Dis the British Royal Family and Aristocrats Have a Recognizable Accent
"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." If always at that place was a phrase that embodied the idea of changing one's accent to get ahead, that'd be it. Later all, the My Fair Lady song that the lyric comes from is meant to showcase how a Cockney flower girl can advance her social standing but by improving her diction. And Eliza Doolittle wasn't the merely one giving it a shot.
Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars including Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Orson Welles employed what'south 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 sophistication on the silver screen.
Information technology's a trick that fell out of favor by the middle of the 20th century simply nevertheless pops up in popular culture—adieu, Madonna!—and is on full display in Hollywood, the new Netflix series produced by Ryan Tater.
In the 2nd episode of the serial, a group of aspiring young actresses are seated in a classroom at the fictional Ace Studios being tutored in the art of using the mid-Atlantic accent properly. "Mid-Atlantic is a made-up accent; no one actually speaks this way naturally," Kingdom of the netherlands Taylor'south Ellen Kincaid, a studio casting executive charged with training immature talent, tells the group of wishful starlets. "But it takes on some British inflections that add some refinement to the otherwise apartment and grating American dialect. You ladies would do very well to speak in this dialect at all times."
In the scene, Kincaid asks 1 student "where does the Mid-Atlantic accent come from?" "The middle of the Atlantic," she answers. "And who lives there?" Another educatee pipes up: "No ane."
It's a short scene but an of import i for the series to go right. "In 1947, the twelvemonth we begin in, more movies were made than ever before; the demand was then enormous that all of these studios were constantly pumping films out. They needed bodies, and so we knew that this sort of training center within a studio would be an access point," says Hollywood producer Ian Brennan.
"And if yous're going to be in those rooms, information technology seemed like the natural thing to exercise was see a group of starlets sitting around trying to learn the Mid-Atlantic accent, which they really did. If you listen to those old movies, people spoke in a way that sounds so funny today. Then, we wanted to go backside the scenes of that kind of scenario. It seemed like the obvious starting time place to get to transport people into this earth."
The Mid-Atlantic accent was important to include in the series, Brennan says, because "it denotes a kind of upper crust, East Coast wealth—only it's an affectation. It was created to unify and standardize an American dialect; people thought that American English could be harsh and apartment, so this was about halfway British. It was a mode to add together a patina of class and élan to voice communication that would otherwise sound provincial."
The emphasis'due south beginnings aren't entirely clear. Some experts trace it back to early American prep school oration classes, the work of the 19th-century philologist Henry Sweet, or that of the Australian linguist William Tilly, a onetime educatee of Sugariness's who went on to teach at Columbia Academy. Near can concur, however, that it was vocalization passenger vehicle Edith Skinner (a onetime Tilly associate) who really made the Mid-Atlantic emphasis popular.
In 1942, Skinner—who taught at Juilliard and Carnegie Mellon—published Speak with Distinction, which became the de facto wording bible for anyone looking to speak in what Skinner called "Good Speech."
The book, which is all the same bachelor today, gave advice on how to hold your lips and where to position your tongue, and recommendations on exercises for the jaw, cervix, and shoulders to aid in proper pronunciation. "Distinct utterance is the prime requisite of an histrion," Skinner wrote. "In fact, the audience should be able to take for granted that they can hear and sympathise everything the actor says, without straining to do then."
When it came to how she wanted her pupils to sound, Skinner wrote, "Adept Speech is hard to define but piece of cake to recognize when we hear information technology. Adept Speech is a dialect of North American English language that is costless from regional characteristics; recognizably Northward American, yet suitable for archetype texts; effortlessly articulated and easily understood in the terminal rows of a theater."
It was a technique that dovetailed with the rise of "talkies," which first came well-nigh in 1927, and gave actors the opportunity to use their voices to assist further a story. "The real secret of it, in terms of what Hollywood was packaging, was that you could find yourself upwards mobile by simply changing the sound of your voice," explains Samara Bay, a dialect motorbus who'due south worked on American Crime Story and I Am the Nighttime. "What a deeply American mythos to be able to do that: It'due south the song equivalent of bootstrapping."
Despite its popularity at the time—making it a touchstone in movies similar His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Denizen Kane—the accent would autumn out of fashion after World War II. Later, figures like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley would keep to utilize the accent to punctuate their public speaking and information technology would show up as a punchline nigh often to mock snobs, similar it did in the Boob tube series Frasier—but today the use of the Mid-Atlantic emphasis on screen (with the exception of Cate Blanchett using a similar version in Mrs. America to what she did in The Talented Mister Ripley) has all but disappeared.
Still, while yous might not hear the Mid-Atlantic accent regularly in modern movies, its legacy hasn't vanished entirely. "What is left over is a sense that there's a right way to sound, and you lot're in the club or y'all're not," Bay says. "In any culture, there is a audio that'southward associated with power—and it'south normally the sound associated with the richest, oldest, and whitest people in that culture. And so it'south upwards to anybody else to decide, do I want to match that or deviate from it and stand potent on my ain?"
It'south an thought that isn't lost on the creators of Hollywood. "That's the theme of the show," says Brennan. "Why are we trying to fit into a organization that doesn't want to include us instead of trying to create a new organization? Hollywood isn't only exciting considering you get to bathe in nostalgia and the lushness of the catamenia, only besides because it makes a broader and quite pointed statement about inclusion and aspiration. Is this the best we can practice, or might at that place be something more?"
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Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a32292809/mid-atlantic-accent-golden-age-of-hollywood/
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