Having been born and raised in an upper-class Connecticut early in the last century, I think this may simply have been the way Hepburn naturally spoke. Perhaps the transatlantic accent of old Hollywood films arose as an attempt to imitate that accent.
Come to think of it, Audrey Hepburn as well seems to have had that accent, though since English wasn’t her native language it’s probably more because of that than any affectation or dialect coaching.
If Price was in financial difficulties resulting from this episode, that might explain why, at some point in the mid to late 1980s, he was shilling a cheap 3D camera. (Cheaply made, that is, not inexpensive.) You had to send the film to a company in Arizona for processing.
It was a sad thing to see, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
He seemed very “Camp” i cant remember Mid-Atlantic dialect bening that.
Audrey grew up speaking English and Dutch. Her father was a Brit. Her mother Dutch. She spoke 6 languages in fact. A lot of her schooling was in French in Belgium.
Audrey had a different accent than Mid-Atlantic. But not quite a standard English one either, so I can see lumping her in with the others.
I think you might be right about Katherine, but she is general considered to speak with a Mid-Atlantic accent, even if she did grow up with it, rather than learn it.
I cant stand her, exept in African Queen
A word that I reach for is “unctuous”. But, looking at the clip linked in the OP, Price is pretty clearly presenting the gay sociolect. He’s not laying it in on thick as some do, but his toast is certainly well-spread with it.
He’s also not performing the accent he does in acting roles. In that, he’s very clearly affecting a kind of British accent. I distinctly do not find it Mid-Atlantic.
Not every sort-of-British thing is Mid-Atlantic. For example Price is quite rhotic, he uses his R’s. Mid-Atlantickers tend to avoid that, because they’re trying to take on the social affectations of a London socialite, not a farmer from the Westlands. (It bears noting that British English used to be much more rhotic, and this shift in itself was also a form of social striving. In this manner, the non-coastal parts of the US are more conservative to British speech than the Brits themselves, so Price’s native Missourian is serving him well in terms of presenting one historical type of very pure British accent).
So anyway. Vincent Price elocutes like an actor in all his speech. He isn’t a mid-Atlanticker like Cary Grant, he falls into his own peculiar British-like accent when speaking theatrically, though not in his conversational speech. In normal speech he’s a bit twee, neither hiding it nor overdoing it. But in a way, he’s conserving a type of Elizabethan-era pronounciation in the same way we can say many rural Brits and inland Americans do (or did, before widespread urbanization).
I did say that his accent wasn’t exactly the same as some others who took the Mid-Atlantic accent; it does seem that he added that bit of over-the-top “camp,” for lack of a better term.
But you also keep saying that you think he was trying to sound British, which has nothing to do with “camp,” and a lot to do with what the Mid-Atlantic accent was all about.
Zachary Scott was a Price contemporary who played the same kind of roles. In reality he was from the South and could be convincing on the occasions he got to play a Southerner. I think it was just an affectation that a lot of actors had at the time.
I don’t think he necessarily came off that way in his time. I can’t claim to know, but I think today anyone who behaves or speaks “differently” is likely to be thought of as gay, whereas in earlier times they might have, at least sometimes, been thought of as an eccentric character. Then, too, film audiences of the mid 20th century expected their gentleman villains to be perfectly attired with such accessories as silk foulards, and wearing a velvet smoking jacket at home didn’t hurt either. They were further expected to speak with perfect articulation rather than the way most people actually speak.
There were some villains – Vincent Price played one – on the 1960s Batman TV show that were played to have some of the same characteristics. Besides Price’s Egghead, Cesar Romero’s Joker particularly comes to mind.
George Sanders (of course he was British anyway)