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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Barriers are breaking down between British and American acting styles as stars like Johnny Depp, Claire Danes, and Samantha Morton embrace a dynamic naturalism.
Nov 18, 2004 | Just look at the way people talk about the accents.
Traditionally, when British actors play Americans, critics and moviegoers marvel over the realism and accuracy of their adopted Yank accents. And when you're listening to Bob Hoskins use the "whaddya know, whaddya say" voice he reserves for American roles, or the changes and irony Natasha Richardson rings on her flat Western accent as the title character in the 1988 film "Patty Hearst," there's reason to marvel.
Americans who play Brits aren't usually so lucky. Other than a New England accent (one of the hardest to pull off), no accent sets an actor up for criticism faster than a British accent. I can't think of one American actor playing British whose accent, no matter how good, hasn't been picked apart.
Accents -- and impeccable enunciation -- have bolstered the myth that British actors are superior to American actors. But the differences between British classical acting and American Method acting are eroding as a more uniform style, grounded in Method acting and its dedication to naturalism and emotional realism, takes precedence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where did this idea that accents equal good acting come from anyway?
From the fetishization of technique, that's where. It's hard for Americans to detect anything that deserves to be called culture in their own country. So they're suckers for precise diction and stories about classical training. Marlon Brando is the greatest actor this country has ever produced, and yet it was common in his obituaries to see it considered a terrible tragedy that after playing Anthony in the 1953 film of "Julius Caesar" he never again ventured into the classics. If that was the pinnacle of Brando's career, where does "A Streetcar Named Desire" fit in? Or, for that matter, "On the Waterfront" or "The Godfather"?
Shakespeare is one yardstick for an actor, but it is not the only yardstick. The critic Steve Vineberg has argued that Laurence Olivier, in his performances as the crumbling vaudevillian Archie Rice in John Osborne's play and 1960 film "The Entertainer" and as Othello in the 1965 film of the Shakespeare tragedy, came as close as anyone has to blurring the lines between British classical acting and American Method acting.
I'd add to that Daniel Day Lewis' performance as Christy Brown in 1989's "My Left Foot," in which the technique he brought to the role was secondary to his portrayal of Brown's emotional life. And certainly the explosion of writing, directing and acting talent that came about from the Angry Young Man movement in British theater and film in the '50s, and the work done by director Joan Littlewood, roughened up the traditions of British acting.
A more recent sign that the barriers separating British and American acting styles are growing shakier is the number of Americans appearing as Brits in current movies, accents -- good or bad -- be damned: Annette Bening in "Being Julia"; Billy Crudup and Claire Danes in "Stage Beauty"; Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie (OK, he was Scottish) in "Finding Neverland"; Renée Zellweger having her second go-round as Bridget Jones (a casting choice that outraged the novel's British fans). A better sign is that much of the finest recent British acting -- the work being done by Samantha Morton, Clive Owen, Colin Farrell (OK, he's Irish), Naomie Harris, Ewan McGregor (OK, he's Scottish, too) and many others -- appears to be derived less from what we think of as classical British style, than from the Method-influenced work of American actors.
