CATCH A CLASSIC
TCM Special Theme: Movie Accents: ‘Americans Playing Brits & Brits Playing Americans’
TCM, beginning at 7 p.m.
It takes a very skilled actor to effectively adopt an accent that is not his or her own in order to fully step into a character. Each Tuesday night this month on Turner Classic Movies, you’ll see a number of films depicting some of the more successful accent-adoption efforts; in many of them, the accents are so realistic that you may not have even known they did not come naturally to the actors if you had no idea where the performer was actually from. That was certainly the case in tonight’s first two films, which find American actors adopting British accents that even had Brit viewers impressed. First up is the classic and hilarious 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, in which Americans Michael McKean, Christopher Guest (who is part English) and Harry Shearer (all also cowriters of the film) flawlessly talk and sing in their personas as members of a fictional British heavy-metal band. After that, Texasborn actress Renee Zellweger earned lauds, including a Best Actress Oscar nomination, as the titular single Englishwoman in the 2001 romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary (pictured), making its TCM premiere. Tonight’s next two films flip the script with famous performances from Brits playing Americans, starting with Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, with Peter Sellers adopting an American accent as U.S. President Merkin Muffley, one of his three roles in the film (Sellers’ other two roles find him using a British accent as a Royal Air Force officer and an exaggerated German accent as the titular ex-Nazi scientist). The evening concludes with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play that sees British actress Vivien Leigh delivering a Best Actress Oscar-winning performance as insecure Southern belle Blanche DuBois in this New Orleans-set tale. —