The Top 10 Worst Accents In Film

Julia Roberts in Michael Collins
Catherine Zeta Jones in Traffic
Sean Connery in Darby O'Gill
Gerard Butler - P.S. I love You (Why don't they just hire Irish actors for these parts?? :) )
 
Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly. I think she was supposed to be Scottish but her accent was all over the place.

And my favourite, Donald Sutherland in The Eagle Has Landed with his Oirish accent
 
Big mention goes to Gerard Butler in P.S. I Love You. When he started talking, I thought he was joking around and putting on a pirate voice. Then it didn't stop.
 
Mickey Rourke's 'Irish' accent in Prayer for the Dying. Starts in Northern Ireland, then takes a tour round southern Ireland, pays quick visits to Liverpool and Scotland before jumping on a plane back to the States.

Most accents attempted by Ewen McGregor, but his American ones are generally pretty bad.

Don Cheadle - oh god that was awful
 
Sean Connery should be exempt from these lists for the simple reason that he doesn;t do accents! He just plays Sean Connery!

Charlie Hunnam is a weird one. He's English, but his accent in 'Green Street' is beyond belief, yet in 'Sons Of Anarchy' his American accent is bang on the money.
 
Am surprised no one's mentioned Keanu Reeves' "English" accent in Dracula yet.

Another bad one is Angelina Jolie's bizarre Greek? accent in Alexander. Definitely not her finest hour.
 
No - that defeats the whole point of training to be an actor in the first place. Actors are supposed to be able to do diffferent accents, and if they don't then their choice of roles is going to be severely limited.

And also by that logic, Irish actors would only be able to play Irish people, US actors US roles etc...what would be the point of that?

It makes perfect sense for an English born actor to perfect a decent US accent, it means they can work in the US as well as the UK, such as people like Gary Oldman, Damien Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis...3 examples of English actors who actually do it very well, and as such have the best of both worlRAB.

And besides, if everyone could do a perfect accent, where would the fun be in that...;)
 
Accents are the element in movies that has most improved over the years. We've moved on a long way from John Wayne playing Genghis Khan as if he were dealing carRAB in a Wild West saloon bar.

The 2 worst in recent history, when the actors were actually trying, are Tom Cruise in Far and Away (Oirish) and Keanu Reeves (strengulated uppah cless English) in Bram Stoker's Dracula. A surprisingly appalling English accent was Jodie Foster in Anna and the King, which was dictioned at TV daytime soap level.

Stars like Sean Connery almost never alter their natural accent and you can't criticise them for not sounding like the nationality of their characters unless the film is actually transliterated into foreign territory. Tom Cruise got a lot of criticism in the States for Valkyrie and the British actors didn't, yet they all used their natural voices and to have done the whole film in ze German schweinhund Nazi lingo would have reduced it to Allo Allo.
 
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