I thought that her speech was very like that of Britishers, but there are some gentlemen who don’t agree with me.
Could you help me with describing her accent? Was her accent in Dinner at Eight mostly British?
Example of her accent:
Related Thread:
Speaking as an actor with a fine arts degree including vocal education:
Formally trained American actors of that era, both stage and screen, received elocution lessons in which the “transatlantic” dialect was taught and enforced. This is an unusual and unrealistic mode of speech which hybridizes northeast-US accents with an upper-class British influence in order to create an idiosyncratic pseudo-aristocratic pattern of speaking.
You can hear Katherine Hepburn leveraging the same vocal training in this clip from the Philadelphia Story.
It’s not British, of any flavor. It’s not American. It’s not anything that is like the way anyone talks in the real world. It’s Actor Speak, and it’s all part of the heightened dream reality that movies were selling in that area. The Method revolutions that followed, as exemplified by actors like James Dean, were in large part a reaction against this kind of unreal performance.
Anyway, Billie Burke is doing the same thing, just with the dial cranked up to eleven.
Isn’t that the same accent Kelsey Grammer uses?
I immediately thought Boston Brahmin.
I would say that to a certain degree, yes, Kelsey Grammer uses a version of the Mid-Atlantic accent as a character choice to appear “elite” (snobby, elevated).
This.
I vaguely remember an SCTV sketch making fun of this phenomenon. What sticks with me is Catherine O’Hara dramatically lighting a cigarette and saying, “Oh, Johnny! Johnny!” more than a few times. Not a great example of the accent, but maybe a reminder for somebody.
The only thing I would add to Cervaise’s excellent explanation is that I’ve always heard it referred to as a “midlantic” accent, i.e., somewhere between New England and Britain.
Wikipedia has a page discussing it.
Other names for it:
Larchmont lockjaw
Locust Valley lockjaw
Boarding school lockjaw
Boston Brahmin
(I’ve heard transatlantic, midatlantic, and midlantic, with the first being somewhat more frequent, so that’s what I went with.)
Is William F. Buckley’s accent midAtlantic or something else?
Some of the people who spoke this accent weren’t actors. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s accent was something like this. He grew up in a rich New York family. He went to a prep school and to Ivy League colleges for both his undergraduate education and for law school. Rich people from the northeastern U.S. spoke in accents like this. William F. Buckley is a strange case. He was born in a rich New York family. However, as a child he spent time in Mexico, London, and Paris. English was his third language, since he learned to speak Spanish first and then French. He then moved back to the U.S. His accent was thus influenced by Spanish, French, and upper-class British English:
I thought that her soft “l” was rather British. Why her pitch was very high (very like that of British speakers.
Btw, thanks a lot.
The speech of Roosevelt was pretty different from that of Billie Burke. His “l” was dark, velarized.
I find both Roosevelt’s and Burke’s accents to be weirdly different from any I know of now:
It’s evident, but they’re different from each other in the same time, aren’t they?
Yes, they are.
One of the most interesting examples is Helen Keller. She was instructed in speech by some of the most highly-thought of at the time, speech teachers in the east, who taught that dialect, and even though it is hard to understand exactly what Keller is saying most of the time, you can still hear the accent.
She spent a good number of her formative years living in London, where she went to a lot of plays, and decided she wanted to be a stage actress. If her midatlantic accent skews a bit further east than some others, that may be the reason.
For a long time I thought David Ogden Stiers was British because of the affected snobby Bostonian accent he used for Charles Emerson Winchester III (which at the time I knew nothing about). I guess that’s the same kind of thing you’re all talking about.
When I was a kid, I thought that rich people actually talked like Thurston Howell III.