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."