Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars including Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Orson Welles employed what's known as a “Mid-Atlantic accent,” a sort of American-British hybrid of speaking that relies on tricks like dropping “R” sounds and softening vowels, in order to convey wealth and ...
Katherine Hepburn suffered from essential tremor, which affected her head and larynx and was the reason for the distinct sound and nature of her voice.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the American upper class and entertainment industry of the late 19th century to mid-20th century, that blended elements from both American and British English.
So, did Audrey Hepburn have a British or transatlantic accent? It's a bit of both, really. Her accent was this elegant, refined blend that sounded British but with a continental European twist. It's like she took a bit of this and a bit of that from her travels and mixed it into something totally Audrey.
So, even though the country of Midatlantia doesn't exist, the mid Atlantic accent does (or at least it did). It was made famous by actors like Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Eleanor Parker, and Grace Kelly, just to name a few.
Katharine Hepburn was famous for her Mid-Atlantic accent - Daily Mail
Does anyone still have a Transatlantic accent?
Is there anywhere in the US where people speak with a transatlantic accent? No. The accent used by actors in American movies largely during the 1930s and 1940s was pretty much completely made up. It was closest to accents you might hear in Maryland and the vicinity, but it was so exaggerated as to be unrecognizable.
The Big Picture. The Mid-Atlantic accent was artificially created and popularized to project eloquence and grandeur in Hollywood. Prominent figures like Katharine Hepburn upheld the accent's prestige in the film industry.
Yes, Marilyn Monroe had a recognizable accent and speaking voice. Her accent, which was frequently described as a blend of the typical American accent with a subtle breathiness and softness, was a product of her birth and upbringing in Los Angeles, California.
Why did people stop using the Transatlantic accent?
Why did the Transatlantic accent end? The public stopped using the Transatlantic accent toward the end of World War II, when public schools began to phase it out. Still, actors who wanted to align their name with swankiness continued to use it.
According to Distractify, while Child was raised for the most part in California, her voice may have been inspired by Mid-Atlantic accents while attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
But, by the end of World War II, American elites and even Hollywood stars stopped speaking the swanky Mid-Atlantic English. Yet, some people, like the American author William F. Buckley and the Hollywood leading lady Katharine Hepburn, still used the consciously learned accent to emphasize their way of speaking.
Any actor or actress of her period would have spoken in much the same accent, the mid-Atlantic accent, as that is the accent actors would have been trained in at the time. Grace Kelly needed lessons to get rid of her Philadelphia accent, not a British accent.
Considering all of this and his farmer upbringing, it is safe to speculate that Washington's natural accent was, as Morse portrays it, predominantly American with a detectable English influence.
On June 29, 2003, Katharine Hepburn—a four-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress and one of the greatest screen legends of Hollywood's golden era—dies of natural causes at the age of 96, at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Audrey's stage name 'Hepburn' was taken from her father's name. He was born Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston (1889–1980), but later double-barrelled the surname to the more aristocratic-sounding Hepburn-Ruston.
Katherine Hepburn never had children. She was married once briefly, but then only had affairs, the most famous being with Spencer Tracy who was married. She personally felt that she would have been a terrible mother because she was unashamedly “selfish.” She was dedicated to her career.
I'm curious because his mid atlantic accent is one of the things he is famous for. He was born and raised in England and then spent his adult life in American movies, so he tried to imitate the American accent and the result was a very unique form of pronunciation that he is famous for.
Why don't Americans and Brits have the same accent?
The first is isolation; early colonists had only sporadic contact with the mother country. The second is exposure to other languages, and the colonists came into contact with Native American languages, mariners' Indian English pidgin and other settlers, who spoke Dutch, Swedish, French and Spanish.
The main issue that makes it difficult to understand a British accent is that it is different from an American accent in terms of pronunciation and word choice. This means that someone who has only ever encountered American accents may struggle to follow along when someone speaks with a British accent.
Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars including Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Orson Welles employed what's known as a “Mid-Atlantic accent,” a sort of American-British hybrid of speaking that relies on tricks like dropping “R” sounds and softening vowels, in order to convey wealth and ...
To rid herself of her Southwestern accent, Crawford tirelessly practiced diction and elocution. She said: If I were to speak lines, it would be a good idea, I thought, to read aloud to myself, listen carefully to my voice quality and enunciation, and try to learn in that manner.
She was raised by her Dutch mother and spent the duration of WWII in the Netherlands. Her dominant language as a child was Dutch. When she was five years old she was sent to boarding school in England and learned to speak English (hence her English accent).
Strange, then, that other famed male actors at the time—Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart—had wildly unencumbered manners of speaking. Their accents were very much their own: the former's a rural dialect of Pennsylvania; the latter's a spin on a regional New York accent.
Cary Grant was originally from Bristol and was known as Archibald Leach. He was a bus driver. He moved to Hollywood to make films. He started out with a Bristol accent and it morphed into a mid Atlantic one, sort of American West coast with a discernable west country rhotic burr.
