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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York”.  Not just an American accent but a Civil War era New York accent.  The greatest performance of all time IMHO.[/quote]

He's another one that has had a lot of formal acting training.[/quote]

DP. This gets into another realm--how does one "do an accent" from the past, a lost accent so to speak? There are coaches and specialists out there who reconstruct speech from past eras but it must be quite a challenge. I agree that Day-Lewis's accent is wonderful in that movie. It sounds strange to us, but I figure if we time traveled to the past, many people "speaking English" would sound alien to our ears.

This is really off-topic but accents aside, the art of writing scripts for historically-set shows is also difficult, I think. Hearing people who are supposed to exist in 1870 or 1775 or 1910 who are using vocabulary and constructions that sound like today can be jarring. I know it must be done on purpose a lot, so we can identify with the characters, but it can backfire too. On the positive side, one show we watched had a remarkable "sound" as if the characters' speech patterns and word choices were truly from the 1890s--"Ripper Street." [/quote]

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