Confusion reigns re: Pettigrew and Lupin

[GulPlum]

At 13:35 18/02/03 , Amy Z <lupinesque at yahoo.com> wrote:
>Thanks for the links, Richard!

You're welcome. (there's another one at the bottom of this message). ;-)

<Tim Spall>

>Maybe he's going to go on a crash diet for the role, thus fulfilling
>the description of Pettigrew as a man who's recently and rapidly lost
>a lot of weight.  The ultimate diet:  if you can't manage to lose
>weight for the sake of your health, you give yourself the even bigger
>motivation of a plum role in multiple HP movies.

Hmmm... But he'd lose his *entire* public persona and career as a slob! :-) 
(think Roseanne Barr and you get the idea...).

Even so, it's not just that he's overweight. He's also quite a large bloke 
even if he lost weight (I've never met him in person, but I get that 
impression).

> >Another is that he speaks in an exceptionally
> > broad Midlands accent

>In that case maybe he'll give Pettigrew a more intelligent voice than
>his native accent suggests.  Or maybe he was chosen partly for that
>role, since Peter isn't supposed to be the sharpest knife in the
>drawer.

Oh, I'm absolutely convinced that he was chosen for the role (if the 
rumours are true) because of his natural accent. Ditto Mark Williams (also 
a Brummie). :-) Whilst, say, Gary Oldman, could do a perfectly plausible 
Brummie (or any other typically uneducated or *seen* as uneducated) accent 
- indeed he has done in the past! - any (Brit) viewer would immediately 
know it's fake, because we know what he sounds like (rough London, 
actually, although it's been trained up to sound "proper" and that's how he 
usually speaks). With Spall, we know we're getting the genuine article.

>It's crazy, isn't it, the way we assign intelligence or lack thereof
>to an entire region?  In the US, we (=non-Southerners <g>) think
>Southern accents sound dumb, even when they emerge from patently
>intelligent people.  And we think upper-class English accents sound
>intelligent, even when they emerge from evident idiots.

There's a reason both Southern USians and British Midlanders sound 
"stupid": it's the nasal, drawn out vowels, which make the speaker sound 
lazy (hence stupid). The laziness/stupidity isn't so obvious to non-native 
speakers, because they don't pick up on the nuances; they don't have a 
"standard" to which to compare them. (To draw in another language I speak, 
the same is true of French speakers from around Marseilles: they are 
considered to sound "stupid", again because of the long drawn-out vowels.) 
Conversely, "proper" British English sounds intelligent because the vowels 
are clipped and less nasal.

>Amy
>still ISO of a head shot of Thewlis

There are several on this page on his fan site: 
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9633/picsMisc.html

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who thinks a full body shot of Tim Spall would 
*really* show the difference between him and David Thewlis. :-)