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One of the best things about calling LA home is the opportunity to live unabashedly through your actor friends. If I think I’ve had a bad day, say, maybe received a couple rejection slips in the mail or some line producer isn’t calling me back, my actor friends will come back with something like: “well try standing in a hatefully long line in a bikini top with 300 other girls, waiting to screen test a kiss with a man you’ve never seen before, and after that being told you should consider having yours ears pinned.” Well! The travails of actors are like healing stems of aloe vera to me; everybody knows it’s a brutal business, but I’m always shocked by how much I’d never be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny, the kind you’re pretty much going to have to take personally. But if they can do all these things and still be operational and still forge on, well then that’ll suffice as a proper tableau of hope for me.
Part of this vicarious lifestyle includes helping people get off-book, or support their pledges to speak exclusively in Russian accents until the call-back. Both of which I love to do, and which also brings me to the wonderful George Mason University Accent Archive website, as championed by Zooey Deschanel. It features men and women around the globe all reciting the same passage that begins: “Please call Stella.” (And no, it’s not ripped from a Tennessee Williams play.) Even if you’re not an actor or a proxy, it’s a cunning little archive, with interesting biographical data about each of the participants, including age of English onset and other languages spoken. But is it possible that there are those among us who don’t need the assistance of such a site? If you can slip into a French or German accent easier than backing out of a parking spot, please do share…
Somewhere I picked up the ability to do a decent British accent. Actually, I can do a range of decent British accents. Not sure how I learned it, though.
Also, when I’ve been speaking Spanish a lot, I speak English with a strong vaguely Mexican accent, though English is my native language. I can’t really help doing it, my mouth just gets used to those sounds.
Can’t do an Irish accent to save my life, and it makes me sad.
posted by Aemi on 11-17-2007 at 11:10 am
Being an actor isnt THAT tough… your skin gets thicker as time progresses. ;-) Could be worse…I mean its not like there is a strike going on or anything… oh… wait.
drat.
thanks for the link
posted by david on 11-17-2007 at 12:58 pm
i can do a pretty convincing southern accent. especially if i’m hearing it on tv or someone around me has a southern accent. it really freaks my husband out though! he says i sound like i’m possessed because it’s so different from my usual west-coast accent.
posted by lindsay m on 11-17-2007 at 3:30 pm
What a great website; I adore it! Thanks for posting it.
I’m a young aspiring actress and am attempting to be russian in a musical I’m doing. I was really pleased to find I sound pretty close to the examples of Russian-born women. And it helped me figure out certain consonant sounds I wasn’t sure how to make authentic. Awesome.
posted by Courtney on 11-17-2007 at 5:00 pm
I LOVE accents, I try to mimic them all the time (I’m not an actor, just a weirdo)…I live in Texas, but can do Midwest pretty well, and British (dated a dude from the UK, some of it sunk in)…my friend is from BAHston and I love listening to her…I keep practicing my Brooklyn accent, but haven’t mastered it…the toughest ones are the most neutral - there’s nothing to grab onto, so to speak…
thanks ya’ll, this is groovy!
posted by donner on 11-17-2007 at 11:05 pm
From living in Japan, I can do a decent impression of a Japanese person who can’t speak English very well speaking English. I just pronounce all of the words as if they were written in katakana and get rid of my intonation.
posted by Elsa on 11-17-2007 at 11:16 pm
So far I’ve fooled people into thinking I’m German, British, French, Russian, Chinese, your sterotypical ranting African politian, and Antonio Banderas. Picking up the phone for me is always an adventure. Who can say for sure where I’ve learned these tongues but I use my real voice only half of the day.
I once tried to fool a group of Brits when I visited Seoul’s international shopping district, but unbeknownst to me what I thought was British was actually Aussie… I’ve tried to be more distinctive since then.
Jamie T, The Getaway, Guy Ritchie and the Orbitz Gum girl have certainly helped.
posted by Jim on 11-18-2007 at 10:08 pm
It’s funny how quickly I start to naturally mimic an accent. If someone is speaking to me in a foreign or regional accent, my accent just unconsciously changes to match theirs. Once a friend of mine from New Jersey when we first met thought I was making fun of her, mocking her accent.
I have a naturally funny accent that causes people all the time to ask me where I’m from. I get guesses of everywhere, from New England to the Deep South to California, to Europe, and everywhere in between. My accent is a mixture of pretty much everywhere because my mom who taught me how to talk was raised in the Navy and picked up an “everywhere” accent and passed it on to me. When my husband met my mother he got a huge kick out of it because he’d never met anyone else that talked like me before, and her accent was exactly like mine.
posted by Melissa on 11-20-2007 at 3:49 pm