Bad accents and chameleonic impersonation
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www.guardian.co.uk
Watching Michael Sheen’s very impressive turn as Brian Clough in The Damned United DVD last month – a period in the life of Brian when he was very much not the messiah – set me thinking about accents. This is a Welshman perfectly channelling those once-familiar strange, condescending Middlesbrough tones, one of Sheen’s heartfelt chameleonic impersonations. And there are transatlantic equivalents: we’re used to a wide range of Americans, usually female doing word-perfect London (Gwyneth Paltrow, Renée Zellweger and many more.) Yet any form of Scottish seems to defeat those on the other side of the Atlantic, Mike Myers and Groundskeeper Willie being particularly extreme examples of joke jockery.
There’s no doubt that we were crap-accent champs in the days when Michael Caine and Sean Connery were our most revered screen thesps. Connery played a Russian submarine commander, an Irish cop and King Agamemnon without bothering to attempt any of those tricky foreign vowel sound. Caine, early, in his career played a Texan in Hurry Sundown, highly recommended for accent fans – it’s funnier than noted wonky cockneys Dick Van Dyke, Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle.
But weirdly, the prime US offender was that most sophisticated and erudite of sitcoms, Frasier. I didn’t mind the non-existent composite northern accent of Daphne Moon, as played by Jane Leeves (born Ilford). It was a bit worse when Millicent Martin, another Essex native, was pitched in as her mum with a slightly worse version of Northern Indeterminate. Then they gave us Anthony LaPaglia (Adelaide, Australia) as Daphne’s cockney (!) brother. As the series neared its end, not quite jumping the shark, but certainly stepping daintily over a halibut, they gave us Robbie Coltrane and Richard E Grant – using their own chalk and cheese accents – as two more brothers from this family of Mancunians. It’s enough to make Liam and Noel turn estuary.
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