Or playing Yul Brynner’s son in Taras Bulba.
In his as-told-to autobiography, Curtis says he didn’t realize at the time he sounded like Cary Grant in SLIH; he was just trying to do an English accent, period.
True story: At the private language school where I used to teach in Moscow, there was an Irish teacher who was assigned to a high school way out in the sticks. When he left after teaching there for three years, the teacher who took his place found that all of the Russian kids spoke English with an unmistakable Irish accent!
FWIW, British Received Pronunciation is what’s taught at all state schools that don’t employ foreigners, and it’s what most students do their best to emulate. All of the textbooks that were used at my school used PR as well (since they were, of course, printed in the UK).
The worst American accent I’ve heard by a British actor was Oliver Reed in *The Shuttered Room. *
It was filmed in England, but set in H.P. Lovecraft’s New England. After Gig Young and his young wife Carol Lynley return to her ancestral island village of Dunwich, her cousin Reed and his gang of louts begin terrorizing them and attempt to rape Lynley.
Reed’s accent wanders up and down the eastern coast of the U.S throughout the film., sometimes sounding like he’s the sheriff of Dogpatch, sometimes like a New Yorker, sometimes like a Bizarro version of someone from Maine. One of his henchmen sounds exactly like one of the Bowery Boys. The actor who played Lynley’s uncle had such a bad American accent that an uncredited Donald Sutherland had to dub in his dialogue. Apparently the New England accent is hard for those from England (whereas the Canadian Sutherland could pull it off.) Southern American accents may be easier for English tongues.
In the earlier Children of the Damned. which was set in England, Reed also played another leader of a gang of toughs, but when a middle-aged American yachtsman challenges him in the film, Reed briefly mocks him by feigning an American accent - which is incongruously spot-on and really funny.
Alan Cummings’ American accent in The Good Wife is fairly accurate; enough so that it’s a bit of a startlement to me to see his introductions of Sherlock on Masterpiece Mystery; I always have a brief moment of “Oh! That’s right, he’s Scottish, isn’t he?”
This is not necessarily unrealistic. I knew a family in which the New Zealand-born father, Australia-born mother, and their English-born daughter all had different accents.
Yeah, the trench newspaper some of the Tommies produced was called The Wipers Times
Was Millicent Martin doing a Mancunian accent as Daphne’s mother? I know she sounds different in real life; doesn’t she normally speak with Received Pronunciation?
Interesting you should post that link now. Looking at the paper, I see it’ll be exactly 100 years old next week.
I love David Tennant (and he does a great English accent from his native Scottish) but his American accent ranges from passable to downright cringeworthy. It was tough watching him in “Gracepoint” (the American version of “Broadchurch”) because his accent was so spotty.
Good one. I’d seen Cumming doing an American accent and an English accent before I ever heard his actual Scottish accent so it was another one that caught me by surprise.
It was about as approximate as Jane Leeves’s - broad sitcom Northern. Millicent Martin was born in the Essex suburbs of London. Thinking back to her performances in That Was The Week That Was, back in the early 60s, her accent wasn’t particularly RP, closer to the modern “estuary” accent, what with the general loosening up of the period.
She was also specifically “from Britannia.”
He also said he deliberately modified it because he thought people wouldn’t be able to understand the real thing. So it makes sense that he’d add more American to it, and thus make it sound fake.
Though I do note that Scottish people tell Craig Fergusson that he sounds American, meaning he’s actually a cross between the two. Yet no one says he sound fake.
The one thing I noticed about Hugh Laurie’s accent is that I expect him to have some vowel narrowing before the “a as in cat” vowel when before N, but he doesn’t. But I’ve since heard other people who really do have that accent but don’t have the vowel narrowing, so it must’ve just been me.
Even British actors can’t always do British accents right. The classic film Get Carter from 1971 was filmed in Newcastle and the North-east; but there is exactly one real Geordie accent in it - all the rest are generic (bad) Northern accents, and Michael Caine, who doesn’t try.
That’s because Craig Ferguson has lived in the US for awhile now and it’s perfectly normal for people who move to a new location to pick up local vocal attributes to some degree. I don’t know why that surprises people. Accents aren’t static and unvarying. Well, maybe if you never stray more than 10 miles from the place of your birth but that’s not the modern world.
As if millions of accents suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…?
Ah, but Michael Caine was playing a Londoner who travels to the North-East.
Kate Winslet’s American accent in Titanic was pretty bad. She sounded like she practiced by imitating Judy Garland films.
Alan Rickman affects a hilariously bad American accent in Die Hard, although that was the point. On the other hand, wasn’t his character supposed to be German? Hans Gruber doesn’t sound German at all.
Nitpick; Jack Carter was supposed to be a Geordie who had moved to London to join the gangs; he returned home to avenge his brother’s killing
…apparently bringing with him a London accent (the only one Maurice Micklewhite can do).
Err no. I found that he was trying hard but he was not speaking like a true Brit. No his accent was not as good as Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma.
Her accent in Sliding Doors was the best accent I have heard from a non-English person. I had never heard of her when I saw the film and had no idea she was not English.