Diana Jellinek

Kiss 'G'day' Goodbye
Sometimes the accent has to go

by Wenzel Jones for Backstage West, June 6, 2005

Remember poor Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, gnashing and wailing her way through My Fair Lady as she struggled mightily to rid herself of a Cockney accent that was holding her back from her chosen field of endeavor? The same drama is happening daily all over town as performers, certain that their dialect-rich approach to the English language is working against them at auditions, undertake the process of stripping their speech patterns of anything that would label them as being from a particular region or nation. Uninflected speech is seen as the key to the kingdom, where lovely people speak glowingly of exciting new products and hilarity ensues in a dialectically indistinct American heartland, as seen on most of today's sitcoms.

It is not, however, a goal to be taken lightly. "You have to work your ass off," says Julie Daniels, who has been a voice and speech instructor since 1987 (www.teechspeech.com). "You really do have to work hard at it. It is all doable. People call me and say, 'Can this really happen?'" Gratifyingly she assures us that "the answer is always 'yes.'" Some people, particularly in the world of business, are trying to eradicate their accents from their lives entirely. Actors, though, are often of the mind that they just want to credibly pass as a commercially viable American in an audition or interview situation. "Because they happen to be in America, we call it accent reduction," points out Diana Jellinek, who has been teaching voice and speech for the past eight years. She finds it is often easier to approach the task as merely picking up another dialect rather than dismissing the one that you already have as somehow bad or wrong. Students respond better if "they feel like they're learning something, instead of trying to get rid of a bad habit, which it's not," Jellinek says.

Still, certain actors prefer to shed their native dialect entirely. Commercial actor Laura Robbins, who grew up in Key West, Fla., and Virginia Beach, Va., began to divest herself of her Southern lilt as soon as she became aware that she had one at age 19. To be mistaken for a native of Atlanta while on a trip to Chicago was bad enough, but when she first moved to California she encountered someone who equated slow speech with a slow mind. "I actually had somebody call me simple!" she recalls. Having worked with a number of dialect coaches and still reading out loud for 15-20 minutes daily, Robbins has now reached the point at which she rarely hears the question she hates: "Are you from the South?"

Fellow Southerner Christine Casey, a SoCal actor originally from Michigan, but who was reared from age 6 in Alabama, discovered that when she moved to California people would say, "Oh, [listen to] that Southern-girl accent!" "Rightly or wrongly," Casey says, "it annoyed the crap out of me." She took it upon herself to even her accent out by blending her Yankee and Southern speech patterns to achieve what she thinks of as a "newscaster, accent-less voice." Though she can easily slip into a Southern accent--sometimes all it takes is a phone call to Delta Airlines to resurrect it--she has found that unlearning an accent has made it more difficult to acquire new ones. "It took me probably three weeks of really aggressive coaching with a dialect coach to work up a passable British accent when I was doing a play that required one," she says. "On the upside, I got great reviews."

The West Virginia accent seems to be particularly intractable, at least according to the two actors we spoke to who are natives of that region. Stephen Inghram, who considers himself a character actor, was mistaken for Russian by his R.A. when he went to college, but he attributes that as much to his full beard and long hair as his domestic yet foreign diphthongs. Without formal training, he has since made a conscious effort to sound as if he's not from any place in particular and has found, with deliberate effort, success. Michael Childers, an actor who exported his "holler" speech to Illinois in his youth and then nurtured it in the bosom of a Puerto Rican street gang, began to disassemble his speech while attending Columbia College in Chicago, where he learned the Lessac and Linklater methods of vocal training and, in the process, began to lose his regional speech patterns. Having been called a "dirty hillbilly" as a child because of his accent, he always considered his voice to be an "impediment and source of insecurity." Now that he has reached a stage in which he feels he comes off as a "middle-class pedant," he's having a few regrets. "If I had to do it over again, I would never have gotten rid of my accent," he says. "I love it when I hear it. Whenever I hear Billy Bob Thornton...." He pauses slightly before going on. "I think it's so essential that you hold on to every piece of personal identity you can."

An Hour a Day Keeps the Accent Away

If you choose to shed your native accent, teachers and students alike emphasize that diligence is the key. An hour a day, every day, seems to be the norm if you're serious about making progress. Practitioners equate it to playing the piano, or going to the gym; those 60 minutes a week spent with the teacher isn't going to effect a great deal of change all by itself. Jellinek says, "The No. 1 problem is, students won't do the work on their own. The truth is, the work an actor does has to happen in their homework. You take it away, you go home, you try things out, you practice, then you come and see what happens. Don't expect miracles to happen in this one hour that you have for training."

LOU*LOU, an actor who plies her trade here in California but has more than a little of her native Texas still clinging to her vocal cords, says she can adapt in an audition situation but admits she has trouble with the self-control aspect. She purchased dialect tapes at Samuel French Bookstore and understands that "you have to discipline yourself and listen to the stupid tapes every day--just keep going over and over the sounds that they're making." Yet she contritely confesses, "I know what I'm supposed to do, but do I take the time to do it?" She persists at her own pace, and in the meantime is glad to be sent out, as she was recently, for a trailer-trash-mama part, where she happily "played a redneck to the hilt."

Consensus is that a student who applies him- or herself to the project can expect to notice results within three months and at the end of six months have achieved a satisfying amount of progress. To get to a state that president and founder of The Actors' Network (TAN) (www.actors-network.com), Kevin E. West, would consider "perfection," allow something closer to two years. West, who hails from Nashville, took an almost purely mechanical approach when he set out to dump his redneck Tennessee twang. Because the sounds you make are dependent on the way your tongue sits in the mouth, it stands to reason then that to change your way of speaking you need to change the apparatus itself. In addition to sitting down with a list of 10 sentences containing the most egregious sounds of his former speech pattern and recording himself as he read through them countless times, he tucked two little rubber balls into the corners of his mouth while doing his exercises. One would assume such a thing was done under duress, but West can blame no cruel educator, as he had none. "I came up with it myself," he says, "The more you try to form a sound [with] an obstacle in the way of trying to make that sound come out right, the more you are retraining the muscles, just like resistance in working out. It's the same exact concept." Although the method sounds draconian, it's clear from hearing him that it worked. While he does not advertise himself as an accent reduction teacher, West is not averse to private coaching in the area to both members and nonmembers of TAN.

Generally teaching methods are not quite as daunting. Jellinek will have students read through sentences and sounds and will mark the ones that fall outside the ideal. The result is a chart that clearly lays out where the focus needs to be. In one session, say, she will stick to three or four vowel sounds that come from the same place in the mouth and then drill the student in maintaining a proper shape to the mouth to create the sound. The results are taped and the student is sent home to "work, work, work, work, work." Jellinek is fond of the following metaphor: "I always tell my students it's sort of like if you're right-handed and try to write with your left hand in cursive. The brain and the hand just don't know what to do. They haven't ever had any practice, so they're sloppy and awkward and weird. Your tongue is the same way--it's just a muscle--so to make your tongue suddenly do different things is very difficult." And, clever though you might think you are, she can tell when you're sloughing off. "I just got back from working with a student, and I said to him, 'You're spending money on this, and I'm repeating myself now because you haven't gone away and done the work. You can keep doing this and keep wasting your money, or you can actually commit.' In terms of accent reduction I think that's probably the biggest obstacle."

Daniels adds a visual element by employing the International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of symbols that represents speech sounds. She will show you on the chart the sound you are making and then show you the sound you should be making. That way when you play the tape of your session back you can not only hear but see where your mistakes are in trying to acquire General American English. (Standard American English, Daniels emphasizes, is not what she teaches, as that particular dialect refers to the mid-Atlantic accent heard only in 1940s movies, in which a character might ask to borrow the "cah" from "mutha.") Daniels also suggests that, outside of the classroom and homework, the student speak American English all the time. The more attuned the ear becomes to the rhythms and intonations, the more able the actor is to go into an audition in a general way and put on a dialect as needed, rather than let the dialect determine the casting. Good intentions will not cut it. Daniels has little faith in the actor who says, "Even though I'm Southern today, I can not be Southern in a couple of weeks."

Masters of Disguise

Still, certain actors have a ready facility for dialect. Lisa Bailey, an actor and voiceover artist who moved to L.A. from her native Australia last January, had done phonetics work while matriculating at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts back home, but has taken no dialect courses since moving. She is able to affect a credible American accent when she goes on auditions, a gift she attributes, in part, to having grown up on so much American television and film. When she first arrived in L.A., she would go to auditions speaking in her native accent and found that it made the people she was reading to nervous, as they would "listen for the Australian" when she read her lines with an American accent. "So when I go in [now with an American accent] they won't be as picky," because they're no longer paying attention to whether or not she falls out of her native dialect. "I feel like it's a little bit of a shame and fraudulent that I can't speak like [an Aussie] and then go into the American [accent] for the job," admits Bailey, but it seems to be working for her. She hasn't been busted yet, but acknowledges that she'd be "really embarrassed" if she were. Friends have suggested that now that she lives in L.A., why not just use the local accent all the time? Bailey responds, "I don't actually want to lose my natural accent. I just want to be able to have both: to be able to work and then speak as I've grown up to speak."

Shedding an accent is one thing, but actor Silvia McClure has practically shed a language. Raised in Switzerland, where German was her first language and French her second, she came to California as a foreign exchange student and, in 1994, married a young man she met here. She retained her native accent as her English improved, having particular trouble with the "th" sound, as it doesn't exist in German. About five or six years ago she started taking voiceover classes and began to concentrate on sounding like a native speaker. She's studied with Laurel Van Der Linde, Sandy Holt, and Bob Corff, whose CD is in her car so she can put her time sitting in traffic to good use. She reads out loud at least 15-20 minutes a day and, if she has an audition coming up, tapes herself. In addition, she volunteers for a service that records books for the blind and the dyslexic. She now has an on-camera agent and a voiceover agent, and she draws inspiration from the Overstock.com commercial that features a spokeswoman who, McClure came to find out, is German, but "that didn't stop her from getting this big national campaign that's airing all the time." McClure now speaks stunningly idiomatic English, but admits that her spoken French is getting rusty and that "sometimes I feel like I don't speak a language [well] anymore." She adds, "When I write German letters or email sometimes I doubt myself. It doesn't sound right anymore, because the sentence structure is different. German grammar is, excuse my French, a bitch."

When struggling, it's always good to have a role model and Daniels has one for her frustrated students to heed. In the stylish 1991 film noir, Dead Again, British actor Kenneth Branagh achieved what she considers the best example of an American accent by a foreigner. "It was near to flawless," she says. She reminds students that their hard work will pay off, and they need to put in their hour a day, and if they start whining about it being too hard she points to Branagh to remind them, "You can do it."