Bridget Jones’s dialect coach: how Renée Zellweger learnt to speak with an English accent  

Alice Vincent | The Telegraph – September 16, 2016

In the late Nineties, there was one role every British actress in her late twenties or early thirties hoped to land: Bridget Jones.

Helen Fielding’s hapless heroine drank, smoke and sang Whitney Houston to herself while doing both, but she was also the star of the runaway chick-lit success of the decade – one which would turn out to become a three-film franchise over 15 years, grossing more than $500 million at the worldwide box office before Bridget Jones’s Baby was even released.

So when Texan actress Renée Zellweger, mostly known for a role in Jerry Maguire five years earlier, was cast after a two-year-long search, it was hugely controversial – especially as she would be dallying between quintessentially British heartthrobs Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.

“We cast her, and the furore started,” Working Films’s Eric Fellner told the LA Times in April. “There was an enormous amount of backlash and UK actresses were up in arms. At that point, it became quite scary.”

While Sharon Maguire, the film’s director who is returning for Bridget Jones’s Baby, was losing sleep over casting a Texan as the leading lady from the Home Counties, Zellweger was kept blissfully unaware of the small showbiz revolt against her.

Besides, she had more important work to do: namely, learning how to become British.

Barbara Berkery had been working as a voice coach for film stars since landing her first job teaching Kevin Kline to trade his American accent for more gallic tones in French Kiss in the mid-Nineties: “I was working with Joan Washington (the dialect coach known for her work on Schindler’s List and Shame) and she was working on another film at the time, and she said, ‘Well, do you want to do it?’ That’s how I started – completely out of the blue.”

Renee and Barbara train

By the time Berkery was invited to work on Bridget Jones’s Diary, she had coaxed received pronounciation out of Gwyneth Paltrow for Emma, Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love and taught an 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan her English accent for Parent Trap. She was, in short, well-versed in showing American starlets how to round their vowels.

Berkery, who was living in London at the time, was asked to come down to London to meet Zellweger. “I can remember it was in the Covent Garden Hotel, and we sat and worked for a couple of hours on the accent to see how it was going. Then the producers asked me if I thought she could do it or not, and I said, ‘I can’t tell you if she will definitely do it but she has the ability to do it’. And that’s how it started.”

Berkery travelled to Los Angeles to work with Zellweger for a few weeks (“It was embarrassing,” Zellweger recalled at the time, “All these people who I see all the time, and now I’m sitting here ordering huevos rancheros as if I came from Hampshire”) before the actress moved to London to go full-immersion.

Learning an accent, Berkery explains, is not mimicry but adopting a whole new way of speaking. “You have to learn to speak all the time with your mouth in a different shape, with your tongue in a different place,” she says. “When you learn the accent it becomes part of you. It’s like a second skin, you have to act in it. You can’t think of it for a second, you can’t listen to your voice for a second, it just has to be there, like muscle memory – as if you’re a ballet dancer and you’re doing barre work.”

Berkery and Zellweger, who had never attempted a British accent before, would limber up to the linguistic barre in the mornings, and then spend the rest of the day practicing the accent in the real world. Berkery recalls: “she learned very well. We would go and have tea in various places, and she would use the accent”.

On the instructions of the producers, Zellweger landed a work experience placement at Picador publishers, in their publicity department.

Alexandra Heminsley worked there at the time and remembers attempting to take Zellweger under her wing: “I asked her if she’d like me to show her where the best sandwich shops were, but she was always going to meet someone at lunchtime,” she recalled in The Telegraph in 2001. “I told her I wished I’d had that many friends working nearby when I’d been doing work experience; she simply smiled understandingly, leaving me feeling rather small.” Zellweger’s lunch meetings were with Berkery.

“Nobody knew who she was,” Berkery remembers. “We called her Bridget Cavendish, because Cavendish was one of the producers. I would go and meet her at lunch every day and she would talk and then go back to making tea and coffee for people in the office.”

By the time Zellweger was due on set she was ready. “She had the accent complete and the character complete,” Berkery says. “So nobody ever heard her own accent, from the moment she stepped on set, to the moment she finished.”

Grant was “staggeringly impressed”, he told the LA Times in 2001. “There was a very brief phase where Renée sounded slightly like she’d had a stroke – a little bit slurred. And then she absolutely nailed it. I mean, I knew she could act it, just a question of whether she was going to nail the voice, and she definitely did.”

“She kept it going the whole time,” Berkery says. “Renée likes to stay in the accent.” It was only when Firth bumped into Zellweger in a hotel in Los Angeles that he heard her true voice, announcing: “She’s now wandering around using what I think is a rather unconvincing Texas accent.”

As for the criticism – made even by Grant (“there were some early rehearsals where there was a touch of Princess Margaret – she’d gone a little bit posh”) that Zellweger’s Bridget was too plummy?

Berkery dismisses it. “I think that’s a mistake. She wasn’t plummy. She did a media accent in Bridget Jones, which was very different. A lot of Home Counties girls want to go into the media and they go and develop this accent which isn’t necessarily their own, but a kind of media accent.”

Berkery went on to train Zellweger for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason as well as Miss Potter, the 2006 biopic of the Cumbrian writer and illustrator. Once again, Zellweger remained in accent throughout the film’s production. The pair reunited before Bridget Jones’s Baby - it’s not just the character’s lifestyle that has changed for the third film, but her accent, too.

“What we considered received pronounciation in 2000 will have changed slightly”, Berkery says. “People speak faster now, and they use a schwa, which is a neutral vowel sound, in far more words. Also, although Renée did do the accent before, if you learned a dance 16 years ago and had done numerous others in between, would you still remember it exactly?”

Berkery and Zellweger went back to the barre. Now the actress is famous, though, it was rather more difficult to go on their afternoon tea adventures. “We were wandering through town and she had a cap on and everything and yet someone still turns up and asks for an autograph. It makes you wonder, well, how did they know?”