Dialectician Puts Accent on the Stars : Films: The coach who helped cast of ‘Steel Magnolias’ achieve a range of Southern speech also helps immigrants and executives shed their dialects.

Dolly Parton needed a dialect coach for “Steel Magnolias” as much as she needed a few more rhinestones.

The actress-singer from Locust Ridge, Tenn., already has a genuine Southern accent, thank you.

But the characteristic sounds of the South don’t come naturally to all the members of the new movie’s cast, and so David Alan Stern was called in by casting director Hank McCann.

Stern, 43, who lives in Park Labrea, is a dialect coach, a person who helps actors achieve aural authenticity. (In addition to teaching accents, he also guides immigrants, would-be anchors, executives and others in losing them.) For “Steel Magnolias,” a film about six strong-willed women in rural Louisiana, Stern helped perfect the Southern accents of actresses Olympia Dukakis and Darryl Hannah.

Stern, who spent a week on the set in Natchitoches, La., recalls being teased by Parton. “Where’s this little boy from Brooklyn who’s supposed to teach us little gals to sound Southern?” she asked.

As Stern points out, there are really many Southern accents, not one. For “Steel Magnolias” he taught very different styles of Southern speech to Dukakis and Hannah.

“We were trying to create two different worlds with speech patterns,” he says, explaining that director Herbert Ross wanted the women’s accents to reflect their differing socioeconomic levels. Dukakis, who plays the widow of the town’s mayor, “was to have a very aristocratic Southern accent.” Stern calls it “plantation style.”

“I’ve heard people joke that you have to learn to talk that way to graduate from Duke Law School,” he says.

Hannah, who plays the plain young woman hired to work in the beauty parlor owned by Parton’s character, was to have a rural Southern accent much like her movie boss’s.

Stern, who has a doctorate in speech communication from Temple University in Philadelphia, has what he describes as “a completely non-traditional way of looking at accents and dialects.”

As he explains: “Most people look at accents in terms of pronunciation differences. What really creates the essence of, say, a New York sound, even more than the pronunciation--what causes many of the differences in pronunciation--is that the muscles of the mouth are moving in a different way.” Shifting from his upscale, non-regional accent to a stereotyped New Yawk accent, Stern demonstrates that the latter is visibly different. A New York accent “muscularizes” his lower lip and chin.

Stern teaches that different accents focus the sound at different points in the speaker’s mouth. Plantation Southern is focused farther back in the mouth than rural Southern. The r sound is also very different in the two styles, he says. Genteel Southerners drop the r after vowels, while rural Southerners have hard, tight r ‘s. Plantation Southern is characterized by certain rounded vowels. Rural Southern has a more twangy sound. Stern also teaches his students the lilt that characterizes Southern speech.

Stern, who started out to become an actor, says his aim in coaching actors is to help them perfect an accent so they can forget it and get on with acting. “You want them to be able to become a character who expresses herself that way,” he says.

Asked how he got into the accent business, Stern jokes: “Doesn’t everyone wake up when they are 10 years old and decide to become an accent and dialect coach for the movies?” In fact, he says, he knew he had a gift for mimicking accents when he was about 10 and his father brought home the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” the world’s only hit musical about dialect coaching. Stern effortlessly reproduced all the accents on the record. “That,” he says, “was when I realized I was a parrot.”

Stern made the transition from parrot to teacher of parrots when he was on the speech faculty at Wichita State University and was asked to coach student actors by members of the drama departments. “Out there in the Midwest, where everybody was twanging away, the theater faculty asked me if I could teach accents to others,” he recalls. He found he could and continued to coach after he moved to Pennsylvania State University.

In 1980, “tired of academic poverty and academic politics,” he moved to Los Angeles and began seeking clients. “I was able to place very large ads in the trade papers,” he recalls. His industry clients have included Lynn Redgrave, whom he coaches when she has to sound American, Michael York and Bronson Pinchot, the last “a very quick study with dialects.”

Stern found that he began to see more and more non-theatrical clients who wanted help losing an accent, not acquiring one. “When I came out to Hollywood, I was operating on the assumption that 99% of my work would be teaching English speakers to put on accents for the movies. From the very beginning it was 50-50 and now sometimes 25-75 on the accent-reduction side.”

Stern’s accent-reduction clients have included actor Edward James Olmos.

Stern discovered he could apply the same principles he uses with his Hollywood clientele to non-actors. As a general rule, Stern says, non-regional English is spoken farther back in the mouth than most other languages, including Spanish, and involves less movement of the lips and the rest of the face. Many non-English speakers have to learn how to use more of their tongue when they speak, and so the first step in the process is doing calisthenics of the mouth.

Stern never promises clients that they will be able to pass as native English speakers, although some can, he says. Nor does he think everyone with an accent should lose it. “People who do accent reduction often get accused of wanting to homogenize the world, but I’ve spent hours on the phone talking people out of it,” he says. “I feel it’s only necessary when the accent is interfering with some professional or social goal the person has.”

Sometimes the goal is greater intelligibility. Remarkably often, Stern says, the client is simply sick to death of being asked, “Where are you from?” Sometimes, the client realizes that his or her speech is making a false, negative impression. Stern recalls working with a Moroccan client whose monotone speech was routinely interpreted as unfriendliness. Stern taught the client the varied intonation pattern he says is associated with expressive English (Stern calls it “jump up and step down”).

Stern says he is increasingly called upon to teach accent reduction to speech pathologists, teachers of English as a second language and others working with California’s flood of non-English-speaking newcomers.

The movies may be sexier, but accent reduction is, by far, the more satisfying aspect of his work, Stern says.

The process of losing an accent can be very stressful, Stern says. “The hardest part is coming to grips with the emotional impact of using a new style of speech.” However motivated to lose the accent, the client often ends up thinking: “This doesn’t sound like me. This isn’t what talking has felt like all my life.”

“That’s scary,” Stern says.

Stern has enormous empathy for such students. After all, he says, using the non-regional dialect he speaks so well, “most of my professional life is spent speaking a dialect that is not my own.”

Stern says he starts every day sounding like a television broadcaster. “But if my wife and I have a couple of glasses of wine, I begin to sound like Brooklyn, and she begins to sound like Texas.”