THAT CURIOUS INVENTION, MID-ATLANTIC ENGLISH Depending on the role, #actors quite frequently need special dialect, dialogue and voice coaches to help them come up with suitable and credible accents. #JohnnyDepp needed a coach -#BarbaraBerkery- to create his inebriated mumble in Pirates of the Caribbean. #ColinFirth worked with Neil Swain and his own sister, both professional voice coaches, to help him portray the stammer of George VI, his character in the movie The Kings Speech. If you like old #movies, you will have noticed that actors and actresses speak a strange #English. The first thought that is that people actually spoke like that back then. Interestingly, though, this was not the case. It was an invented language. The transition from silent films to movies with voices was complicated for many actors. Accustomed to using exclusively their faces and bodies for expression, they found it difficult to speak and act at the same time. Many, in fact, hated hearing their recorded voices. Actors and actresses started using voice coaches. #EdithSkinner, a #Canadian who had studied #phonetics, was at the time a consultant to #Broadway actors and had gained national reputation as a voice coach. Her book Speak With Distinction, published in 1942 was widely recognized as the most complete and rigorous method on speech and diction. It was a guide to pronunciations and was used extensively by actors, educators, students, speech coaches and movie and theater directors. One of the things the method teached was how to get rid of regionalisms. Her book probably played an important role in the creation of something that over time became known as #MidAtlantic English, a form of English that was neither too #American or too #British. For many years it was taught in American boarding schools, especially in #NewEngland, because it was considered more British and therefore more sophisticated. It came to represent upper class. #Hollywood readily appropriated this accent because it sounded universal and not from any particular part of the world. It was suitable, for example, for the voice of God in some movies, or creatures from outer space. It helped movies sound refined, magical and alluring. You hear this faux-British accent in most Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. It is the accent of #KatherineHepburn, #IngridBergman, #OrsonWelles, #BetteDavis, #VincentPrice and #CaryGrant. Since Cary Grant was actually British and moved to the #UnitedStates when he was 16, he had to do the opposite, learn to sound a little more American. Even President #FranklinRoosevelt spoke Mid-Atlantic English. As in British English, the rs are frequently not pronounced (fear is fea-h, part is pah-t, early is euh-ly). Ts are pronounced and stressed, and you pronounce words ending in er as open (water is “wah-ta” instead of “wodder” in American English, forever is for-evah). The Mid-Atlantic accent continued to be used in the 50s but it started to gradually disappear with the end of Hollywoods golden age and after WWII. Stronger American accents, like those of #HumphreyBogart or #JohnWayne were preferred. The rejection of that idealization of upper class American and British English was in a way also a rejection of classicism.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 22:47:23 +0000
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