Accent Modification Quotes

I felt so out of place at the Miss India pageant. I had just come back from America, and I was told I needed to lose my American accent and learn the Queen's English, so I had to enunciate my vowels and speak well and eloquently. Giving up a New York accent is pretty hard.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

I'm a bit like a chameleon with my accent.

A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.

I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.

You know, so many people say TV makes you stupid. But it had the complete opposite effect on me. It kept me from having a really bad Southern accent.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.

My accent depends on whom I'm around.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

For 'Dum Maro Dum,' I had a diction tutor, as I had to get rid of my Hyderabadi Hindi and learn Goan Hindi. It wasn't easy, because these two kinds of Hindi were mutually incompatible. I had to unlearn one kind of Hindi and then learn a new kind.

If you're in America a lot, it's easy to get into playing American. All of it, the sounds, the energies, all very different. But it's really hard to do the accent. I tend to try and stay in it all day, which is the only way I can manage it.

I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.

When I arrived in L.A., I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult, so I had six months working with a dialect coach, and it's become a habit.

I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent; my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.

I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.

I had a dialect coach from the Royal Shakespeare Company who was from Sheffield.

My American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.

It's very much like a torture sometimes, the process of trying to get rid of an accent.

What happens when I go to America is I sound really English. Most people would start sounding American, but I do the opposite.

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.

To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.

'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

When I first came to the States, I thought I had a perfect American accent, and then I was abruptly becoming aware that it wasn't. So I did have to work on it a little bit, but I was hesitant working on it because I thought it was good.