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Convincing British accents by American actors

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    #26
    Originally posted by TonTon View Post
    That’s a very good call-and a great clip.

    I remember reading a description of Brando becoming very good friends with some English actor in the preproduction phase and the latter only realising when the film was released that he had been used as an informal dialogue coach

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      #27
      Brad Friedel

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        #28
        Originally posted by Janik View Post
        She does.
        Does Mike Myers also carry baggage? I lose track. Anyway, he also does. And also other British accents as well. But then he lived here for years.

        Also true of arguably the best British accent from an American actor, or American by ancestry at least - Gillian Anderson. But she very much blurs the lines between American and British due to spending long periods of her life, including a significant amount of her childhood, in Britain. She also has British citizenship nowadays if I recall correctly (in addition to the American passport that her heredity entitles her too and that I believe she maintains).
        she was born in America to Americans, she’s a naturalised British citizen because she’s lived here for 20 years.

        I’ve always tended to think her accent is a put-on, she lived in Crouch End as a child yet seems to claim her natural accent as sounding like the Duchess of Kent. Feels a bit phoney to me, I know a woman who moved from Surrey to California at the same age Anderson did and she couldn’t do an English accent if she tried.

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          #29
          In my hall of residence at Uni there were two people who lived half-a-mile apart in Swansea, but had gone to different schools. One had an accent barely different from a London one, the other was utterly Welsh, almost to the point of stereotype. Accents are driven by the cultural circles you live in as much as geography.

          Anderson was the child off well-off parents, well heeled enough they could move to London to allow her Dad to attend film school. Their community in London would likely have been artsy and middle-class. Gillian having a generic middle class London accent fits entirely with that background.
          The way she tells it, her American accent is the put on - she only really lived in that country as a speaking being from age 11 (the family was in Puerto Rico prior to arriving in London rather than the move being US to UK).
          Last edited by Janik; 02-05-2021, 20:10.

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            #30
            I remember being in Reading listening to a couple of locals in a pub, one talking with an estuary accent and the other with a west country burr. From what I could tell, they had known each other for many years. So, when did Reading change from the west country to London? Sits?

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              #31
              One of my parents grew up just north of Reading, they have four siblings (ages 65-75) and all bar one speak in a similar estuary accent except one who sounds a little west country – and they moved to Scotland in their twenties.

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                #32
                Originally posted by Janik View Post
                If is for others to judge if people's workplace behaviour makes them 'demanding to work with' or an entitled areshole, not the individual themselves.
                That’s true. But I wasn’t there so I won’t make a judgement either way.

                He largely stopped making films after that terrible guru one. Of course, I’m sure he did very well off of the Schreck franchise and big budget comedy films just aren’t a thing any more. But it’s possible that he just doesn’t get along with anyone well enough to get much else made.
                Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 03-05-2021, 01:24.

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                  #33
                  Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View Post
                  I remember being in Reading listening to a couple of locals in a pub, one talking with an estuary accent and the other with a west country burr. From what I could tell, they had known each other for many years. So, when did Reading change from the west country to London? Sits?
                  Since I've been gone (98). AFAIR there were no estuary accents west of Woodley. But in Maidenhead there was no burr, quite a sharp divide.

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                    #34
                    Mike Myers used to live in Glasgow, so early in his career could do a really convincing Scottish accent.

                    By the time he was playing Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers movies it was sounding a little strained, and nowadays his attempts are pretty poor (being 30+ years removed from his Scotland-dwelling days will do that)

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                      #35
                      So, when did Reading change from the west country to London? Sits?
                      The 1990s? There definitely was, and there was widely recognised, a Berkshire accent which was distinct from both London and also Oxfordshire and was nothing at all like Estuary English. When I worked at a printing firm in Reading in the early 1990s it was with someone with what you would call a broad rural accent along these lines.

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                        #36
                        Originally posted by diggedy derek View Post

                        The 1990s? There definitely was, and there was widely recognised, a Berkshire accent which was distinct from both London and also Oxfordshire and was nothing at all like Estuary English. When I worked at a printing firm in Reading in the early 1990s it was with someone with what you would call a broad rural accent along these lines.
                        Still the same in the early 90s when I worked for a company with a small shop floor in Woodley which is a few miles the London side of Reading. But the accent was closer to a Swindon than a London. But my neck of the woods, Maidenhead which is another 10 or so miles towards London, had no Reading accent at all. Likewise Slough and Windsor. A slightly London infused Home Counties on the whole.

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                          #37
                          Yep that’s a familiar tale. Indeed, the guy at my firm from Maidenhead was the one who sounded most (a bit) like a Cockney wide boy.

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                            #38
                            In 1991 I moved up to Nottingham for three months. The week before going I watched Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves. Based on the local outlaws' accents, I had absolutely no fucking idea what to expect from my new neighbours.

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                              #39
                              Originally posted by Sits View Post

                              Still the same in the early 90s when I worked for a company with a small shop floor in Woodley which is a few miles the London side of Reading. But the accent was closer to a Swindon than a London. But my neck of the woods, Maidenhead which is another 10 or so miles towards London, had no Reading accent at all. Likewise Slough and Windsor. A slightly London infused Home Counties on the whole.
                              You don't need to travel very far west out of London to hear a change in accents. I worked two or three days a week for several years just outside London, but within the M25 in Surrey, and the local accent is definitely different to London (which itself has different accents) and leans significantly towards further west.

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                                #40
                                The only person I've ever known from Maidenhead was my first ever girlfriend. So I assume that the local accent of everyone there is the soft, honeyed voice of an angel.

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                                  #41
                                  Originally posted by pebblethefish View Post
                                  The only person I've ever known from Maidenhead was my first ever girlfriend. So I assume that the local accent of everyone there is the soft, honeyed voice of an angel.
                                  Well mine is, clearly.

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                                    #42
                                    Originally posted by pebblethefish View Post
                                    In 1991 I moved up to Nottingham for three months. The week before going I watched Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves. Based on the local outlaws' accents, I had absolutely no fucking idea what to expect from my new neighbours.
                                    Before we went to Dublin Mrs AE overdosed on Father Ted to help her with the accent. I'm sure I've mentioned before the incident on the bus.

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                                      #43
                                      Well if you did, I missed it. So I did.

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                                        #44
                                        So did I

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                                          #45
                                          I think I've (knowingly) spoken to just one person raised in Maidenhead and their accent was not really dissimilar to my own Wycombe accent. We worked together with a few people from Marlow, and the Marlow accent definitely veered closer to "Queen's English" than the Maidenhead kid and me, despite Marlow being located in the middle.

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                                            #46
                                            My home town had a weird mix of older people with rural Suffolk accents and younger people with either real or imitated East End / Estuary English accents. This is because there was a gentrification programme in the 50s / 60s where a previously small Suffolk town was encircled with new-build housing estates and families were moved to them from the East End of London where the slums were being levelled. Cunningly, they closed the town's railway station at about the same time leaving no means of escape.

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                                              #47
                                              Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
                                              Cunningly, they closed the town's railway station at about the same time leaving no means of escape.
                                              Whether the station was closed or not, that was standard government policy back then (not sure it was written down anywhere though.) Trains didn't stop at Stevenage, for example, during the early morning because they didn't want people commuting. You were supposed to work where you lived. It also made it difficult for people who saw their jobs moved to Harlow, Crawley or Stevenage to maintain family/social networks that had existed for a century or more.

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                                                #48
                                                Originally posted by lambers View Post
                                                One of my parents grew up just north of Reading, they have four siblings (ages 65-75) and all bar one speak in a similar estuary accent except one who sounds a little west country – and they moved to Scotland in their twenties.
                                                Pam Ayres, of course, is famously from Berkshire, now Oxfordshire, and speaks with a regional, rather than "London" accent

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                                                  #49
                                                  Is there a corollary to this thread btw, convincing American accents by British actors?

                                                  (Rings a bell, somewhere)

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