BRIDGET
JONES'S HENRY HIGGINS
By STEVE SAILER, UPI
National Correspondent
- April 30, 2001
LOS ANGELES - Texan
Renee Zellweger's spot-on English Home Counties accent in "Bridget
Jones's Diary" illustrates that movie stars' mastery of foreign accents
has improved dramatically over the decades.
English critics, who had loudly protested the news that an American actress
would play England's new national heroine, found themselves admitting that
Zellweger had nailed the accent.
In the bad old days of slapdash dialects, American Dick Van Dyke could get
away with mangling a Cockney accent in "Mary Poppins." Cary Grant
could play dozens of roles as an upper middle class American professional who
just happened to have an unexplained Cockney accent. Grant never actually said
"Judy, Judy, Judy" in a movie, but the famous catchphrase conveyed
his un-American inflections perfectly.
Of course, being Cary Grant, he probably could have spoken in a thick
Norwegian dialect ("Yu-dee, Yu-dee, Yu-dee") and his audience
wouldn't have cared much.
Because moviegoers travel more these days, standards for accents are
correspondingly more sophisticated. Veteran Michael Caine, another Cockney,
dramatically improved his once notoriously shaky American accent by the time
of his Oscar-winning performance in 1999's "The Cider House Rules."
Englishman Gary Oldman simply disappears into his American roles, such Lee
Harvey Oswald in "JFK."
The main exceptions to this trend appear to be male Australian actors playing
Americans. Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon," Russell Crowe in
"L.A. Confidential" and Hugh Jackman in "Someone Like You"
all let a little Aussie slip through.
This is probably because Americans find Down Under intonations masculine and
likable.
The Professor Henry Higgins of modern movie accents might be Barbara Berkery.
The British former actress coached not only Zellweger, but also American
Gwyneth Paltrow in a hat trick of English roles that began with Jane Austen's
"Emma," continued with "Sliding Doors" and culminated with
Paltrow's Best Actress Oscar performance in "Shakespeare in Love."
Berkery just finished working with Paltrow again for her role in the upcoming
adaptation of A.S. Byatt's esteemed bestseller "Possession."
Berkery also taught Brad Pitt an Austrian accent for "Seven Years in
Tibet" and Kevin Kline a French accent for "French Kiss."
Berkery recently helped Oscar nominee Kate Hudson ("Almost Famous")
how to speak like a young girl of the century-old Edwardian era for a remake
of "Four Feathers."
Zellweger spent about six weeks in England learning Bridget Jones's accent
from Berkery before filming began. "She's a very bright, intelligent
actress so it was a pleasure to work with her because she understood and she
threw herself into it," Berkery said from her home in England.
"When we were working we'd do the exercise and then we'd go 'round to
Fortnum & Mason and Renee would order tea in her accent."
Zellweger even spent three weeks working incognito in Bridget Jones's
low-level job in a publishing office in London. By then, her accent was so
impeccable that only one of her coworkers noticed that she was the American
actress who had costarred with Tom Cruise in the global smash "Jerry
Maguire."
Berkery's technique differs somewhat from Henry Higgins' in "My Fair
Lady."
"The first thing," she argued, "Is to train a person's ears so
you work on just hearing sounds rather than hearing words. Then - and this is
where Gwyneth and Renee absolutely understood what we were working toward -
you learn that in basic Received Pronunciation there are 12 pure simple vowels
and eight diphthongs." These are combined sounds like "I,"
which glides from "ah" to "ee." Consonants would come
later.
British accents are particularly complex because they vary by region, class
and era. Bridget Jones's accent, like Berkery's, starts with what the British
call "Received Pronunciation." This is the neutral or
"BBC" accent favored by newscasters. It emerged at 19th century
elite "public" boarding schools to serve as the nation-wide dialect
of the imperial ruling class. It enables speakers to use multisyllabic words
quickly and clearly, Berkery notes, "because you're using all the
consonants."
Even Al Pacino turned to something resembling Received Pronunciation when
playing Richard III in his documentary "Looking for Richard." If
he'd stuck with his famous Italian-American accent, which is emotionally
expressive but rather tongue-tied, Shakespeare's verbally lavish tragedy might
have taken six hours to perform.
The character of Bridget Jones is supposed to have grown up in one of the
small towns in the posh belt of "Home Counties" ringing London.
Times have changed, though, in the century since George Bernard Shaw's drama
"Pygmalion" (which was made into the musical "My Fair
Lady").
Shaw's flower girl Eliza Doolittle was desperate to have Henry Higgins
gentrify her Cockney accent. In contrast, according to Berkery, "Bridget
Jones comes in to London to work in publishing and therefore she dirties down
her accent a bit to be accepted."
Berkery pointed out, "Now, lots of people going to top public schools in
England are trying to have kind of fake London accents. We're going into a
period of 'Estuary English.' This term refers to the emerging accent found
around the lower Thames River in Southeast England, that blends elements from
working class Cockney and middle class speech. "It's a bit of a
monotone," said Berkery.
She points to Guy Ritchie, director of Brad Pitt's British gangster movie
"Snatch," but best known as "Mr. Madonna," as an example
of the current trend toward dirtying down. Ritchie tries hard to sound like
one of the lads even though his stepfather was a baronet.
All across England, Berkery said, accents are homogenizing. "To get a
really strong accent you need to get older people" to demonstrate it.
English accents are also becoming streamlined. "People would say the word
'fortune' as 'for-tune,' but it's all now 'forchune.' That's now perfectly RP.
We speak faster and want to communicate quicker, so 'schwas' - the neutral
'uh' vowel sound - keep replacing lots and lots of distinct vowel
sounds."
"The sad thing seems to me is that the accent seems to be getting
slightly thinner," Berkery pointed out. "We don't get so much
resonance on it." This will work against England's great tradition of
ringing theatrical voices that carry all the way to the cheap seats. But,
Berkery said philosophically, "Language is evolving, it's always
changing, it never stays still."
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