He Accentuates the Positive in Coaching Actors

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 TV news 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.