Another vote for Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I think he just couldn’t decide, day to day on the set, whether or not he really wanted to do an English accent. Ugh.
How about *Max Headroom’s *(Matt Frewer’s) terrible Australian accent on *Eureka *? The show’s a lot of fun until every time he opens his mouth. I mean, there’s no reason he NEEDS to be Australian…or, if the character needs to be, why not just hire an Australian actor!!!
Which is basically what I said???
Meryl Streep in Silkwood.
Not only was it a horrendous fake of an Okie accent, but it wasn’t even consistent! The supposed queen of accents slid in and out of that one so much you’da thought she was greased.
Not to mention that she was out-acted and out-accented by Cher.
Why are you guys picking on Kevin Costner for Robin Hood? It would be just as easy to pick on him for 13 Days. His Boston accent is atrocious in that. But not as bad as Rob Morrow’s in Quiz Show.
Season 1 of 24 – where was Dennis Hopper supposed to be from again?
Southerners – how was Costner’s accent in The War? For that matter, how was Elijah Wood’s?
Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Cate Blanchett as the villain in the last Indiana Jones movie. Did she learn that accent from watching old Bullwinkle cartoons?
I wish I knew the name of the movie, but while channel surfing I saw Anthony Hopkins attempting a southern accent in a movie that was obviously made in the last few years. Dreadful; he sounded like a southern doing a bad Anthony Hopkins imitation.
Where he was clearly doing a JFK imitation. The real Goodwin (very much alive and a consultant on the movie so Morrow had access) sounds nothing like that.
Many will disagree, but I hated Philip Seymour Hoffman’s accent in Capote. To me it sounded like somebody doing a Capote impression; I didn’t believe it as his real voice. (Toby Jones absolutely nailed it in INFAMOUS the next year, though his performance received no mention at the Oscars or most other major U.S. award shows.)
Meh - Sam Neill and the Finn’s are Kiwis (though Crowded House is Australian), but Russell Crowe we’ll give you (especially when he’s being a lout). We have to learn to share. 
Oh yes. Fake Ozzie accents are bad, and the occasional fake Kiwi too. Sometimes seem to come out sounding South African.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was pretty awful, and Kevin Spacey turned in a particularly horrific parody of a Southern accent.
Kostner’s “Southern accent” in JFK was also memorably awful.
Well Cher’s mama was from Arkansas, so that probably gave her a leg up.
The Human Stain? Set in New England, but I seem to recall the character coming from the South.
That’s partly what you said. You left out the last 20 or so years since he returned to the US.
My point is that he has only spent a small part of his life in Australia and yet is tagged as an Aussie.
Part of the problem is that there is no “Southern Accent.” I’m not talking a bout variations, either. If you get someone from the coast, and someone from the mountains, you will hear two very different accents.
My vote for bad accents is pretty much any “American” accent on any recent BBC production. They all sound like 1930’s gangsters.
I’ve been impressed by, of all people, Cameron Daddo when he appears in a US TV show. He usually plays an Australian, and when he does so, he doesn’t ever exaggerate the accent. It isn’t a strong one in the first place, and he keeps it that way, and I respect him for that.
This is what I came in to say. The only two I’ve heard that might be considered “passable” are Robert Downey Junior’s in Tropic Thunder (and it’s still obviously “put on”) and Anthony Hopkins in The World’s Fastest Indian.
Otherwise, they tend to sound either appallingly nasal or some weird meld of British and South African with some “colourful” local lingo (that no-one here has used since the end of WWII) thrown in.
Just what I was coming in to say. Though I think Ryder’s accent was more mediocre and and unimpressive than outright “bad”—but that’s from being in close quarters to Keanu. I think Kermit the Frog does a better English accent.
Check out the awful “Temuera Morrison” accent that is used in the Clone Wars 3D TV series. It drives me batty.
I’ve pointed this out before, but technically his accent wasn’t any worse than anyone else’s in that film, including actual Britons. Since people in England in those days would have spoken with an accent totally unlike any accent in existence today, his accent was no less accurate than Alan Rickman’s, or for that matter if he’d talked like Fozzie Bear.
He did a good job in **Gallipoli **and since it’s one of my all-time favorites, I think of him as at least honorarily Australian.
Yes, exactly. And I’ve lived in Boston for the past 29 years and have never heard anyone speak like a Kennedy.
The Boston accent seems to be a tough one for most actors. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, and Mark Wahlberg seem to be the only ones that can do it right.
What’s funny is that there’s a theatre troupe that I sometimes work with. One show they did (that I wasn’t involved with) got a mixed review. The reviewer totally panned one of the actors for his “obviously fake British accent.” The actor was British.
Yes, but my point is that the thing you hear most actors speaking resembles none of them.