast swathes of the six counties in a single sentence. Even though we’ve a population of 1,500,000 and are smaller than most American Counties, we’ve got very distinctive accents for each area. Even Ballymena, Ballymoney and Coleraine have different accents and they’re with an hour’s drive of each other.
All they had to do was tell him “West Belfast” and sit him down in front of endless tapes of Gerry Adams.
I’ve just watched an episode of Alias where the main bad guy is supposed to be Northern Irish, with a genuine Northern Irish Accent because he’s played by a genuine Northern Irish actor. However, his sister is played by Kelly McDonald, the girl from Trainspotting, who uses her own SCOTTISH accent throughout. Now, I know she can do a good Dublin accent (Intermission), and really Northern Irish woud not be difficult for her. I can only assume that they chose to go ahead without changing on the basis that it all sounds the same to their audience.
My favourite version of northern irish accents are when the actors just give up and do their own accent and throw in a few “so it is” in at the end of sentences.
irishgirl, I hope you can answer a trivia question about Ireland. Actually two questions.
Is there such a place as Glocca Morra? (as in the song from Finian’s Rainbow How Are Things In…)
Is there such a place as Ballyutogue? (as in the Leon Uris novel Trinity)
Glocca Morra, I don’t think so.
There’s a Carnamona in Galway, but that’s about as near as it gets.
No Ballyutogue in Donegal either, although it could have been modelled on either Ballybofey or Ballyliffen.
The best movie for “New England” accents is Miracle. I think that a lot of the players they used were actually from Boston.
Those of us who are from New England also differentiate locales. I think a Maine accent is different from what I call a Boston accent, which is different than how Kennedy spoke.
One terrible butchering of the Maine accent was Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne. Most of time the time, you can feel the actor waiting for the “obvious” parts of the accent.
Here it comes
“pAHk your cAH ovah THEY-uh”.
- yes! nailed it.*
Technically. . .maybe they get it, but it never sounds natural. Actually, the part of my Maine accent that I retain most strongly is the “or” syllable. It’s not easy to describe the difference in writing, and it is usually ignored by actors. If they dropped everything else except that, they’d be more convincing.
I actually thought Tom Hanks in Catch Me if You Can wasn’t bad. I know it sounded like Mayor Quimby, but it was a decent approximation of Kennedy’s accent, too.
I’m reminded of an anecdote by a Hollywood dialectitian who was consulted by the producers of Kung Fu. They wanted the actors in the China scenes to speak in “authentic Chinese dialect.” The dialectitian thought this was an odd idea – why would Chinese people living in China be speaking a Chinese English dialect? But they insisted. When he taught some lines to some actors, the producers were shocked at how silly it seemed. So they just decided that the actors should try out a sort of “mannered” speech rather than an authentic dialect.
I now know what to rent tonight!
I believe this is urban legend territory.
Nah. McGregor’s accent in Big Fish sounds horribly fakey to my north Georgia ears.
The guy who did a pretty good fake Southern accent in that movie was (somewhat surprisingly) Danny DeVito.
Perhaps so. But this article makes a case similar to others I’ve encountered before.
Oh my god, yes! That accent was painfully, horribly bad.
Ewan McGregor did a decent job in The Island, but I could hear his Scottish slipping through on occasion.
Speaking of Deadwood, Ian McShane’s (Al Swearengen) accent is so perfect I was absolutely shocked to learn he was British.
'Allo 'Allo was different because it was all part of the comedy.
You may remember the policman, Officer Crabtree, who was a British undercover agent. The way that this was got across was by having him horribly mangle his words…to give the impression of a native English speaker trying (and not succeeding) to speak French.
Examples:
Officer Crabtree: I have good nose.
René: Yes, you are very handsome…
Officer Crabtree: The troon has been bummed by the RAF
Officer Crabtree: God Moaning. The resist-once have accqo-aired a bum. They are going to ex-plod the whaleway brodge
Officer Crabtree: I was pissing by the door when I heard a shat.
It worked quite well, in that it was very, very funny.
But isn’t his character British?
I’ve never heard Sean Connery not sound Scots, whether playing an Irish cop in The Untouchables or an immortal ancient Egyptian in Highlander (which made a nice contrast to Christopher Lambert’s Scotsman; Lambert was born in Long Island but grew up in Switzerland and France).
In the movie Choice of Weapons, Peter Cushing’s completely British teenage son goes to school in America and comes back ten years later as David Birney, sounding completely American.
I’ve seen it happen in real life.