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One of the key skills that actors have to master is the ability to deliver lines in an accent other than their own.

For the character the actor is playing to be realistic, how they speak is just as important as what they say, and a dodgy accent can often attract ridicule both from cinema-goers and the critics.

Here are six times accents in the movies were deemed to be good, bad and controversial.

Elvis - Austin Butler

Playing a star with one of the most recognisable voices in the world was a huge challenge for Austin Butler, who spent months ditching his native California accent in favour of Elvis Presley's southern drawl for his role in Elvis (2022).

As well as working with a dialogue coach, Butler immersed himself in recordings of Presley speaking. “I’d hear him say a certain word and I would clip just that bit out so I knew how he said that word. I created my own archive of every word and every diphthong , and the way that he used musicality in his voice,” Butler said to The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

But all his hard work had an unexpected side effect - he had huge difficulty shedding the accent after filming was complete, and even had to hire another dialogue coach who would help him lose Elvis’s distinctive twang.

“I had been practising one way of using the muscles in my mouth for a long time, so it was a process of trying to unlearn those,” he explained in an interview with Esquire magazine.

Butler is not the only actor to have difficulty reclaiming their natural accent. British star Gary Oldman had to hire help to regain his native English accent for 91�ȱ� spy drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). "I have lived in America for so long, my kids are American and that's what I hear around me every day. I had to brush up my English,” he told Graham Norton.

The Iron Lady - Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep is legendary for her ability to nail an unparalleled range of accents. One of her earliest roles was as woman whose baby was stolen by a dingo in A Cry In The Dark (1988), for which she mastered an Australian accent. “It is so understated and natural that it’s difficult to believe she wasn’t born within sight of a kangaroo or two,” wrote one impressed LA Times critic when the film was released.

Since then she’s delivered flawless Danish (Out Of Africa, 1985), Texan (Silkwood, 1983), Northern Irish (Dancing At Lughnasa, 1993) and New York Irish (Proof, 2005) among many others.

Her dedication to getting an accent absolutely right even extended to learning Polish in order to deliver a perfect accent in Sophie’s Choice (1982), and then even speaking German with a Polish accent in the movie.

And while other actors sweat buckets over their glottal stops, it just seems to be a natural gift for the three-time Oscar-winner: “You know, that’s the easiest thing I do,” she said during a panel with director Phyllida Lloyd.

Her most recent triumph was perfectly imitating the instantly recognisable cadences of former British PM Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). Her pitch-perfect accent came top in a poll of American actors mastering British accents in 2017.

For Streep, getting the accent right is a part of completely inhabiting the character she is playing. “There is a point in the process where I don't distinguish between whether I'm doing her or I'm being me,” she said to America’s National Public Radio in 2011. “That's something that, if I'm lucky, happens early on in the process."

Mary Poppins - Dick Van Dyke

Compiling lists of of movie accents that didn't quite go as planned is a bit of a guilty pleasure among movie fans. One that always makes the top of the charts is Dick Van Dyke’s infamous attempt at what was supposed to be a Cockney accent in 1964’s Mary Poppins.

Van Dyke played Bert the London chimney sweep in the Disney classic. But going by his totally unrecognisable accent, he could have been from… well, anywhere.

“I will never live it down. They ask what part of England I was meant to be from and I say it was a little shire in the north where most of the people were from Ohio,” he claimed in 2014, during an awards ceremony.

Over the years the actor has continued to take the ribbing about his Cockney catastrophe in good spirits, even going so far to apologise when he was presented with an honorary BAFTA in 2017. “I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of BAFTA for inflicting on them the most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema," he joked.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Mickey Rooney

Poor accents can sometimes have more serious consequences and cause offence, particularly if they reinforce racist or cultural stereotypes.

One of the most notorious examples was Mickey Rooney’s performance as I. Y. Yunioshi in Blake Edwards’s romantic film Breakfast At Tiffany’s in 1961.

Even by the different standards of the times, Rooney’s crude portrayal of a Japanese character was shocking to some critics. “The role is a caricature and will be offensive to many,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter’s critic at the time.

Director Blake Edwards later said he deeply regretted the depiction of the character: “Looking back, I wish I had never done it and I would give anything to be able to recast it,” he said.

It’s not the only time that actors adopting accents that weren’t their own has led to controversy, some much more recently. Director Paul Thomas Anderson was criticised for a scene in Liquorice Pizza (2021) in which a white character adopted a fake Japanese accent. And in 2020 The Simpsons’ actor Hank Azaria, who is white, announced he would no longer provide the voice for Indian character Apu, after continued criticism.

House of Gucci - Lady Gaga

Pop megastar Lady Gaga really committed to the role of Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s 2021 film about the legendary fashion house Gucci, for which she was required to perfect an Italian accent.

She worked on the character for three years, even dying her hair brown when she found it impossible to perfect the accent as a blonde.

“I lived as her for a year and a half,” she said. “And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that. I never broke. I stayed with her. I started with a specific dialect from Vignola, then I started to work in the higher-class way of speaking that would have been more appropriate in places like Milan and Florence.”

Despite the hard work the results were, well, mixed. Some felt that her intonation was geographically… quite a bit further to the east. Even the film’s dialect coach, Francesca De Martini, had to agree. “I feel bad saying this, but her accent is not exactly an Italian accent, it sounds more Russian,” she said.

Gladiator - Russell Crowe

Like almost everybody else in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Russell Crowe's character, Maximus, speaks with the distinctly plummy tones of English received pronunciation.

On the face of it, it doesn’t make much sense. The character comes from Spain, and the location of much of the action is Rome. Why the cut-glass intonation?

Actually, it’s not unusual for films set in the classical period to have the cast deliver their lines in an English accent. It’s more a convention than anything, but some critics and historians have connected the tradition to the rise of received pronunciation as being the ‘correct’ way to deliver Shakespeare, and this slowly became the ‘right’ way to speak any historical text.

American actors who don’t adopt a British accent often face criticism. Take Channing Tatum in The Eagle (2011), who was lambasted for using his native American accent.

Denzel Washington is already attracting criticism for not adopting a traditional English accent in the forthcoming Gladiator II, but he’s unapologetic: “Whose accent would it be? What does that sound like anyway?” he said in an interview with Empire. “You’re going to end up imitating someone and end up with a bad African accent.”

This article was published in November 2024