A Pronounced Trend

The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but, as Eliza Doolittle complained, being trained to explain that refrain (with the proper accent) can be a real pain.

“Essentially it’s like taking your mouth to the gym,” says Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (familiar to U.S. audiences as Hugh Grant’s daffy roommate Spike in “Notting Hill”), who is learning how to speak “posh American” for the independent feature “Human Nature.” “Your tongue’s a muscle, and you’re training it to work in a different way.”

Once upon a time, what characters said in a film was more important than how they said it. For years, Hollywood played fast and loose with foreign accents, generally relying on a stable of European character actors to provide international flavor, with the overall attitude being something along the lines of “one accent fits all.” But that’s no longer the case, and long gone are the days when an American star such as Katharine Hepburn could sound the same whether she was playing a Philadelphia socialite, Eleanor of Aquitaine or Mary, Queen of Scots.

Many give Meryl Streep credit for raising the accent bar in 1982 with her Oscar-winning performance as a Polish woman in “Sophie’s Choice.” (She’s subsequently done everything from Irish and Italian to regional American--Southern, New York, etc.). Since then, many actors and actresses have altered their natural accents for film roles, with varying degrees of success, but Streep is still considered by most to be the standard against which other accented performances are measured. Now, in an increasingly international market, actors are expected to be masters of accents.

“It broadens the scope of characters you can play enormously,” says Minnie Driver, whose most recent film, “Return to Me,” featured the English actress as a character from Chicago. Driver returns to the Midwest in another American role in the upcoming “Beautiful.”

“Accent informs so much about a character,” she says. “It completely changes the rhythm of your speech and movement.”

In these days of ultra-political correctness, where filmmakers are called on the creative carpet for a seemingly endless variety of historic inaccuracies, vocal verisimilitude has become a highly prized commodity. Enter the dialect coach, well-armed with a verbal bag of tricks. In the past decade, dialect coaches have become a significant presence on the Hollywood scene--and on many a film set as well.

It’s a process that involves repetition, studying audio- and videotapes, visits to locations where the characters live, along with breathing and vocal exercises. Dialect coaches don’t all use the same methods to get talent to mind their properly pronounced Ps and Qs, but all are in agreement when it comes to the finished product.

“You don’t want to call attention to it,” notes Carla Meyer, one of the busiest dialect coaches in Hollywood. “You want it to look as seamless as it can be.”

Using far less equipment, these sought-after instructors work the same kind of transformational magic usually associated with makeup and special effects. They keep a low behind-the-scenes profile, but their influence is being felt where it counts. Consider the recent Academy Awards: Though it’s a rare Oscar season that doesn’t feature several nominees from Britain or Australia, what was especially notable this year was that every non-American in the four acting categories was nominated for a role in which he or she portrayed an American character, including best supporting actor winner Michael Caine.

It’s possible to look at this trend of non-American actors striving to take on American accents as yet another dreadful sign that this country is, indeed, taking over the global cultural landscape. While that particular point is up for debate (except perhaps in France), the reality is more marketplace-based: For one thing, films are often financed at least in part by interests outside the U.S., which could make non-American actors appealing to producers. And then there’s the undeniable fact that there’s more film work for English-speaking actors and actresses here than elsewhere; by becoming adept at American accents, actors make themselves more competitive.

Certain actors find a change in vocalization a fundamental part of the acting process. “Every time I create a character, I don’t assume they speak like I do, even if they’re Australian,” says Cate Blanchett, who worked with Meyer for “Pushing Tin” (1999) and the yet-to-be-released “The Gift.” “Like finding the way the characters move, you have to find the way they speak.”

In “Pushing Tin,” Blanchett was totally credible--and almost unrecognizable--as Connie Falzone, a disenchanted housewife from Long Island, or, to use the vernacular, Lawng Geylund. (Coming after her Oscar-nominated performance as Queen Elizabeth, it was about as different an accent as you can have and still be speaking the same language.)

Meyer recalls that for that role, “I had recorded a woman who was a nurse for my dad, and she was a great model for Cate to use.”

Meyer didn’t draw on one specific individual for “The Gift,” in which Blanchett speaks with a rural Georgia accent. Instead, while on location, the two wandered the aisles of a local Wal-Mart.

“Normally, I might go to the Wal-Mart to observe the way people move,” Blanchett says. “But when you go with Carla, as you’re picking the Cheerios off the shelf, you’re listening to what people are saying around you. The great thing about not being American is that you don’t assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.

“And that’s what’s great about working with Carla,” she adds. “She’s like a piano tuner, but she’s also a concert pianist as well, because everything that we discuss she can do herself.”

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Meyer went to drama school at Carnegie Mellon University, where her speech teacher was Edith Skinner, who, almost 20 years after her death, is still spoken of with reverence by those who employ her methods. Skinner developed an approach to speech and dialect training built upon the International Phonetic Alphabet and Standard American speech, which, Meyer explains, “is very good Eastern speech, upper-class New York or Connecticut--without the lockjaw.”

This is generally taught for more “theatrical” applications, whereas films are more likely to use General American, “more conversational everyday speech--unaccented American, if there is such a thing,” as Meyer explains it.

Judi Dickerson, who also uses the Skinner Method, was Russell Crowe’s dialect coach on “The Insider.”

“We studied videotapes of Jeffrey Wigand [the real-life figure Crowe was portraying] and listened to that man speak over and over and over again,” she recalls. They picked up specific sounds in his speech that Crowe could use “while at the same time not seem to be doing an impersonation.”

Dickerson worked with Crowe again on “Gladiator,” where his Australian accent was minimized so his speech wouldn’t be too marked a contrast to the rest of the cast, which was largely British. “Russell’s got a great ear,” Dickerson says. “Usually I’d just repeat a certain word for him, and that would be enough; he’d do it perfectly the next time. Or sometimes I’d give a hand signal--sort of like an airplane controller on the ground--and he’d know just what I meant.”

The specifics of dialect coaching vary from accent to accent and actor to actor, but certain principles remain constant. The coach generally starts by breaking down a script phonetically. Many actors, however, aren’t familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet’s symbols, which resemble a cross between shorthand and Greek, so it’s then up to the dialect coach to get the message across in other ways.

Word lists are made for the actors to use in practice sessions. “I’ll take words from the text that use a particular sound and make lists of them, then we’ll build sentences out of those words,” says Meyer, who’s currently on the set of “Pearl Harbor,” where she is working with Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, whose characters are from Tennessee.

Tapes help actors hear what a particular accent sounds like when spoken by a native of the region--and help them listen to their own voices, both naturally and with the new accent. Most coaches have huge stashes of dialect sample tapes--people they’ve approached while on the job, at an airport or anywhere else they may be when struck by a particularly distinct voice.

The best accented performances are those in which you stop noticing the change in voice at all. Clunkers draw undue attention to themselves and away from the film. Reviews of Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (1991) focused as much on his in-and-out attempt at a British accent--”more Sherman Oaks than Sherwood Forest” noted one review--as on his swashbuckling heroics. And Al Pacino’s version of colonial Brooklynese in 1986’s “Revolution” was thought more an assault against the English language than the British army.

Of course, there are no vocal recordings for people who lived before the Edison age (for all we know, maybe Costner and Pacino weren’t too far off the mark). This presents a dilemma when making a period film such as “The Patriot,” the Revolutionary War epic starring Mel Gibson. Both Meyer and Dickerson worked with Heath Ledger, who plays Gibson’s son in the film.

Ledger and Gibson are Australian (although Gibson was born and spent his early childhood in New York state). Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” on whom Gibson’s character is loosely based, was from colonial South Carolina. So what’s a dialect coach to do? Taking their lead from the filmmakers, Ledger was instructed to speak with a non-accented American accent.

“We were going under the assumption that the Southern dialect had not yet fully developed,” explains “Patriot” producer Dean Devlin. “We had a lot of discussions about accents, and we decided to go with a standard British accent for the British characters and a General American accent for the Americans, just to establish the difference between them.”

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Meyer and Dickerson are two of a group of about a dozen coaches who use the same teaching technique. But not all dialect coaches subscribe to the Skinner Method. Robert Easton, the self-labeled “Henry Higgins of Hollywood,” is a pioneer in the field who hung out his coaching shingle in 1964.

Easton sets himself apart from the “Skinnerites” who, he believes, focus too much on Standard American, a dialect he thinks is rarely if ever used and too “semi-British” for most American applications.

“Some people are extremely auditory,” he says. “They listen, and they get it.” With a more visually acute client, Easton writes out a phonetic transliteration of dialogue that emphasizes the appropriate dialect changes. For example, the phrase “stark naked” could read “stock naykuhd” for a character from Brooklyn, “stalk naykid” for someone from New Orleans, “stack naykid” from Boston, and “stork nekkid” if the character was from Fort Worth.

If Easton had coached Strother Martin, who played a Deep South character in 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke,” the often-mimicked line “What we have here is failure to communicate” would look like this: “Hwutt we have hee-uh is fay-ya tuh kuhmyoonykay-eet.”

Those clients who can’t pick up verbal clues very well either by ear or eye Easton dubs “kinesthetic,” noting: “Many of the people I coach have been dancers or athletes and have a great feeling for musculature. So I talk to them about mouth position, tongue position, maybe I even make little drawings of where the tongue should be.”

Easton has especially high praise for British actors, who, he feels, “in general are very open to doing whatever is necessary to create the character, not only in terms of dialect, but in terms of body language, mannerisms and so forth. It’s an oversimplification, but the English tend to try and use themselves to find and express the character, whereas Americans are more likely to use the character to express themselves.”

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In 1997, Easton coached Driver in an American role in “Grosse Pointe Blank.” Since then, Driver has sharpened her stateside speech skills with other coaches in a number of films. Despite her experience with different accents, Driver says it’s still “terrifying in the beginning. When you’re first starting an accent, it rules everything, and I’m always trying to figure out how the hell to focus on a scene when I’m so worried about an accent. Then, when you get loud or you get sad or you get angry, your accent is often the first thing to go.”

It’s often at such emotional points during filming that a dialect coach comes in, noting such shifts and gently pointing them out to the actor during a break in shooting. But coaches are not always hired for the duration of a film. When credits list a dialogue “consultant,” odds are he or she helped during rehearsal or post-production but was not there when the cameras were rolling. Naturally, the coaches themselves are keen to be on the set from start to finish--though that’s often not the case--and actors generally concur.

“It’s just so good to have a coach on the set with you,” Driver says, “because they can be listening up.” At the same time, Dickerson says, “My job is not to interfere with the actor’s creative process. You do your training [as an actor] and then eventually you find your own way.”

Dickerson, who is working with Hilary Swank on the Charles Shyer film “The Affair of the Necklace,” recently coached Ifans in “Human Nature.”

“It’s ‘listen and repeat,’ ‘listen and repeat,’ ” the Welshman says of the challenge to learn the new sounds and mouth movements of American speech. One element in particular needed special attention.

“I roll my Rs,” Ifans explains. “When I speak American, my tongue kind of feels left out. I’ve had to learn to let it lie lazily in my mouth like a futon.”

Dickerson “knows the mechanics of the mouth and tongue,” he says, adding in a roguish tone that transcends any accent, “she’d probably be a very good kisser.”

Ellen Baskin is an occasional contributor to Calendar.