Quotes About Accent

I've been typecast. People don't want to take a risk or a chance. Quite a few times they've come up to me and say "We want you to do that Russian accent." And I'll be like, "How about if I do an Irish accent or a South African accent," and they don't trust that you can properly pull them off.

The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking.

I guess the most interesting thing that people think is I'm English. They think that I live in England and have a British accent. When they talk to me, at first they go, "Man, you have a great American accent," and I go, "No, no, no, this is my accent. I don't do accents." And then they're really disappointed, and they try to punch me.

I didn't really like my Sydney accent - nobody likes the sound of their own voice - and when I was a little younger tried to change my accent gradually. But I've only ever really lived in Sydney and Los Angeles, so I haven't been influenced by the accents of some far-off land.

I live in LA so I worry my kids aren't that connected to Britain, I suppose I don't want them to become American kids. We try to get back three or four times a year. When they go to school they speak with a British-American accent but when they come home to us they go back to their British accent, so I can deal with that.

I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent.

I went to a dialect coach and she told me that I had five problems; two were my Israeli accent and three were my New Jersey accent. I don't even want to know what I sounded like back then!

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.

Barrons has something the rest of us don't have. I don't know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we're standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there's something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn't want to. It likes it there.

Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural.

When I do an accent I commit fully and take it very seriously.

I played a lot of leaders, autocratic sorts; perhaps it was my Canadian accent.

Usually, certainly British singers, adopt an American accent when they sing and I think that usually people are thinking of somebody else, but I just think of very specific people.

I vowed to never use my American accent, and I didn't. Even going to get the paper in the morning to buying milk down at the shop, getting a cab, wherever.

I found out later on that was not true, that life drawing tells you a great deal about rhythm, about the structure of a human being or any animate object, and this could be directly translated into thinking about proportion and accent, rhythm in a pot form.

I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

There is a huge fan base, they're very knowledgeable and very loyal. I was astonished - before I started working on the series I didn't know anything about Game of Thrones. I hadn't heard of the books. When it started going out, people were coming up to me in the street saying [fake cockney accent] "oh, Game of Thrones, f------ wonderful.

Christopher Reeve did such an amazing job that to give him some kind of accent or more bravado would have been wrong. Audiences wouldn't have responded to that either.

When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

An accent in a way can be an entry into a character.

I can rap in a London accent, make weird faces, wear spandex, wigs, and black lipstick. I can be more creative than the average male rapper.

I'm from the South, and there's a different understanding of how to chop. There's a syllable play. It's a delicate art. Your accent has a lot to do with it. If you're from a certain area, words don't roll of your tongue as slick.

You can learn any accent you want. It's a fascinating thing.

Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

It feels great and it's very beautiful when you can bring someone of your own nationality into a story, where even the historic element of it is important. I loved that I could use my own accent for the character.

I'm a sucker for any guy with an accent with any kind.

I grew up in Mexico, not the U.S., and the fact is that there just aren't any parts for Latin actresses. I have to persuade people that my accent won't be a problem, but an asset.

I've never had my own accent in a film. It's something I schedule into my preparation. That's one of my favorite things, hearing all the voices.

Funny enough, every role that I have had, I try to tone down my accent or speak with better diction.

I always like seeing people transforming themselves, in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that.

I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.

I could never stand big-mouthed types. I had problems with that at high school. I’ve still got the scars on my fists from the teeth of the guys I hit so that they’d finally shut up. I came from England to Canada, of course, and was often ridiculed because I had a strange accent. I was expelled from school and it was a long time before I could control myself. But the impulse remained: a punch in the mouth to get some peace and quiet.

I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn't pronounce my R's. I wasn't a beauty.

I got a really thick strong accent. I'm a nerd, nah not really, I'm goofy. You have to know me. You'll see it, people who know me see it.

My music has a little hint of down south but I don't have a down south accent. I guess it's just the beat selection that puts me in a down south mind frame.

My wife is funny. And I dabble in it. So being funny is big around our house. But what's surprised me is my daughter can do an English accent. I don't know how she learned this.

[Katharine Hepburn] was much stronger, much more opinionated than I am or ever was, and it was considered attractive on her. But not on me. I don't know. Maybe her Bryn Mawr accent was more appealing than mine.

I havent lost my culture, just my accent.

That's an interesting accent you got there. Are you from stroke-victim?

Comedy has always been something I love, but for some reason - probably because of the British accent - I've always been pushed toward more period work.

I think in Arabic at times, but when I'm writing it's all in English. And I don't try to make my English sound more Arabic, because it would be phony - I'm imagining Melanie Griffith trying to do a German accent in Shining Through. It just wouldn't work. But the language in my head is a specific kind of English. It's not exactly American, not exactly British. Because everything is filtered through me, through my experience. I'm Lebanese, but not that much. American, but not that much. Gay, but not that much. The only thing I'm sure of, really, is that I'm under 5'7".

At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when that failed to persuade them, he fa...ked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent.