are you under the impression that there is only one “British” dialect? If you think the USA accents are varied you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
Cannot stand listening to Angelina Jolie butcher the English accent.
And Sullivan Stapleton in Blindspot. I know that’s not the same because he is Australian but he is really bad. I knew he wasn’t American but didn’t know he wasn’t a Brit until I looked him up. To me it seems that too many Brit and Australian actors think whispering in a husky voice sounds American. Stapleton sounds like he is always out of breath. On the other end Damien Lewis is amazing with accents.
Another series with bad American accents was Spooks, a spy drama that was aired in the US as MI-5. In particular there was an actress playing an American who had a horrible accent.
Don Cheadle in the Oceans 11+ movies. Great actor, horrible accent. And there really was no reason for him not to be American.
Can you be more specific? I stopped watching past the first few seasons. The recurring role of a CIA agent in the first few seasons was played by Megan Dodds who is from California but has lived in the UK for years.
as I’ve remarked before, Leo McKern, who was undoubtedly great (He was Rumpole of the Bailey. And played The Village’s No. 2 more times than anyone else. And had tons of roles in movies from Help! to A Man for All Seasons to The Blue Lagoon and The French Lieutenant’s Woman), couldn’t handle a North American accent to save his soul. His way of portraying a Canadian was to s-p-e-a-k v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
The Irish actress Genevieve O’Reilly played a CIA agent later on in the series. Her accent was…unusual.
I’m English and thought Downey was fine. (Maybe Jude Law helped him - they made a great team.)
P.S. Great Britain is made up of England, Scotland and Wales. Sherlock Holmes was English.
See above about the non-existence of a ‘British’ accent.
You can argue that there’s an ‘educated’ English accent, but here’s some of the English accents I can easily tell apart:
North London
South London
West Country
Birmingham
Liverpool
Newcastle
The attempt to portray Robert Plant in the first episode of Vinyl was absolutely woeful:
I was at a meeting over the weekend where one of the participants observed that “Americans think I have a British accent. Australians think I have an American accent. Only the British seem to realize that I have an Australian accent, although it’s not a standard one.”
Slight derail, but: recently I started watching an Australian show made in Melbourne: Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. I’m intrigued by the way that accents are handled–only a few cast members sound (to my American ears) Australian, while most of the cast use what sounds like a generic sort of Oxbridge accent. (Perhaps they film more than one version, for sale to differing markets…?)
QFT. My first thought when I read sachertorte’s post about bad American accents was “Daleks In Manhattan”. Those were some awful attempts at American speech.
Marc Sheppard wasn’t bad in “The Impossible Astronaut”, but really the only actor on Doctor Who who sounds like an American is John Barrowman. And he got his Midwestern accent honestly: by growing up in Normal, Illinois.
Elisabeth Moss attempting a Sydney accent in Top of the Lake. It seemed like they tried to keep her dialog to a minimum, as she was hopeless.
I could be wrong, but wasn’t that once upon a time a class marker in Australia? That is the “standard” Australian accent ( to American ears ) was that of the hoi polloi, while the wealthy spoke in an accent much closer to the Queen’s English?
Come to think of it, that does seem to be the rule for who ‘sounds Australian’ (to Americans) in the show, and who doesn’t–that is, it’s the working-class characters who have the Aussie sound. (And the show is set in the 1920s.)
The reason Carrie Fishers accent ‘melts away’ is because she’s not addressing Imperials after she’s rescued.
Dinklage’s accent is so bad he REALLY isn’t doing an English accent. It’s basically Dinklage doing an affected voice. I’ve done the same in a few plays where the character is ‘European’. I just throw out a voice and by the time the show starts its just taken on a life of its own.
A few observations. Costner in JFK, not bad. Costner in Thirteen Days? “Oh GOD is he going to talk like this the whole show”??
Best American doing a British accent? Forrest Whitaker of all people in The Crying Game.
I dunno. Gwyneth Paltrow’s RP in Shakespeare In Love and Sliding Doors sounded authentic to me. But I’m not British, so my opinion might not have much value.
Renee Zellweger got an office job in England, passing as a Brit among Brits, to hone her accent for BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY (for which she was BAFTA-nominated).
She pretty much nailed that accent, impressively so.