[78-L] Accent you hate [FWD]

Mike Harkin harkinmike at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 11 23:39:07 PDT 2009


 Bud Black wrote:
>> It always amuses me to watch an old movie where the actors are portraying
>> the great statesmen of early American history, and hearing George Washington
>>  Benjamin Franklyn, or Thomas Jefferson speaking in good old Americanese,
>> when in all probability they all spoke with a pronounced English accent, not
>> being that far removed from the mother country.

Many years ago Masterpiece Theatre ran an adaption of Last of the Mohicans;
at first I thought it funny that alll the Indians had British accents, till I realised that probably we all had British accents....  Or at least the remnants of one, as I understand that by Irving's time Brits were deriding Americans' strange accents.  It sure would have been nice to have had the phonograph/gramophone back then!

Then there's Jean Marsh, who Alastair Cooke told us during the first run of Upstairs, Downstairs was a true Cockney.  Which means she probably spent millions of pounds on elocution lessons to get rid of her Cockney
accent....  So which was her most famous part?  Rose, the Cockney 'ousemide'!  Go know!

Mike in Plovdiv  





      



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