It occurred to me yesterday ('cause, you know, sometimes I'm kinda slow) that we've got a host of non-American/non-Canadian English-speaking actors playing American charcters on American TV these days.
Off the top of my head (and just limited to shows I watch), I've got:
Hugh Laurie (English) on House.
Anna Torv and John Noble (both Australian) on Fringe.
Joseph Fiennes and Sonya Walger (both English) on FlashForward.
If you want to stretch the point a little, you've also got Naveen Andrews on Lost suppressing his natural (English) accent in favor of Sayid's Iraqi-English. And Jamie Bamber (English) did a very respectable "Caprican" on Battlestar Galactica.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit to discover there's plenty more of these that I'm unaware of.
Now, I've heard Anna Torv catch some flack for an (allegedly) dodgy accent. But I've heard truly bad American accents {cough}Nicola Bryant {cough}, and I don't think this is one of them. Any of these folks can "pass" undetected by my ear.
I wonder if there's any American actor who could "do" a British accent -- take your pick which one -- that wouldn't make a native want to claw his own ears off?
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And you missed Yvonne Stahovsky from Chuck, who hides her native Australian accent quite well. And wussername from the new Bionic Woman a few years ago was passably American on that.
There's someone else I know of -- I'm sure of it -- but I just can't think of off the top of my head.
In the movie Dead Again, Kenneth Branagh did a terrific Austrian accent as Roman in the flashbacks and a terrific American accent as Mike during the modern sequences. His then-wife, Emma Thompson, completely failed to sound like the Americans she was supposed to be both in the past and present.
I was on the staff of U.S. European Command Headquarters, in Stuttgart, Germany. I have a terrible faculty for learning foreign languages and never did learn German, but there was an interesting thing. If you were immersed in it long enough, you could follow it and understand the gist, if not the nuances, of what was being said to you in German. That was especially true with their television programming. With the aid, of course, of what was occurring on screen, it soon became reasonably easy for me to follow the German dialogue.
One free weekend, I was in my quarters watching television---pretty much just to have it on---and some kids' gameshow appeared. The first thing that caught my eye was the hostess---Marijke Amado. What a babe! At that point, the show could have been a documentary on house paint and I was hooked. The way this game show worked, there was a panel of six judges. Five of them, apparently, were German natives, but the sixth was clearly American, though he spoke German as fluently as I ever heard. Later, I discovered that the American was Christopher Barker, son of actor Lex Barker. Christopher Barker has lived in Europe, particularly Germany, most of his life, and I am given to understand that he is a relatively popular recording artist and actor there.
I didn't know that then; all I knew was that he looked and sounded a lot like Anson Williams, "Potsie" on Happy Days.
So,the show is progressing and I'm following the German just fine. About halfway through, the hostess, Marijke, and Barker get into some badinage, and I guess going with whatever the line of conversation was, Barker starts speaking English. Clearly, he was an American.
Then Miss Amado replies in English and for a minute or two, she and Barker converse in English.
The first thing that caught me a bit a nonplussed was hearing English at all. I got so used to hearing German all the time, it was slightly off-putting.
But the thing that really caught me off-guard was Miss Amado's English---it was with spot-on American. If one didn't know, she could have been an eastern or mid-western American. I guess it's because I was so accustomed to expecting a German speaking English to sound like Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes. Not to mention that one would naturally expect a non-English speaker speaking English to have some kind of unusual accent.
For the first time, I realised that, just as we hear German accents, French accents, Spanish accents, etc., to the rest of the world, there is an "American" accent. I imagine I intellectually knew that all along, but that was the first time it really drew home.
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