James Earl Jones has what can only be called his own accent - or at least, I’ve never heard anyone else speak like him. In his case, there’s an understandable reason for it: he had a very severe stutter as a child, to the point where he didn’t speak for eight years:
(From Wikipedia.)
Tina Turner.
Nina Simone.
You don’t read previous posts do you? There is no problem with that that. He is my #1 too (posted above) and his stories about his life are beyond bizarre. I have tried to figure out if he is a real person rather than playing a character and everything I can come up with suggests that he is real. If anyone wants to listen to his stories, he is amazing but start at the bottom with “The Apron Strings of Savannah” and work your way up. The stories aren’t that long but they are unique. I think I just got a lot more screwed up just by exposure.
Not defending the verifiability of his accent, but my family were expats and each of us kids learned to talk in a different country, and our accents are are all noticably different now as adults.
Edgar Oliver certainly has his own accent, if that is his usual voice.
:smack: :smack:
Sorry Shagnasty - thought I had but so very clearly missed it. So much for my smartphone usage.
No problem. I think Edgar Oliver is real rather than a character because I met someone much like him before. There used to be a ‘store’ on Newbury Street in Boston (the toniest area in Boston) called Gargoyles, Grotesques & Chimeras except it wasn’t really a store in the conventional sense. It had no signs to distinguish it from the other almost identical buildings around and, although I found it many times, it simply disappeared most of the time and I had to find it again. Once you got inside, it was nothing but a scattered array of religious artifacts laid out like a warehouse style pillage of very large artifacts ranging from Catholic to Celtic to Protestant with this odd single key piano music playing in the background. There was no organization, no price tags or anything else (I posted about the music years ago and someone who was also an enthusiast of this incredibly eccentric store sent me a copy of the music - it is called Melancholy with No End and I love it).
The relevance to this thread is that I know the owner of that store is a very real person. He freaked my then high-school aged brother right out when he described the history of the ‘Green Man’ that I bought for him. He sounded a whole lot like Edgar Oliver does today but he was nice, knowledgeable and sincere. It is like you stumbled upon the Addams Family gift store.
It’s a total affectation. She was born in Idaho and moved to Alaska very young, where she grew up.
I’ve never heard anybody else speak quite like Katherine Hepburn.
Unlikely. It’s extremely hard to stay “in character” like that 24/7. Same with GWB. People don’t like them, but that’s no reason to believe they have fake accents.
Yeah, sort of. But I think her accent, much like FDR is as much of their times as anything. No one talks that way now because accents have changed.
That is so not a standard Australian accent. I don’t know WHAT that is - a little Aussie, some south of England mixed in with a bit of Irish, perhaps? Anyway, his voice is extremely … um … unique. Probably helps, when you’re a comedian.
Stephen Hawking.
Apparently his parents are Irish. He doesn’t sound like any other Aussie I’ve ever met, not even the ones with Irish parents.
I always thought he was a transplant from England, but no, he was born in Blackwater,Queensland.
I found this amusing little rant about him:
“HE’s totally unbearable! His accent is Y-gen medication. Or Woolloomooloo Yank. Or ADHD teenager. Or Antonioni-ennuied young monotonal adult. Like one of those obnoxious brats on the bus going to private schools. Like, like and um like they can’t stop talking, like OMG I shouldn’t have said that. I just find the show and the persona the most irritating things I’ve ever seen on a television set.”
More here
http://opiniondominion.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/the-case-of-comedian-accent.html
Tommy Wiseau. He is totally, 100% American (according to him) because he likes the footballs and drinks so many litres of beer while watching them throw the old skin of pig.
As I have no clear idea if there is an Idaho or Alaska accent, I have to assume it is her invention. It just sounds exaggeratedly upper Midwestern, and her syntax is all her own.
Julia Child. Born and raised in Pasadena, CA.
Without knowing he’s Australian, I would have placed his accent as southwest England with slight Welsh influences, plus bits of Californian and only very occasionally, Australian
It would seem so, but as an Alaskan myself, I can tell you that nobody up there talks remotely like that unless they’re a transplant from somewhere up on the Mesabi Range. I’ve known a lot of people from the Midwest (and was married to one), and while some of them had a readily identifiable way of speaking, none of them sounded like Palin. Her speech is like a caricature of what people think a Midwest accent sounds like. I would suspect that she started doing it gradually while young because people thought it sounded ‘cute’. Perhaps she was influenced by a friend from the Midwest, but I don’t buy it as real.
As for Katherine Hepburn, Imdb says she had a “distinctive way of speaking, with what many say is a ‘Bryn Mawr’ accent.”
Vincent Price…born and raised in Missoura.
St. Louis, for what it matters. Four counties over from where Mark Twain was born.