Gwyneth Paltrow...
... is quite good at Brit accents e.g. Sliding Doors, but then she's married to one and she lives here half the time.

James Marsters - Spike from Buffy - is good enough that I was surprised to learn that he wasn't from London.

Brad Pitt did a passable (and largely unintelligible) job in Snatch

But that's about it. Pretty much every other American actor who's achieved any level of fame is more or less useless at Brit accents.

I'm not sure that's true the other way around, certainly given the number of Brit actors working over there in American roles (e.g. half the cast of The Wire, Hugh Laurie, etc.)

But that's not realy the point - you have to be good enough to fool your audience. So a Brit actor playing an American in America, or an American playing a Brit over here (or any non-Aussie playing an Aussie there) needs to be spot on. But an American playing a Brit in an American fillum aimed at an American audience (insert other nationalities as applicable) can sound laughable to us without harming the box office over there at all - witness Dick van Dyke's strangulated yowling in Mary Poppins, or Don Cheadle's fist-itchingly bad turn in Ocean's Eleven.

Cheadle's accent might have been rubbish in Hotel Rwanda too, for all I know, but Rwandans were not the target audience, so his performance was larded with praise by people who wouldn't know a Rwandan accent from a chickenwire fence. Including me.

ASIDE: I do Am Dram here in Britain with an American woman who's lived here for the best part of 20 years and rates herself a good mimic of accent (she has a Masters in Theatre, has tought drama for years, acted and directed and so on). She can do pretty good American regional accents (to my ear) but her vowels are all wrong for British RP (and every other British accent). Which makes me wonder if she's equally bad at the American regional ones and I just don't know any better. She's a damned good director, though.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 22 Mar 2010, 16:46, Reply)