Best and Worst Accents on Film and Television?

On the flip side, I learned something interesting. Linus Roache, the assistant D.A. in Law & Order, has a perfectly acceptable American accent, so I assumed that he was from the US.

I was shocked to hear him being interviewed the other day. He had a thick British accent. Checking further, I found that he was born in Manchester, and spent most of his early life in Great Britain.

He has obviously learned his US accent well.

Years ago, there was a beautiful young actress from Sweden named Inger Stevens. Unfortunately, she killed herself at age 35, but that is another story.

Anyhow, in her training as an actor, she developed a perfectly acceptable US accent. In an interview, she told how she was going to play the part of a Swedish woman. She said that she had to study very hard, as she had completely lost her Swedish accent.

Anyone remember Mickey Rooney with his Japanese character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? The P.C. police would have a hissy fit over that one now.

This is really the oposite of best or worst accents. This is about no accent at all.
Now and then I watch films from Germany. If there is a person supposedly from Russia or China or some other country who has only spent a few months in Germany. If this person is played by a German the person speaks a perfect German with no accent at all. Especially if it is a person who has not had the chance of studying German it drives me nuts.
At least the person should speak with an accent - I don´t care how bad but not a perfekt German.

That makes sense as well. A lack of an attempt of an accent in an immigrant character is pretty unauthentic and distracting.

Why does DiCaprio cop some vaguely early 20th century Brooklyn accent in every ******* movie he does? Does anyone else think this guy is totally overrated as an actor?

His worst work accent-wise was in Gangs of New York. The Irish brogue somehow wears off halfway through the movie, except where he's narrating. So he'll literally have the accent one second and not the next.

Peter Sellers was excellent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvwP1oo18G8&feature=related

Yes! Yes he was an excellent source of accents of all sorts!

Lindy Chamberlain is actually from New Zealand and that is the accent that Streep nails perfectly! You had no idea what you are babbling about!

I said the Lindy (played by Meryl Streep) accent made my hair stand on end, which it did.
What are you babbling about, yakof?

Sean Connery always amuses me when he tries to do accents.
No matter what accent he tries to do, it just sounds like Sean Connery.
Especially his Irish accent in The Untouchables.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sK3-6fvGoE

And his "Russian" accent in The Hunt for Red October.

We watched Shutter Island recently. In it, DiCaprio plays a U.S. Marshall from Boston. I thought his accent for that role was pretty good, but then I'm not from Boston and don't know if people who are from there would find it acceptable...or even passable. Sounded pretty good to me. Overrated? I think most actors are overrated lol.

I totally agree with you!!!
It is a pet peev of mine, also to me all Americans trying to do an Australian accent.... sound like Americans trying to do an Australian accent!!

I ran into a high school aquaintence at the store and she started speaking in a British accent. I asked her if she had been out of the country since HS and she said no, that this was some kind of "brain" spasm that puts her into this speaking pattern. She then began to list ALL her many physical ailments. We spoke for several minutes and I noticed the accent slowly recede. By the end of the conversation, she was speaking in our normal, midwestern accent.

Later I thought:
She was stresssed out at our meeting and slipped into some kind of psychological protective mode, on many meds, OR she is a BS'er.

The weirdest thing I ever encountered . . .

BTW - she NEVER was in a situation where she would have picked up or been exposed to a British accent.

And all Australian's trying to do the American accent ... give it up!

Higgins the butler in "Magnum PI" was American but supposedly Brit in the series and was absolutely awful, tho media stories at the time said some Englanders thought he was one of them--god alone knows why.

Hugh Laurie, the couple of times I watched "House", sounded pretty good as an American. There was a clip of him on an interview show somewhere talking about the show and he was talking in his normal English accent, and that was kind of a shock.

Bostonians make fun of actors trying for a Boston accent--NO ONE has nailed it. Even the Kennedys couldn't nail it--whatever they spoke, it was not Boston English, no one is quite sure where it came from--maybe a two-block radius around the Brookline home they grew up in.

And I don't think I've ever heard a convincing Southern accent either. There isn't just one real Southern accent, probably at least eight or nine distinct ones. Carroll O'Connor in "The Heat of the Night", as I remember, was pretty awful.

Some Welsh already sound like they're halfway across the ocean to America anyway.

Matt Damon was pretty good in Good Will Hunting, but he's from Boston, I think.

Yes - he is. He did an excellent job with his accent.

Yes - when I started reading the beginning of what you wrote, the first thing I envisioned was Connery in the Untouchables and how he sounded like.....Sean Connery.

I saw this on one of the news programs like 20/20. It was either mid-western or southern girl - can't remember because it was so long ago, that due to some brain problem talked with a British accent.

Many many years ago, I saw this man on television who was a linguist. He claimed that he could tell where a person was born, and any other places that they had lived by studying their accents.

He had a few persons from the audience speak, and he made his evaluations. Each time, he was "right on the money".