Reply to Actors from other countries who are able to sound totally American

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Matthew Rhys! I was shocked when I saw him on an interview a few years ago and realized he was Welsh. He does such a good American accent in everything he’s done. [/quote]

+1 -- Also Damien Lewis -- though he's not quite as good as Rhys.  Lewis has said that the hardest American accent sound for Brits to master is an "r" in the middle of a word.  He gave an example if dialogue from Band of Brothers where he had to say "It hurts."   [/quote]

DP. Not to derail, because the OP was about American actors doing other accents (despite the thread title) -- but, YES! This is a great example you give. The hard "R" sound in so much American English is tough for Brits and sometimes a less experienced British actor will bear down too hard on the R and over-emphasize it. I think the flip side is true as well; Americans doing various British accents seem to have a hard time being convincing with the softer, "ah"-like R. [b]Think, "It hurts" but with (let's say) an English received pronunciation accent, like, "It huhts" -- so easy to overdo the [i]lack[/i] of the hard R.[/b]

There is a terrifically interesting dialect coach who works with a lot of actors and who does very informative YouTube videos. Erik Singer. Look up some of his videos. Fascinating. And he does a lot more than just US-British and British-US dialect coaching. He talks about the Leo DiCaprio "Blood Diamond" accent in one of his videos, I believe. [/quote]

Yes.  And the Americans end up sounding like they're from Georgia or Alabama for a minute.  :)[/quote]

Interesting.  Going back to the Brits doing American accents side of things,  Lewis's accent in Band of Brothers sounds to me like Jimmy Stewart, who was raised in PA and went to Princeton, but sounded like a generic American everyman (before Tom Hanks became the generic American everyman).    [/quote]

He had that old-fashioned Mid-Atlantic (like literally middle of the ocean, not our area) accent.  Like Hepburn, and many others of that social class and era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent[/quote]

Katherine Hepburn had a classic WASP upper-class accent  (aka, Larchmont Lockjaw) -- actually quite different form Stewart.   [/quote]

I think Grace Kelly is a better example of “Mid Atlantic.”[/quote]

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