It’s British, but not as we know it: Hathaway voices her accent fears

THERE’S a fine tradition of Hollywood’s finest playing British characters on stage and screen and – not to put too fine a point on it – mangling our regional accents in the process.

Who can forget the sound of the Missouri-born Dick Van Dyke “cor blimeying” his way through Mary Poppins as Bert, the Cockney chimney sweep.

Or Josh Hartnett’s accent in Blow Dry, a 2001 British comedy starring Natasha Richardson and Alan Rickman, which this newspaper’s film critic described as trotting “happily from Newcastle to Oxbridge, Bristol to Belfast”.

Now, Anne Hathaway has admitted she too has made something of a hash of our accents, and it has left her anxious about her latest effort at playing a Briton. The New York-born star of The Devil Wears Prada and Ocean’s 8 is remembered fondly by accent aficionados for her demolition of a Yorkshire brogue in the 2011 romance One Day.

So, eight years on, she is more than aware that the critics will have their pens sharpened for her appearance in the forthcoming comedy The Hustle, in which she stars as a British con artist alongside Rebel Wilson.

“I found out that I had to do it a week before we started shooting. I thought if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t make a difference, but the director insisted,” she said.

“I’ve done it before and it hasn’t always gone well, and it is so stressful to see someone struggle through an accent, so I got a dialect coach and made the best of it.”

For her part, Wilson – whose attempt at a British accent in Bridesmaids was similarly mocked – has got off easy this time. “As the producer, I gave her all the accents and I was cast as Australian, so I did no prep,” said Wilson, who is from Sydney.

Van Dyke eventually apologised for his Cockney accent, though not before blaming Julie Andrews, and the rest of the cast, for not taking him to one side to point out the deficiencies in his rhyming slang. He also claimed that his voice coach for Mary Poppins, who was Irish, “didn’t do an accent any better than I did”. In 2017, when Van Dyke was awarded Bafta’s Britannia Award for Excellence in Television, he stated, tongue somewhat in cheek: “I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of Bafta for inflicting on them the most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema.”

It’s not all one-way traffic of course. The British veteran actor Sir Michael Caine was widely derided for his attempt at a Texan accent while playing an oil tycoon in the panned 1994 action thriller On Deadly Ground.

And Colin Firth’s attempt at the tones of Texas in the 2010 drama Main Street did not go down well, though perhaps it was just the contrast with his usual quintessentially English characters.

Still, everyone’s a critic, as Hathaway can vouch. Despite winning an Oscar for her role in the musical film Les Miserables, her three-year-old son, Jonathan, is no fan of her singing.

“When I sing he puts his hand up and says, ‘Mama no! Mama no!” she told The Graham Norton Show on BBC last night. To no parent’s surprise, he appears to have relented when she sang a song from Peppa Pig.

Following the release of One Day, Hathaway said that she learnt her Yorkshire accent from watching reruns of Emmerdale, describing it as “actually quite exotic for me”.

Audiences will just have to wait and see what she’s been watching for inspiration this time. Hopefully not Eastenders or Coronation Street.

‘It is stressful to see someone struggle through an accent, so I got a dialect coach and made the best of it’