its weird you brought this up because everytime I hear it I wonder what the fuck is going on with it. I can never think of examples either but john lithgow is totally spot on. I usually just call it “i’m a prick” accent
Good trivia question: which two members of the Frasier cast were born in England?
Jane Leeves, obviously, and John Mahoney (Marty Crane), born in Blackpool and brought up in Manchester
And I agree with the sentiment that the accents so far discussed sound very American. Dare I suggest it, even suggesting social status, and elevating class above origin?
Cool! I guessed right!
Or, as we’re kind of getting to with the other replies here, the “rich enough to go to Harvard” accent?
Oh, the England one is easy. Now guess how many cast members are actually gay!
Isn’t this what they used to call a Mid-Atlantic accent? Halfway between British and American?
Aaaaand wiki.
The accent is Standard Amercian aka Mid-atlantic. It is a dialect developed by voice experts for the theatre, and is not indigenous to any particular region. It allows the actor to speak loudly and clearly with a minimum of effort and stress on the vocal apparatus. In addition, it sounds educated and “not from around here”, making it useful in a wide variety of roles. It also makes it easy to transplant actors from one region to another. An actor from New York and an actor from Edinburgh could both work in a production in Tennessee without having to learn a new accent or sounding out of place, thanks to the standard accent.
As mentioned in the Wiki article, the thing that sprang to my mind was Katharine Hepburn, and the riff Jennifer Jason Leigh played on her accent in The Hudsucker Proxy.
Is it the infamous “Cambridge Accent”? An affectation of people who don’t want to sound like they’re from the Boston area so instead go for a posh pseudo-British lilt to their words.
Hmm. Well, I think the definitive answer to the OP is MidAtlantic, as laid out in the wiki article, but I’ve never heard that referred to as “standard American” before. It’s always been reserved for the poshest upper crust, or those who want to sound like that. Newscaster-Midwestern is closer to *standard *American.
I’ll second this. I roomed in college with a bunch of theater majors who were trained to talk this same way.
Correction: Newscaster-Midwestern is General American aka CNN English.
The names of dialects aren’t always intuitive; upper-class English is often called Received Pronunciation, or British RP, RP, or BBC English.
Perhaps a good nickname for Standard American would be “Theatre English”.
Did you beat any of them senseless with a sock full of quarters? I know I would have.
“And I stepped on the ping pong ball!”
crickets chirping
“Well, it was ghastly! Well, it was just ghastly!”
Sorry. I simply adore that movie.
Hmm. Well I’m gonna keep calling the OP-referred accent Mid-Atlantic; it doesn’t make sense to me to call it Standard, since, well, since it’s not.
Not that I doubt you, as such, but do you have a cite that “Standard American” is used to describe the Mid-Atlantic accent rather than the General American accent?
Not familiar with John O’Hurley, but I do know John Lithgow of course. I can hear that he has what you might term a cultivated American accent but it had never occurred to me that it might sound “almost British”.
Hmm, re-reading that post it occurs to me that it might sound rather snobbish. Like there’s an ascending hierarchy, American -> Cultivated American -> British. That is not what I meant 
.
Let’s, please. The only other person I’ve met from Manchester sounded just like her, and as a linguistic major, I’d love to hear what “weird ‘Manchester’” means in this context.
Standard American is not Mid-Atlantic or Theatre English. Standard American English is, by definition, the accent perceived by most American listeners as “neutral”, and the one most appropriate to the widest variety of job interviews and news programs. Which is the same thing as General American, BTW. And it’s pretty much the standard “Midwestern” accent, like you say, but IMO it sounds more and more like California English every day. “Do You Speak American?” by Robert MacNeil and William Cran contains, IIRC, a compelling argument that SAE is becoming more like California English.
Just to make sure you keep on doubting the OP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_American_English
And for the academically inclined, an assful of linguistic studies whose very existence assumes and even depends on the definition of SAE that I gave above:
Hosoda, Megumi; Stone-Romero, Eugene F; Walter, Jennifer N. Listeners’ cognitive and affective reactions to English speakers with Standard American English and Asian accents. Perceptual & Motor Skills; Feb 2007, Vol 104 Issue 1, p307-326.
Fogel, Howard; Ehri, Linnea C. Teaching African American English forms to Standard American English-speaking teachers. Journal of Teacher Education; Nov/Dec 2006, Vol 57 Issue 5, p464-480.
Billings, Andrew C. Beyond the Ebonics Debate: Attitudes About Black and Standard American English. Journal of Black Studies; Sep 2005, Vol 36 Issue 1, p68-81.
Sligh, Allison C; Conners, Frances A. Relation of dialect to phonological processing: African American Vernacular English vs. Standard American English. Contemporary Educational Psychology; Apr 2003, Vol 28 Issue 2, p205, 24p.
Wiel KS; Fitch JL; Wolfe VI. Diphthong changes in style shifting from Soutehrn English to Standard American English. Journal of Communication Disorders; Mar-Apr 2000, Vol 33 (2), pp 151-63.
Canady C; Sumimoto CY; Wojcicki RM. A comparison of Hawaiian Creole and standard American English speakers by listeners familiar and unfamiliar with Hawaiian Creole. Asia Pacific Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing; 2000, 5(3), 157-62.
Ray, George B.; Zahn, Christopher, J. Language Attitudes and Speech Behavior: New Zealand English and Standard American English. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Sep 1999, vol 18 n3 p310-19.
ETA: Overkill? Thanks, it’s what I do. 