(I’m sticking this in CS because, well, they’re both actors.)
Both John O’Hurley (most famous as the voice of Elaine’s boss, the fictitious J. Peterman, on Seinfeld) and John Lithgow have it. It sounds almost British, but both of them are, as far as I know, American born and bred. Is it a regional accent? Is it something they picked up doing too much Shakespeare in their college drama classes? Is it pure affectation? Both of them use the same accent in everyday speech as they do in their roles. I’ve just never been anyplace where people spoke like that: not New York (where Lithgow is from), not downeast (O’Hurley is from Maine), and certainly nowhere in the West or deep South.
I don’t really hear any type of accent when they talk. They just seem to have an overly dramatic way of speaking. Kind of like some of the Jon Lovitz characters. “I’m a thespian!” “Subway! Eat fresh!”
Of course they have an accent. Everyone has an accent.
As an English person, I do think they sound kind of posh English (not British - British accents are wildly different from each other). The Bostonian gourmand Lloyd Grossman, who is a TV presenter over here, sounds kind of like the examples given, but weirder.
Lloyd Grossman has lived between London and the Eastern US long enough that his accent has changed a fair bit. I can still hear a touch of the elongated Bostonian vowels, a hint of his time in Toronto, and London. In any case here is Lloyd:
I watched a 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone” last night starring Julie Newmar (as “Miss Devlin,” with sexy little horns glued to her head), who also seemed to speak with some odd pseudo-British inflections. Today I checked Wikipedia and IMDb to see where she was born and raised, thinking she must have at least attended some overseas school teaching British English in her childhood to have acquired that accent. (Hard to explain it exactly, but there was a distinct non-native pronunciation to some words.)
It only says she was born in Los Angeles and I can’t find anything mentioning living or studying abroad, or her parents being immigrants. Maybe she was just trying to sound “upper crust.”
At any rate, she was smokin’ hot in 1963. The guy in the episode sold his soul to go back in time to the town of his childhood—he *must’ve *been gay.
It irritates me slightly when people suggest that the Crane brothers in Frasier sound British. They don’t. They sound affected, yes, but 100% American. On that show, the food critic Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert) is the most English-sounding (apart from the actually-English character Daphne, but let’s not go into her weird “Manchester” accent just now), and indeed that actor spent his formative years in Blighty, according to Wikipedia.
