Bad accents

How about a great and (I’m told by Russian speakers) horribly wrong accent? John Malkovich’s Teddy KGB character in Rounders (“It hurts doesn’t it? Your hopes dashed, your dreams down the toilet. And your fate is sitting right besides you.”).

One of the subplots plays out, strangely enough, among the Cork criminal underclass

What?! That’s hilarious.

Considering how entertaining the show’s ersatz Irish accents are, the decision to have the New Orleans characters talk like newscasters must be counted as a missed opportunity.

should read “NYC/DC on one side OR LA on the other”
.

Kenneth Branagh did a surprisingly convincing plain yank accent in Dead Again. Not regional, just some US Metro area or another. But like Laurie in House, no slips.

My standard for godawful, though, is Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Really excruciating.

The Departed didn’t do so well with folks from Boston. DiCaprio was OK. Poor Vera Farmiga needed to focus a bit, though, and stop thinking about, say, Monty Python.

the best Hollywood Irish accent by far that I’ve heard was Brad Pitt in Snatch

Oh yeah, he does another good job in whatever that bad film from 96 or 97 is with Harrison Ford, where Pitt plays an IRA man who lives with a NJ family. There’s a great scene where, in his first evening at the house, the Ford’s character’s wife cooks Pitt dinner. Pitt wolfs it down and says “This is great — what is it?” And the wife says “It’s corned beef and cabbage … We thought you ate that all the time.” “Never had it in my life” says Pitt. Excellent stuff.

In The Wire, a British actor plays a Balitmore cop who attempts a bad English accent to secure a brothel appointment. I think this would be quite challenging. (He never quite gets a convincing American accent, to me.)

Highlander? Scottish accent?

Christophe[r ] Lambert!?

Scotty on Star Trek?

Possibly everyone from outside of NY or LA feels this way, but I have noticed that the accent of my hometown of Boston is represented particularly atrociously on-screen. Mystic River, anyone? Mark Wahlberg in The Departed actually seemed fairly credible, but then, he’s from Boston. The two thuggish brothers in Mystic River actually did a good enough job that they clearly seemed not to be faking. I just looked them up on IMDB, and one of them is Mark Wahlberg’s brother. So there you go.

I do think there are a variety of Brits who do credible U.S. accents. I remember being fooled by Bob Hoskins when I was young. A variety of Australians seems to shed their accents without too much difficulty (Naomi Watts, Mel Gibson, etc.).

It took me years to figure out that certain Monty Python characters (e.g. the couple in the “Argument Restaurant” section of Meaning of Life) were supposed to be American.

Adam @21,

Gibson is only sort-of Australian. New York birth and childhood, IIANM, before his whackjob dad carted the clan off to the Antipodes. As such, it’s the trace Ozisms in his early US films that startle, not his later mastery of Yankish.

Q. @24,

people from New Orleans don’t sound like “Southerners,” but some people do think they sound like New Yorkers

Would this be the NO dialect know as “Yat”? I’ve heard (and from a Brooklynite who, long long ago, spent a fair bit of time in NO) that this sounded rather like Brooklynese (or at least, like Brooklynese on Quaaludes).

Sadly, my understanding is that neither Yat nor Brooklynese really exist any more. (Lived in Brooklyn two years my self. Never heard anybody who sounded like the Brooklyn guys in all those WWII films. Frankly, for all intents and purposes the natives might as well have been from Queens.)

A variety of Australians seems to shed their accents without too much difficulty (Naomi Watts, Mel Gibson, etc.).

As mentioned above, Gibson doesn’t quite count for this purpose. OTOH, the USian accent of Aussie Rachel Griffiths (Brenda on “Six Feet Under”) was, IMHO, flawless.

OK, last one: for reasons that completely elude me, the attempts at British accents on both The Simpsons (Groundskeeper Willie excepted) and Family Guy are consistently atrocious. Given that animated shows are hiring people strictly for their vocal abilities, you’d think they’d be a cut above in this regard, but no.

Another vote for Keanu in Dracula. Sheesh. Interestingly, it was Christian Bale’s (working-class) Brit accent in The Prestige which grated on me.

On the plus side, Jamie Bamber’s (generic) Yank accent in Battlestar Galactica is very good – I was very surprised to hear his real (Brit) voice.

Speaking of LaPaglia, I note that people are ragging on Daphne’s Manc accent, whilst ignoring the far greater crime that was LaPaglia’s character. Utterly shambolic.

I think that Indian bloke in “Heroes” is putting on a funny accent for teh Americans. And his name! I said to Swati in the office “Isn’t ‘Mohinder Suresh’ just two first names?” She said “Yes, and what’s more one is from North India and one is from South.”

So ever since, I’ve thought of him as “Chet Jim-Bob”.

Re #37: I’d say that’s a fair assessment of Laurie’s American accent, and I’ll admit that he never sounds like a generic American to me. But he does sound like a very highly educated American – which is, more or less, his character.

Characters in Eastenders sound just like Eastenders nowadays, because all Eastenders watch Eastenders and have picked up the accent from there.

Apparently, a good deal of south London slang circa 1990 came from Minder and Only Fools (eg, ‘nice little earner’) rather than the other way round. TV rules, ok

@38 – Sendil Ramamurty (sp?) is an Indian-American, judging by his appearances on the commentary tracks of season 1.

McNulty’s accent is very frequently off in The Wire–but we cut him slack ‘cuz he’s on the best show ever. No, it was actually Idris Elba who pulled off the accent the best: he’s fantastic & hope he just takes off (am settling down to catch Sometime in April tonight).

But-cha know what? Dem accents can be real funny to pick up: I never thought Minnuhsodan’s talkt like dey did in Fargo until I dated a girl from up dere and boy! did her dad ever sound like dat! You betcha! An I’m from Duloot, you know?

[Actually, I had a hint when I was in the Marine Corps: a girl I dated in North Carolina asked once if I was from Canada… eh?]

Meryl Streep’s Australian accent in A Cry in the Dark/Evil Angels – trying too hard if you ask me.

@ 46 The accents in Fargo where perfect for anyone living North of say Blaine. People in MSP, not so much…

Heath Ledger has always impressed me, managing to do really good American accents. His Enis DelMar in Brokeback Mountain is really impressive. I’m looking forward to hearing how he handles the Joker. Most actors just ham it up and chew the scenery, expecting that to carry “crazy psychopathic clown” without thinking it through. Crazy is more than just saying shocking things and laughing. And since the Joker is essentially a New Jersey mobster, there’s a lot to work with.

Bad accents? Just asked my wife, and she immediately started laughing with the memory of Orson Welles in The Long Hot Summer and in Lady from Shanghai. We can’t stop laughing.

(re Brooklyn accents: not too common anymore, no, but they’re around Brooklyn College, where I teach: the English office and a few (not many) of my students (as their accents tend toward the Slavic and Caribbean).

Oh! Another one! If you have the DVD of The Blue Angel, try to watch the English language version (are they doing the lines phonetically?). It’s friggin hilarious.

I suppose Jean Seberg’s accent in Breathless is supposed to be authentically bad. But I can’t help but think that’s the best she could do.

And Brando’s an easy target, but for the life of me I can’t remember his accent in Reflections in a Golden Eye. I’m sure it’s terrible.

i just thought of another one: Stafford Repp as Chief O’Hara on the original “Batman” tv series.

how about David Carradine with his faux Asian lilt in “Kung Fu”? we could start a whole ‘nuther thread of annoying fake Asian accents, as Asian people are so horrifically stereotyped in the media in general going back, like, forever.

I was always a little puzzled by Alan Rickman’s accent as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. He speaks German-accented English, but then when he’s pretending to be an innocent victim, he starts “faking” an American accent (pretty well; it sounds a little forced, but I don’t know if that should be blamed on actor or character). Which raises the question: is Gruber supposed to be deliberately keeping his German accent most of the time? Why would anyone do that? Maybe that plot was more complex than even John McClane realized.

Oh, and we can’t let this discussion pass without mentioning Ahnold. I always thought there must be something interesting to say about the distinction between movies like Commando and Kindergarten Cop, which make perfunctory attempts to explain his accent (“When I was a boy in Germany. . .”), and the ones like Terminator and Total Recall, that just want you to accept it without question.

Which raises the question: is Gruber supposed to be deliberately keeping his German accent most of the time? Why would anyone do that?

Maybe like Kissinger he thinks it makes him sound smarter? Or like Schwarzenegger he just thinks it fits with his image?

Alright, since you all seem to be very knowledgeable about accents let me ask the native speakers here: is there such a thing as accent free American English and if so would that be spoken in Iowa?

I’ve spent some time there ages ago and the way English was spoken there seemed very neutral to me and I think somebody mentioned something to that extent, but I would like confirmation. I’ve given up looking for a lowest common denominator in the UK.

Bono’s accent in the new south park episode. Tainted Scottish at best. It begs the question, is it really that difficult to find a real Irish accent in whatever part of America south park is created in?

Derrida Derrider … the best attempt at a South African accent I’ve heard was Tom Jane in Stander – not perfect but very credible. Mind you, the rest of the film was an excellent recreation of late 70s and early 80s SA, so he may have been propped up by that.

As for Leonardo di Caprio in Blood Diamonds … not so much.

Yes yes yes, these are all fine examples, but nothing can beat the duelling bad accents of bruce willis (various, inc. ‘Canadian’) and Richard Gere (Northern Irish) in the remake of Day of the Jackal. Surely a candidate for worst remake ever as well.

novakant: there is no such beast as accent free english. It is just a conceit – usually one entertained by whoever considers themselves the ruling class. Posh english BBC RP-type speakers will often consider themselves to “not have an accent” – this is an obviously absurd claim to many. Of course they have an accent! A posh, annoying, grating accent at that.

You get the same conceit in the US, I have noticed. Excet the peopl there considered to “not have an accent” are midwestern (I think?) and often chosen to read the news and suchlike. Getting to not have an accent is about power and snobbery more than any meaningful description of the way people talk.

Everybody has an equally thick accent. If you are an Iowan american or “Home” Counties public school educated englishman in Glasgow, see where your claims of not having an accent get you. Mocked by the locals for having a strange, thick, foreign accent, that’s where. Put a glaswegian in Ohio and see who has the thick accent then.

Claims of being accent-less show a lack of any sense of perspective.

Having said this. Groundskeeper WIllie surely has the worst accent in the history of Man? But I don’t think that counts – it isn’t even supposed to be accurate, just an amusing parody. Same for the monty python americans.

Stringer Bell in the wire makes a much better job of an American accent than his english compatriot McNulty.

The Fargo accents are pretty close. I’m from Northern Minnesota, and I heard that accent all my childhood. I think they’re ever so slightly exaggerated. Marisa Tomei did a pretty good Minnesota accent in Untamed Heart.

vavatch, yes, there can be a certain amount of snobbery involved, which is obvious in the case of Received Pronunciation, which is a horrible tongue twisting exercise used mainly by very class conscious people

yet, there is such a thing as Standard German and Standard French, and at least in the former case there is nothing forced or snobbish about it; its usage might indicate that the speaker hasn’t been stuck in the region of his birth for life and that he received a certain degree of secondary education, but that’s about it – it’s very common and makes life easier

As I said, I think it’s hopeless to find such common ground in the UK, but I suspect that phonetically the American English spoken in such states as Iowa might come closest to being neutral and therefore could be considered accent free.

It’s really quite a problem for non-native speakers if there is no standard, since adopting the regional accent of the place you happen to live in sounds inauthentic and is frankly impossible in places such as London, while speaking the Queen’s English might brand you as a toff.

Way back in 25:
See, I dunno about McNulty; can we get a vote from someone familiar with the accent he’s trying to do? My dad’s mailman sounds like an Americanized Brit to me, but claims Maryland roots going back generations.

Your dad’s mailman might have grown up on the Eastern Shore, where Dashiell Hammett was born. That’s a different dialect entirely. If West is trying to do a classic working-class white Balmer accent, he’s failing miserably. This YouTube video is as good an example as I can find on short notice. (It’s from the Baltimore suburb of Dundalk.)

Daphne’s accent in Frasier is apparently deliberatly mangled (by the actress) to be more comprehensible in the US. It doesn’t sound Mancunion, but it doesn’t bother me.

What does bother me is that her brothers have completely different (and bad) accents. It’s not just that La Paglia’s accent is awful, it’s that it’s (presumably) meant to be from London. Robbie Coltrane, when he appeared as another brother, didn’t really speak actual words – but they sounded like they were, well, Scottish. Did this family move around a lot or what?

Two comments above already mentioned Keanu Reeves, but I gotta add:

In “Little Buddha” he attempts some kind of Indian accent, I think, as he plays Siddhartha.

And in “Point Break” Reeves attempts the accent of “someone who’s not a doofus,” and fails: “I am an FBI agent, dude.”

He’s probably a great guy, but his voice is not so good.

Really, I thought the whole point of the mangling of accents on Frasier (Leeves, LaPaglia, and even Milicent Martin) was entirely deliberate – an inside joke for those people in the audience who understood the wierdness of Leeves’s accent. I’m disappointed if that’s not so!

And they can never distinguish between an Australian and New Zealand accent.

For those of us who do not hail from those strange yet distant lands, there is a simple shibboleth to tell the two apart. One need only ask the subject to pronounce the following sentence: “Australia are the better rugby nation.”

Likewise, one of the shibboleths of a Bradford accent is whether the city is called Bratford or not. Having somehow picked up a very RP accent over the years, I managed to surprise a masseuse at a work do by managing to narrow her accent down to the Leeds-Bradford conurbation (the advantages of growing up in the Aire valley.)

For the benefit of non-northern English people, the two cities are about, oh, six miles apart and fairly contiguous these days.

Nancy Mitford’s accent is offensively posh, while I’d consider Simon Jones’ rather pleasant. As is said in the article, the upper class accent (URP) is only a subspecies of RP, so it’s tricky to get it right. That said, I’m neither a linguist, nor a native speaker, so maybe some English people should chime in.

To me, Hugh Laurie in “House” and Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “Without a Trace” have the same accent. I assumed whatever accent it was was the easiest US accent for Brits to simulate.

I’ve always found Van Damme’s characters explain away their accents better than Arnie’s. It’s the kind of attention to detail that marks a true master of the craft of acting.

Bubbling under are Peter Sellers’ Indian accents; The evil leprechaun in The Simpsons; Anita Ekberg in “La Dolce Vita”: a Hollywood starlet with a svedish accent: why couldn’t Fellini just dub her?

The second worst accent is Kate Winslet’s English accent in “Titanic”, which is odd considering she really is English.

The worst accent is Ken Curtis as Charlie McCorry in “The Searchers” (“I’ll thank you to unhand my fi-an-cy.”) I have no idea what an 1860s hick cowboy sounded like, but neither does Mr Curtis.

Best accents: all of “Spinal Tap”.

“Not noticeable” sounds like faint praise; “convincing” is more complimentary. But that character was a real cipher–there’s a scene where he disappears in the middle of a conversation–so “not noticeable” is also closer to the role he played. (Unlike Lewis, who conveyed lots of character through that flat somwhere in mid-Pennsylvania accent of his.)

Can’t say where O’Meara’s unnoticeable accent came from; I pegged him more by class and ethnicity (i.e., middle class WASP) than region, since he didn’t have the distinctive accents of the soldiers from working class Philadelphia or rural Texas or Acadia.

And while we’re talking about class, the story goes that Claude Rains grew up with a pronounced Cockney accent, but that he learned how to speak in the tone and accents of the upper class while working in the theater. Which got him an officer’s commission in WWI because he had the manner of a commander.

I don’t think American actors should ever be allowed to ‘do’ an accent from somewhere in Britian, Ireland or Australia. They only end up embarassing themselves and their native country. Best illustrated by the fact that, while you will occasionally hear of an American surprised to learn some particular actor is not really North American after all, you rarely here of anyone from the aformentioned countries fooled by a yank having a go at the local talk.

British/Irish/Australian actors seem to do American accents fairly well. Yes they butcher regional accents (so do American actors not from those regions) but they pull off the standardized North American accent we’ve come to expect from Hollywood movies and nightly newscasts solidly. British/Irish/Australian actors doing American accents don’t sound like they’re from anywhere really, which is why I think they do so well in comic book adaptations with American settings. See the new Batman franchise in which Katie Holmes is the only actual American I think.

I’ve heard Gwyneth Paltrow does a good British accent, but I dislike her so I’m hoping this isn’t true. This was supposedly verified by a story in which she allegedly, while studying for her english accent role, worked as a receptionist and fooled the people that she was speaking with that she was a local, which I think would be a great premise for a Saturday Night Live skit.

Christian Bale is often credited with a A+ American accent (I think his is a perfect example of the comic book/Hollywood American accent). When he was being interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR, he gave no indication by his speaking that he was English. When Terry Gross pointed this out, he said that he chooses which accent to speak in on a day to day basis, regardless of whether he is filming or not. The moral of this story is that Christian Bale is a strange, strange man.

When American actresses do English accents, even when they’re quite good at it (e.g. Gwyneth Paltrow, Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones), they always come out sounding about 20% too posh, to my ears at least.

Daphne in Frasier’s Manchester accent was bad. However, worse was when her brother came to visit, and he talked like a cockney!

British actors quite often do a good job of regionally non-specific and high-status American accents (eg, Hugh Laurie), and vice versa: American actors are often good at the equivalent British accents (Paltrow, Zellweger, etc). What is much rarer is the ability to get right regional and working-class accents – look at how many of the complaints in this thread have been specifically about bad Cockney, Mancunian, Irish, Texan, etc, accents. But that’s not a problem confined to actors trying to cross the Atlantic. (I’ve lost count of the number of truly awful attempts at Suffolk and Norfolk accents I’ve heard from English actors over the years.)

My usual candidates for hilariously bad British accents: almost every single one ever attempted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only reasonable one I can think of is Wesley the watcher – and that’s a posh one again. And where on earth is Kendra the second vampire slayer supposed to be from?

But these are dwarfed by the aural horror that is How Green was My Valley. I can honestly say that I have never heard anything quite like it.

Kate Winslet in Titanic is playing an American, not a Brit!!!! I don’t know why it irritates me so much when people say that, but it does!!! Perhaps I need more hobbies!!!!!!

Bob Hoskins and Guy Pearce do really good American accents. Both came as utter surprises when I heard them in their own voices.

The accents in Fargo are exaggerated, but then regional exaggeration is a Coen Brothers thing. Raising Arizona has some very good examples of the interior Southwest dialect (cranked up for comedic effect), which is often mistaken for something Southern but has its own rhythms.

My favorite accent ever is the Monty Python character who says “One thing is for sure. the sheep is not a creature of the air”. I’ve been told that it’s generic rustic south-central English. I care not whether it be accurate.

When American actresses do English accents, even when they’re quite good at it (e.g. Gwyneth Paltrow, Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones), they always come out sounding about 20% too posh, to my ears at least.

Yeppy. Bridget Jones is middle-middle, and Mark Darcy is upper-middle, and that’s actually important (to the extent that Bridget Jones is important, I know.) Zellwegger sounds upper-middle: just a bit too posh.

Damien Lewis and Michelle Ryan have two hours of NBC to themselves and their accents. (And at the same time, Anna Friel is doing a slightly less assured job on Pushing Daisies.) The line on female leads, apparently, is that Brits are less botoxed.

As for Laurie, I’m now convinced that he’s basically doing Ken Branagh in Dead Again.

The weirdest accent-shift, though, is Gillian Anderson, who utterly lost her American accent — acquired as a teenager — on her return to Britain.

Speaking of Heroes, though, David Anders (previously Sark in Alias) has the upperish-class British accent off pat, which makes the Oirish characters look even more embarrassing.

Sendil Ramamurty’s accent in the original unaired pilot was much more, um, Indian — almost It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum territory. He’s anglicised it since.

Well, I always thought Tony Head had a rather nice English accent :-)

Speaking of the Whedonverse, though, I think Alexis Denisof has always done really well. Granted, I think he has lived much of his life in England, but his American accent is just painfully Northwestern. I’d seen him in several other things as well (a couple of episodes of Sharpe, etc.) and never realised he was technically a Yank.

Not on a movie accent, but on the discussion of posh English accents: Several years ago, my mother gave a conference presentation in England and at the end was asked a question by a man she was sure must be drunk.

It turned out he was a perfectly sober viscount.

Being from New Jersey/northeast U.S., I can tell you that Hugh Laurie does an AMAZING job with the accent. I ADORE him and HOUSE and I would like him to stay in the U.S. forever.
You have a treasure in him in the U.K.
Appreciate that.

Wow, this thread is fun. And kinda arbitrary, too! Anyway, here’s one more vote for the astonishingly good Merkinian of Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman, and Rachel Griffiths.

novakant — i’m as sure as sure can be that she’s not. But I saw it a long time ago. Can anyone else confirm?

Kate Winslet in Titanic is playing an American, not a Brit!
Ah! She sounds like a bad American impression of British, so maybe her accent was spot-on. Any recitations from gilded-age Philadelphians among those German POW recordings?

In ‘Big Love’ there is an female federal agent that is supposed to be from Boston. Stunningly bad. The topper is that it feels as if the writer(s) think of everyone in Boston as being from a patrician Boston family in the 19th century.

I always thought that the accent thing was perfectly in character for Hans – he COULD speak like an American, but he showed his contempt by not doing so…

This is how I saw Gabriel Byrne’s character in “Miller’s Crossing”. Sometimes he sounded American, sometimes he sounded Irish, and I never kept track but I think it depended on who he was talking to.

131 posts and not one mention of the atrocity that was Robin William’s “Boston” accent in “Good Will Hunting”? William’s monologue about Game 6 of the 1975 World Series may be one of the most cringe worthy performances I’ve ever had to sit through. Both the actual words and the accent. Ye gods.

Bad accents? Somehow all the north-western European accents in American films sound like German.

I know I can’t really blame Hollywood for not getting accurate all the accents in the world, but it never ceases to be strange hearing Swedes or Dutchmen talk like they grew up speaking something that sounds quite, but not entirely, almost unlike German.

As someone mentiond, David Anders does a pretty good uk/euro accent. I had no idea he was a guy from Oregon when he was on Alias.

How can Terry Gilliam not do a Yank accent? he’s a Yank!

I agree the Aussies/Kiwis tend to do great American accents. Personally I think you can hear much of the difference between those and also South Africa in the sound of their ‘a’s.

I have trouble listening to Eric Bana do serious action movies, when he developed his faux-US accent doing parodies of the same sort of roles for sketch-comedy shows in Australia.

It’s like watching Hugh Laurie in house. You’re always waiting for the joke.

Oh, and this thread would not be complete without congratulations to Sean Connery, for playing people of all nations without once, ever, sounding like anyone else but Sean Connery.