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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hugh Laurie is fantastic.
Also, Ben Mendelsohn (an Australian) in Bloodline. [/quote]

Hugh Laurie to me is the gold standard. I'm a speech therapist by trade and with everybody else, even the really good ones, I have caught at least one error here or there, even if it's a tiny one. I've never heard him slip. I still remember my feeling of utter shock when I heard his real accent in an interview. Unsurprisingly for someone who went to the Dragon, Eton, and Cambridge, he sounds very posh. I know he's said "New York" is his least favorite word because of the medial R.

A more obscure one is Yannick Bisson from Murdoch Mysteries on CBC. He's Canadian but fakes an American accent perfectly. This might sound like nothing until you realize that he's Francophone Canadian and didn't start with English until he was 8. He sounds mid-Atlantic to me but then they had one episode where he quoted a sentence in French and I was like, "Wow, he fakes a great French accent!" No, turns out French is his native language and it's the English accent that's a fake. I was agog. You would think that with an obviously French first name like Yannick I would have figured it out before that but you would be wrong.[/quote]

DP. Whoa, someone besides me who knows who Yannick Bisson is! (An aside, but Jonny Harris's own native Newfoundland accent is a hoot to me on "Murdoch." I'd never heard a Newfoundland accent before encountering that show, and at first was puzzled as to where he was supposed to be from, until it was established that the character is from Newfoundland. Excuse me, that should be: NewfoundLAND. And that's Harris's own accent. But I digress....)

If I recall the story correctly, Hugh Laurie did the whole audition process for "House" with an American accent and until he got the role, some of the people producing the show, who shamefully must have been utterly unaware of his brilliant UK TV and film work, believed he was some little-known American actor. That's how good his accent was. Very consistent, too.

I would add to the list a long-ago film with Kenneth Branagh, "The Gingerbread Man." He played an American from Georgia and he nailed not just "American" but a specific regional American accent and did not fall victim to the generic "Southern accent" so many actors -- American ones too! -- employ if they play a Southern character. I'm from NC and loathe it when characters from "the South" all sound alike, as if NC doesn't sound different from deepest Louisiana, etc.

I would pay to see Yannick Bisson in a role where he only spoke French, BTW, PP....[/quote]

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