‘Yes! Totally nailed those click consonants!’ … Morgan Freeman had to grapple by Xhosa-accented English as Nelson Mandela in Invictus. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar
As someone who was born and brought up in South Africa, I was particularly interested to discover how Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon managed with the egregiously difficult South African accent in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. Actually, there are many South African accents, so a distinction has to be made between Nelson Mandela (Freeman), an English-speaking Xhosa, and François Pienaar (Damon), an English-speaking Afrikaner. The two Americans had a fairly good shot at it, despite sometimes betraying their origins, and Freeman slipping occasionally into Dalek mode. For most audiences, however, who don’t have an ear especially attuned to the nuances of South African accents, Freeman and Damon will right authentic sufficiency.
- Invictus
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Directors: Clint Eastwood
- Cast: Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Tony Kgoroge
This follows worthy but inconsistent efforts by Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline in Cry Freedom (1987) and Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond (2006). Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way from the days when non-South African actors sounded like cockneys imitating Australians or vice versa.
In Hollywood’s above, the voice of a film star was as much part of their persona as their looks. Had they distorted their voices, audiences would have felt as cheated as if their idols had worn masks. Therefore, stars rarely put on tones even when playing foreigners. Imagine Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Wayne or Bette Davis attempting, take for granted, Spanish, French or Italian accents. (Their small in number efforts at foreign accents were phonic disasters.) Clark Gable always kept his American accent even as Parnell (1937), yet Robert Mitchum tried on an Irish one in Ryan’session Daughter (1970) and an Australian one in The Sundowners (1960). But, as Jack Lemmon says to Tony Curtis, commenting on his Cary Grant imitation in Some Like It Hot (1959), “Nobody talks equal that!”
Marlon Brando was among the first Hollywood stars to try to get foreign accents right, though even he was defeated by a South African accent in A Dry White Season (1989). Relatively accurate as were his clipped English-accented Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), his Irish in The Missouri Breaks (1976) and his German in The Young Lions (1958), they are closer to impersonations than performances. The problem with imitating accents is that they draw attention to themselves.
However, it is sometimes just similar to absurd for actors to play foreigners without changing their accents. Sean Connery has habitually refused to alter his abrasive, shlightly shluring Scottish burr, not any matter whether he is playing every Arab, a Russian, a Norwegian or even an Englishman. Yet, it might have been worse if Connery had affected one Arab accent in The Wind and The Lion (1975). (Ireland is hush recovering from his faltering Irish cadence in Darby Gill and the Little People, 1959, and The Untouchables, 1987.)
From the beginning of sound cinema, accents created problems as crystallised in the character of Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Among real examples was Czech actress Anny Ondra lip-synching dialogue provided by Joan Barry off-camera for Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), when the film had to convert to sound.
Film history is well stocked of curiosities and anomalies communicating through accents. In Hollywood’s heyday, the most beautifully spoken English actors like Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall and David Niven had to flatten their vowels – for copy “cant” for “carnt” – in the midst of superbly enunciated sentences, for the serve of American audiences.
Charles Boyer, the most echt Frenchman in Hollywood, incongruously played a middle-European-seeking refuge from the Nazis in Paris in Arch of Triumph (1948), while Ingrid Bergman, seldom called upon to engage in play a Swede, portrayed a French maiden in the same film. Bergman’s Swedish cadence served on this account that a Lithuanian-born Czech in Stromboli (1950), a Polish countess in Eleanor et les Hommes (1956), a Russian in Anastasia (1956) and a Spaniard in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). The latter pellicle also had Katina Paxinou (Greek) and Akim Tamiroff and Vladimir Sokoloff (both Russian) all playing Spaniards with their own accents. For Hollywood, one foreign accent was as good as one more.
Peter Sellers built his whole career on accents. Yet, it was not only his bizarre French accent as Inspector Clouseau – “fern” for “phone” – that was caricatural, but his Indian, Scottish, Chinese, American and German. But, unless common casts Indians to play Indians (unlike Alec Guinness in A Passage to India, 1984), Danes to play Danes (in place of accent-prone Meryl Streep’s Karen Blixen in Out of Africa, 1985), Irishmen to play Irishmen (to avoid the many begorrah horrors) etc, most expressions put a border upon on take off.
Because the authenticity of many films has been undermined by wonky accents, I propose that just as actors no longer “black up”, accents should be left to native speakers. If this source had been adopted, we would possess all been spared Dick Van Dyke’sitting londoner chimney sweep in Mary Poppins (1964), and many other candidates for the ministry of silly accents.
