Hugh Laurie’s accent

I see that it was a poll of Radio Times readers

Consider the source.

Dominic West (“McNulty”) in The Wire is ranked #10, which only suggests to me that it’s very hard to make a list of high-profile British actors who can’t do credible American accents.

Of all the British actors playing Americans who come to my mind, only Michael Caine regularly falls short with regard to the accent, but his other strengths more than compensate. (Sean Connery arguably cheated a bit on the accent playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables, but the performance was an overall success.)

#2- House IS comedy.

One of the interesting ones on the list is Ian McShane for his character in Deadwood – isn’t he supposed to be a British immigrant (according to the plot)?

I know Still Standing isn’t still on the air, but shouldn’t Mark Addy get an award? His accent felt forced and painful, such that I never experienced a suspension of disbelief (not that I really watched that show more than three times).

Dominic West’s Baltimore accent isn’t that great, but it never really got in the way of appreciating his performance.

I think there’s something a little odd about the poll being a Radio Times poll- perhaps this reflects the relative insularity of Americans, but i can’t imagine an American mass audience having anything like a valid opinion about what a terrible English accent is. Most Americans (and I include myself) have a difficult time distinguishing non-US English speaking accents from one another. If you can’t tell an Aussie from a Kiwi accent, a Jamaican from a Trinidadian, or a Scottish from an English, how can you evaluate quality?

I’m not sure that the English would have such a problem, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Feel free to correct me.

@7: “..Albert Swearengen (Ian McShane) is the proprietor of the Gem Saloon and the founder and de facto head of Deadwood. Apparently born in England, raised in a Chicago orphanage under an abusive figure known as Mrs. Anderson whom he insults and derides on numerous occasions during drunken rants, and having spent time in Australia..”

and it’s the 1870’s in South Dakota, so the is no way the real Swearegen would not had spoken the flawless midwest accent the reader of the Radio Times correctly expected.

On the other hand, the real Al Swearengen was born in Iowa.

Name more than ten british actors working on well-known american TV.

Exactly.

Also, Given his work in The Wire, Dominic West’s pretend-fake british accent is far worse than his real-fake American.

I believe there was a scene in House where Laurie did a “fake-fake” accent, similar to the scene in The Wire with McNulty. That most likely tells us something very important about our postmodern times, etc.

i’m not so sure i trust the average brit’s assessment of accents. when i did my study abroad in glasgow, an english friend went on and on about how bad jane leeve’s accent was as daphne in ‘frasier’. only when imdb.com came into existence did i learn that she’s from ilford, essex

I suppose one reason British actors are better at faking an American accent than American actors are at faking a British one is the inroads that U.S. TV has made there, as virtually everywhere. Music, too. (Even during the British Invasion, I don’t recall many Americans who could do a convincing British accent of any type.) Now if only Henry Farrell could learn to speak proper English, that would be something.

TV, movies, etc, but not really music — the British and American music scenes are very distinct. But the general point is right: the rest of the world watches America, and thereby picks up a fair amount of surface acquaintance with various aspects of American life, whereas most Americans just watch America too, and those who are less insular don’t have a single reference point. Explains a lot, not just an asymetric facility with accents.

One of the interesting ones on the list is Ian McShane for his character in Deadwood – isn’t he supposed to be a British immigrant (according to the plot)?

Yes. Eggs-fucking-actly. One speculates that the voters did not take this not insubstantial li’l factoid into consideration.

Name more than ten british actors working on well-known american TV.

If you want to talk about the prime-time network lineups, you can start with Laurie, Anna Friel, Damian Lewis, Lena Headey. Then there are Sophia Myles, Kevin McKidd, Michelle Ryan (whose character put on a British accent for one episode) in now-cancelled series from last year. And though I’ve never watched the CSI empire, Louise Lombard was apparently a regular on CSI: Classic until this season.

Given that it’s an internet poll for the RT site, who knows what the makeup of the respondants was, but it would be nice to have control samples of British and American viewers telling us which American actor in an American show has the most convincing American accent.

Louise Lombard’s accent really was a disaster–she was never able to maintain it for more than a few words at a time.

Linus Roache, who cropped up on L&O: Original Recipe this year, had a trainwreck of a New York accent at the beginning, although it’s since settled down a bit.

To Tom Hilton

Please accept my apologies. I’m afraid I read your comment the wrong way, and now rereading I see you actually were just adding a helpful historical detail and not at all being pedantic. I also intended to sound more sarcastic than mean, and failed in that too. Again, sorry to come down like a ton of bricks.

All the best,
Philly

Philly, thanks and no problem. I was just a little taken aback by your comment; on the other hand, I don’t comment here much, so there’s no reason you’d have known from the start what my intent was.

34: Now if only I was in a department where there were senior colleagues who could teach me …

“if only I were in a department”, actually.

Hugh Laurie as House sounds plausibly American to me — I know Americans who sound “more English” (mostly a matter of vowel sounds). But even Laurie as Bertie Wooster does not to my ear have a strongly English sound; of course he eschews the affected drawl and final-g-dropping that had hitherto gone with the role. Michael Caine’s accent, by contrast, is in no way mild or generic — he’s a cockney, as was cast as such for much of his career.

Its strange Louise Lombard(cor, phew)’s accent being so crap (to Americans) in CSI. She was in an English (radio) production of mine (Front Page) of an American script and I thought she was really good – compared with most of the (English) cast.

Its my impression, having been in the business a long time, that recently Americans (save Dick Van Dyke) do better English accents than the English do American. Renee Zellweger was good in Bridget Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow passable in the stuff she’s done.

So notoriously bad are English actors at doing American accents, in fact, that I’m relieved to say, if it all works out, that my next couple of radio scripts about America are actually going to be recorded there. For a while Radio4 even stopped doing American plays because of the “actor problem.”

But then, a lot of American actors when trying to do US regional accents (especially Deep South, Piedmont, and Louisiana) are often as bad at those as your generic UK actor is.
Thank you for shedding light on the otherwise baffling experience of an Australian friend who was, many years ago, having a haircut in the Carolinas. The barber, entirely on the basis of my friend’s Strine accent, formed the unshakeable opinion that he must be from Louisiana . . .

Damian Lewis in ‘Band of Brothers’ had a better American accent than the real Americans in the series. Also, mysteriously, he looked American.

Hugh Laurie also looks American, though more like the pre-war Americans (tall, spare, strong jaw) who were already losing out to the new, pink, plump Americans by World War II, as George Orwell noted in 1944 or thereabouts.

As an American who appreciates Laurie from his Fry & Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster days, I think his American accent meets my Turing test (if I met someone on the street who spoke like him, I’d think he was born in the U.S.)

As a Kiwi who had lived in both the USA and the UK for several months on various occasions, when I first saw House I was completely unaware that Hugh Laurie was British. It was only by reading Crooked Timber that I realised Hugh Laurie was the same guy as on Blackadder, another TV series I loved.

Of course I’m the person who got off the plane at Auckland airport after three months in the USA and was surprised at how many Aussies the airport had evidently hired. And then I was surprised by how many of my friends and relatives had acquired Aussie accents during my absence.

I love Tilda Swinton, but her accent in Michael Clayton was pretty uneven.

The same with Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs, even though some people inexplicably cite his performance as an example of doing a good accent.

He apparently takes the title of “worst British accent ever” with good humor and pride, but cripes people, give the old man a break.

No.

To 40 & 46: the story I’ve heard is that when Dick van Dyke auditioned, he actually had a pretty credible Cockney accent. The director told him that Americans would never buy it, and proceeded to demonstrate what Americans thought Cockney was supposed to sound like.

Now, I don’t know whether the story is true or not, but it does demonstrate that what is important is not how good the imitation really is, but how well it accords with the viewers perceptions of what an authentic ‘American’ accent should sound like. Maybe those who give Laurie poor ratings are addicted to John Waynes, Clint Eastwoods, and contemporary Gangsta shoot-’em-up flicks.

As an addendum – I _despise_, _loathe_ Southern accents, so much so that I suspect the people putting them on are doing so just to tweak me. Is this an idiosyncratic reaction?

Gwyneth Paltrow’s English accent was pretty convincing in Sliding Doors. Meryl Streep got away with bad accents for years until Evil Angels. A shocker of an Aussie accent there. The guys from Spinal Tap were awesome. Did anyone ever see Lorenzo’s Oil and Nick Nolte’s a-pizza-pie-a Italian accent. Execrable.

There used to be a lot of British actors doing terrible American accents. You can hear them if you watch old sitcoms and Doctor Who serials from the sixties and seventies (the rocket pilot in “Tomb of the Cybermen” is a particularly choice example). Most of them seemed to be doing one of two accents. One was an outrageously exaggerated cowboy drawl used mostly for comic effect; but the other, used for non-cowboys, sounded sort of like an attempt to imitate the style of 1940s radio or newsreel narration–this rapid, somewhat nasal, loud barking patter that I’ve never heard any American use in actual conversation. I assume that acting classes were actually teaching it as a generic American accent.

These days, that seems to have petered out and there are lots of British actors doing extraordinarily realistic American accents.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s English accent was pretty convincing in Sliding Doors.

Paltrow’s accent in that film is closer to what Bridget Jones should have sounded like on film. Zellwegger had the accent equivalent of the uncanny valley: to my ears, it was just not-quite-right enough to be really annoying.

there are lots of British actors doing extraordinarily realistic American accents.

Though you do find some real clunkers on lower-budget British TV and radio (I agree here with #39) so it may well be that all the good ones are off in Hollywood where the money’s better.

I don’t think I’d seen Natalie Portman in anything before V for Vendetta, and although I was vaguely aware of the name I knew nothing about her. I was hugely surprised to discover lately that she wasn’t English. Her accent was faultless in that film.

it’s got to be vasculitis

Eamonn Walker in Oz I thought was a good take on American

Cary Elwes was also quite believable in Glory. I think 51 is right, the voters expect certain accents and therefore under-rate Laurie’s accent. Conversely, Americans are terrible with recognizing accents in general. I’m from Long Island, (the north shore and thus not Lon Gisland, which is a South Shore accent, but not from the preppy part of the North Shore so no Locust Valley Lockjaw.) As an adult, I’ve moved around quite a bit, including a stint in New Mexico where I interviewed a lot of Navajos, Hispanos, and third generation Anglos. All recognized that I wasn’t from NM, but were shocked to discover that I was from NY because I did not sound like anybody on Seinfeld or Friends.

#38

Also, if you want to see a US actor painfully struggling with an English accent…

have a listen to Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

If they weren’t going only for Standard American, they could have had a much longer and more deserving list. British actors attempting a Texas accent are at least as bad as any American manglings of British dialects…

A month or two after I moved to the USA I began to feel that people should stop faking their American accents. Really, everyone sounded fake. It’s an in-your-head thing, I guess.

Listening to Cary Grant, would you know he wasn’t American?

Forrest Whittaker in the Crying Game: He had a strange accent but I believed he was British, but with a strange accent, whicht can happen. I found him so compelling as a Brit that I thought his American accent was rubbish in his next movie.

The only valid test of English/American is Root beer. A true Brit will find it disgusting.

Tim Roth was supposed to be doing an American accent in Reservoir Dogs? No way! Surely, he was a British low-life on an extended holiday.

I thought Madeleine Stowe’s American accent in Twelve Monkeys was pretty awful. But it turns out that despite that, and the various extra E’s in her name, she’s American. Now I don’t know what was wrong with her voice in that film.

I think Costner did a remarkable “tour of England via bad versions of regional accents” performance.

I too like Cary Elwes, where did he go?

Woody Allen doing a bit of “an American unwittingly putting on a ridiculous English accent whilst talking at length to an upper class Brit” in Scoop was pretty funny.

Marmite might work as well as Root Beer.

How dare anyone critisize Hugh Laurie for any thing!! The man is AMAZING!! I was raised in New Jersey and I didn’t know he was British, so it must be a pretty good accent….almost perfect I would say. And he ROCKS in HOUSE!!!
Someone in RADIO judging Hugh….GIVE ME A BREAK!

Also, Lennie James(Hawkins)on JERICHO did a great American accent. He is from Britian as well. From my heart to yours, Lennie.

Not quite a Briton, but I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Sam Neil’s excellent American accent in Jurassic Park.

I haven’t thought about it for years, but I remember back in the ’70s thinking that BBC actors must have spent weeks listening to recordings of Harry Truman while learning to do American accents.