British accents

[Skimmel_98]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C4716
From: Skimmel_98
Subject: Re: British accents
Reply To: [Yahoo! #4701] Re: British accents
Date: 7/20/00 10:20 pm  (ET)

This may qualify as an admission of ignorance but as someone who can
barely distinguish a South African from an Australian by there accents,
I can not begin to tell you what distinguishes a Liverpool accent from
a Birmingham accent from Manchester accent. I suspect that those of you
on the Eastern side of the pond would have a similar difficulty telling
the differences between a Texas accent, an Oklahoma accent and a Kansas
accent. It takes a lot of exposure to the actual accents to be able to
tell the difference.

Which brings my main point. The actor's accents will be even less relevent
than their nationality to the success or failure of the movie. They
could all have the same accents as Kevin Costner (Robin Hood), Dick van
Dyke (Mary Poppins) and Robin Williams (Mrs. Doubtfire) (all of which
I understand are bad accents but you couldn't prove it by me) and if
the script is well written, the movie well acted and it has the kind
of production values it deserves, it will be a great success. Fail on
those counts and getting the accents perfect won't help a single iota.