accents

K

K-Ro

Dear British People as a Whole,

Hahaha, please answer the following survey: Which American actors have done the best job of using a British accent in film?

thanks!!!
K

PS: I'm asking because I'm always hearing how American actors suck at it........ according to the continent of England. I know you guys do an amazing job of imitating our accents, which is sort of a mystery, how it's so one-sided. So I'm wondering if we have any lone bright spots.
 
None of them they all sound shit and nothing like British, English people are better at doing accents I reckon coz we have flatter tones so can manipulate them better, whereas Americans have softer higher pitch voices

But if he counts robin Williams does good impressions though.
 
I've heard quite a few good British accents from American actors.


I have not ever once heard an American or British person imitate an Australian accent even somewhat close to sounding normal. It seems to be one of the most difficult to pull off, even though so many Australians can convincingly pull off all sorts of American accents..
 
Yikes, I knew we were terrible but I didn't realize it was pretty much across the board! What about Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors? Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones? Sorry to be so chick-flicky but aren't those performances pretty close? Or are they still noticeable? : \
 
jax_rox said:
It seems to be one of the most difficult to pull off, even though so many Australians can convincingly pull off all sorts of American accents..
Click to expand...

I don't know, I've been becoming increasingly aware of Australian actors doing american accents, maybe just because there are a lot of them on american shows these days. They certainly get close, but there's some uncanny valley stuff going on there where I start wondering what character motivation the actor has for creating such an odd accent - and then I see them doing behind the scenes interviews where they speak with their native accent and it suddenly makes sense.

I think the reason they can get away with it is that there isn't really an american accent - you can pick a dozen different regions in the country where the accent is distinct and noticeably different then the others, and there'd still be a dozen more you were skipping over. Additionally people tend to move around a lot, so it's common to have accents that are a weak mix of several different ones. So when the actor's accent is odd you just think "is this guy a texan by way of minnesota?" but still accept it as 'american'.
 
K-Ro said:
Yikes, I knew we were terrible but I didn't realize it was pretty much across the board! What about Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors? Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones? Sorry to be so chick-flicky but aren't those performances pretty close? Or are they still noticeable? : \
Click to expand...

the problem brits have is that people perceive them with a posh accent, like bridget jones.

but its not true, theres only a minority who speak like that, the thing is with british people you have a massive range of accents, Welsh, northern irish, scottish, english but then we have the cities - London (which in itself there are at least 20 different accents i can recognise, for me i can recognise someone from east london because they tend to speak slightly posher than north london, then you have south london which is very ghetto with 2 main accents, ghetto street and cockney.

then in north london you have the same as south london except that its the sweet mates (white people) who speak cockney (only applies to new youth) then you have the street ghetto (which is white aswell as other mixed ethnities)

then you have west london which is where mainly the richest can afford to live their accents are just annoying.

then lets say if we go to oxford, its like a very posh overall of london accent.

btw iv found the easiest way ever to spot someone isnt from london, its actually so easy that the answer is in the name itself, london.. ask someone to say the word london, within an instant i can detect where a bouts they are roughly from, that because of the l-uh-n-dun is pronounced differently in different areas and is actually harder for northern folk say for instance from yorkshire to replicate a london accent to say london because it always turns out two ways they either say it in their native accent - lu-wn-duwn, or an over exaggerated accent of a cockney and go l-ahn.dun which kinda sounds australian.

the key then i would say to replicating a british accent.. do not try to imitate a londoner! not only does it piss us off which we then slaughter you for doing so, but you lose respect for failing to act properly.

also dont watch green street as an example of cockneys because its full of shit.

Michael caine is an excellent example of an old school cockney, also mike reid who use to play frank butcher in eastenders but died is also an old school cockney.

theres shit films which represent the youth of today in london such as, the estate - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1786699/

and anuva hood http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1658797/

how they speak is how todays youth generally speak, the ghetto street talk
 
How is an American going to get it right, when even us Londoners can't agree!

Michael Caine is a sowff (south) Londoner, not a cockney! Technically a cockney has to be born in London's East End, within hearing distance of Bow bells. So even Mike Reid was not technically a cockney and Bob Hoskins even less so. My grandmother had a brother who could only speak cockney, although he died when I was quite young, I remember my grandmother had to translate so I could understand him.

Johnny Depp does an English accent which doesn't grate too much but Don Cheedle doesn't!

This is an example of a cockney accent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o

And this is a shortcut method of learning how to do an east end accent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyAgy2CngfY
 
Mike Myers on SNL did many many different variations of English accents.

I'm sure he's gotten it right a few times (Plus his parents were English)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIaiW1XrzxA
 
Mike Myers does a decent generic English accent but he's hopeless in the clip posted because he's trying to do a sort of south/east London accent. BTW, David Tenant does not have a really strong Scottish accent, this is a really strong Scottish accent (!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrmcxa1yBec

There's really no such thing as a Scottish accent, when we say Scottish accent we really mean one of the Scottish accents; there's a highlands accent, an Edinburgh accent, a Glaswegian accent, a Doric accent, etc. Most trained British actors go to a school like Guildhall or RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and are given elocution lessons so they can speak with the Oxford (BBC) accent. Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins both had strong Welsh accents originally for example.

When we say "posh" English, it's usually the accent from around Oxford to which we are referring, which is considered to be the most correct of the English accents. You have to realise that English has a very rich and complex history: There was originally Brythonic, of which only a sentence or so sitll exists. Then the Romans imposed latin, then the Angles and Saxons imposed their languages, then the Vikings and finally the French. England wasn't even a country for a long while but a set of countries, each with it's own language, each of which influence today's English accents. Considering the relatively small geographical size of England, the range and diversity of accents is really quite amazing.

Even the English of say the late C14th is pretty much a completely alien language compared to English of today. Have a look at the first page of The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) and see if you can understand any of it!

G
 
AudioPostExpert said:
Even the English of say the late C14th is pretty much a completely alien language compared to English of today. Have a look at the first page of The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) and see if you can understand any of it!
Click to expand...

I can understand all of it, but I am a special case ;)

The concept of a 'British accent' is horribly wrong, and the concept of a unified 'English accent' is also wrong. But that's not to say that all American actors do a bad job.

I think that 8salacious9 is confusing the conversation by stereotyping certain areas with certain accents in quite a crass way, sort of like saying that all Texans sound like rednecks or all Bostoners have As the size of a van. England is a small country with a broad range of accents, even within localities.

I'm at university in Oxford, which has twice been cited as the home of the 'posh accent'. But that's because it's the home of English literature, which has been seen as the birthplace of correctly spoken word. That doesn't take into account the fact that it's an industrial city of half a million people that has some of the worst poverty in the UK. So whilst the typical representation of Oxford might be well spoken, that's a very crude way of looking at it.

I think there are some Americans who do decent English accents. I think Renee Zellweger is pretty good in Bridget Jones. Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare In Love. Meryl Streep has been decent in a couple of films. RDJ in Chaplin is good.

Worst I've heard? Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta was distractingly shite.

But, in general we're better at doing American accents because it's been a necessity for actors wanting to compete for top Hollywood roles. There are very few actors who have managed to become international stars without ever having to pretend to be American, and the ones who have, someone like Hugh Grant, have avoided it because Britishness is their biggest selling point. Almost everyone else has to get it down.
 
NickClapper said:
I'm at university in Oxford, which has twice been cited as the home of the 'posh accent'.
Click to expand...

So many variations of regional accents in the UK .... and then there's the student accent...Lord knows where that comes from but thousands of 18 year olds from all over the UK turn up on campus and within minutes start conversing in a very strange type of RP!! ;)

But yes Manchester, Liverpool, Cumbria, Lancashire, North Wales and Yorkshire all TOTALLY different accents within an hour of each other.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top