Michael Caine in the Cider House Rules is a pathetic accent.
Colin Farrel’s in Minority Report is perfect. Jamie Bamber on Battlestar is equally excellent.
Of course, Bamber is not playing an American. So it can’t really be judged to be either bad OR good.
cochrane writes:
> Nicole Kidman also can do a convincing American accent in my opinion.
Of course, she spent the first three and a half years of her life in Honolulu and Washington, D.C.
Rachel Griffiths did a pretty good American accent on Six Feet Under.
Chalk me up as another person who had no idea that Lee Adama was played by a Brit.
I had no idea until I saw him in the Horatio Hornblower BBC movies.
The all-time worst American accent I’ve ever heard was Benny Hill*. It was so bad I could only tell he was trying to be American because he was wearing a cowboy hat and waving an American flag.
*who, granted, was not known for his particularly stellar acting skills.
I recently watched “The Meaning of Life” and those American accents were god awful. I had a hard time figuring out they were supposed to be American accents.
Marc
Minnie Driver does a reasonably good Southern accent in The Riches, but Eddie Izzard’s American accent is not so good. Clip.
Fun show, though.
I cringe when an episode of the new Doctor Who takes place in America. It’s not only the accents, it’s the words and the phrases. What’s bizarre is that some of the actors in the episode “Dalek” were American (living in England), and they still spoke Brit-like.
It’s funny that the OP mentions Daphne (Jane Leeves) from Frasier. In a book on Benny Hill (yes she was on that) she was asked why Daphne was supposed to be from Manchester, when she didn’t sound at all like a Mancucian. She replied that if she did an authentic Manchester accent, American audiences couldn’t understand her. So a British actress had a really bad British accent.
I’d always assumed that Daphne was an American trying to do a Mancunian accent. It did tend to wander a bit on occasions.
I’d always assumed that Daphne was an American trying to do a Mancunian accent. It did tend to wander a bit on occasions.
As for really, truly dreadful British accents, didn’t David Boreanaz attempt to do an Irish accent in an episode of Buffy?
In fairness, they were probably trying to be over-the-top, but yeah, it took me a while to figure out the tourists in the aloha dungeon were supposed to be Americans.
Several episodes of Buffy and Angel, in fact. Whenever they showed a flashback to his early life as Liam (human) or Angelus (his evil vampire persona, before he was cursed with a soul and became good-guy Angel), he spoke with a horrible Irish accent.
Meanwhile, his Angel castmate Alexis Denisof, another American, did one of the best British accents I’ve ever heard as the character Wesley Wyndham-Pryce.
That’s cos he learned from a master (not The Master)
Australian actor Jack Thompson’s southern US accent in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was so good that I don’t think anyone was aware he wasn’t a local (or so I’ve heard).
Well, yes, I’m aware of that. But is three years old enough to not have your American accent wiped out by moving to Australia and spending most of your childhood and all your teen years there? Mel Gibson was born in New York and lived there until he was 12 and many people say his Aussie accent colors whatever role he plays as an American.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard Kobe Bryant speak at length. His father is a former NBA player who went to Italy to play professional basketball. Kobe was born in Philadelphia and lived in Italy from when he was 6 until about 13 and learned to speak fluent Italian. His speech retains traces of an Italian accent. I know, I’m comparing oranges to apples, Kobe isn’t an actor. But people can grow up in one place and learn a language, but their accent will be most strongly influenced by their family members and the people one grows up around. I don’t think a particular accent can be hard-wired into a person at that early an age like in the case of Nicole Kidman.
Clearly, none of you have tried to sit through Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins.” Horrible. Just horrible.
Manc here and it’s pronounced “nugget”.
new-gah my arse
I thought Hugo Weaving did a good American accent in The Matrix. It was a bit stylized, but definitely good.