Diana Jellinek

Losing an Accent to Gain an Acting Role

by Shira Ovide for the Columbia News Service, April 18, 2006

Sam Chwat as Henry Higgins, only nicer. As the founder of New York Speech Improvement Services, Chwat's Eliza Doolittles are foreign-born actors who say their accents prevent them from getting the roles they want. So Chwat drills his charges until they talk like they were born in Ohio, not Bangkok or Caracas.

"She's dying," intoned Theodore Zoumpoulidis, a 20-something actor and Greek immigrant, who was preparing for a performance in front of a theater full of agents. "She's dying," he repeated, looking intently at Chwat for approval.

"That's it," Chwat said.

Two years ago, Zoumpoulidis left his country, a steady job and his family and friends to pursue an acting career in New York. But he has discovered that how he speaks is interfering with his success. His Greek-accented English, Zoumpoulidis said, "immediately gets you out of 90 percent of the parts."

Linguists, speech pathologists and acting coaches are capitalizing on the ambitions of immigrant actors who often pay $100 an hour for help in shedding their accents. The field, often called "accent reduction," is exploding, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, where fresh-faced Russians, Swiss and Australians arrive with dreams of being a star.

The hopes of the would-be actors are squelched, Chwat said, as soon as they open their mouths. If you're an actor with a foreign accent, he said, "You're likely to be typecast as a foreigner or you'll be relegated to silver polish commercials or nonspeaking roles."

There is no specific training or accreditation for accent reduction teachers, but most are licensed speech pathologists, like Chwat, or acting coaches who found a knack for teaching people how to talk 'Merican.

David Schaap is a New York-born actor who now lives in Montreal and coaches Canadian and French-Canadian actors to sound like their neighbors to the south. His students hope to land parts in the many American film and television productions shot in Canada, where Toronto often fills in for Chicago or New York. "It's very hard to sell an American that doesn't sound like an American," Schaap said.

Schaap grew up in Long Island, N.Y., and knows personally that an accent can limit an actor's range. "When you're a Noo Yawka and you tawk like this," he said, breaking into a familiar New York accent, "you don't get a lot of work."

Like most accent reduction coaches, Schaap teaches a dialect called Standard American English, a kind of accentless speech favored by television news anchors that sounds distinctly American but not specifically regional.

It's not just actors who want help shedding their accents. Business professionals also find that a foreign accent subjects them to discrimination in the workplace. Some people are simply tired of having to repeat themselves because coworkers and friends can't understand what they say.

"Communication really is the currency of business today," said Karen Long, president of Voice Ergonomics, an accent reduction firm in Greensboro, N.C. "In the business world today, everyone is wanting to expand and improve their business communication in order to advance."

Losing an accent is a tough road. Diana Jellinek, an actress and acting coach in Los Angeles, compares shedding a foreign accent to losing weight. Both require persistence and commitment, and both have a high rate of failure. Most of her actor clients, Jellinek said, "do it for two or three times, and 75 percent of the students will disappear."

Alan Kennedy, a New Yorker who teaches accent reduction and English as a second language, says the first step is to help his students hear the English words they're saying that sound un-American. People from Spanish-speaking countries, for example, say the words "green" and "grin" the same way. "Sometimes it takes them a long time to hear the difference," Kennedy said.

In hour-long sessions, Kennedy runs his students through difficult word pairings, and shows them diagrams of how the mouth should look when pronouncing certain words. He writes dialogues for his students that include their most troublesome words.

Paul Meier, who coaches actors all over the world from his home base in Kansas, says actors are particularly good at shedding foreign accents. "If there's not a bit of the actor in you anyway, I don't think you're going to do too well in modifying your speech," he said.

Kennedy, though, says accent reduction is innate, not learned. "I really think that it's a skill that you either have or don't," Kennedy said. Just like "some people have good singing voices and some people don't."

Some accent reduction students are wary of losing their accents, said Linda Lane, a linguist who heads the American Language Program at Columbia University. "I've had students tell me, 'I don't want to sound like a fake American,'" she said.

Jellinek understands the concern, so she turns the tables. "Think of it not as losing your accent, but learning an American accent," she said.

Most adults trying to shed an accent shouldn't worry about losing it altogether, Lane said. "They are probably never going to lose their accent," she said. "I'd even go out on a limb and say impossible."

An accent, to some actors, can be an advantage instead of a hindrance. "I tell my students to use your accent to your advantage," said Lisa Mojsin, who teaches accent reduction in Los Angeles. "Because there may be a time when you want to be the exotic."

Back in Chwat's cramped Manhattan office, where piles of books threaten to topple over, Zoumpoulidis' session ends with praise from his Henry Higgins. "You should feel very proud of yourself," Chwat said. "You put a lot of work into this and it shows."

"I couldn't do it without your help," Zoumpoulidis replied.