Masterful actresses know how to accent the positive

I have to say Toni Collette, when I first saw her, I honestly thought she was American, then I heared her on an interview. And you have to of course add Julliette Binoche.

I have to say I wasn't all that convinced by Meryl Streep's Australian accent, although maybe it's just because I don't want the Australian accent to sound like that! Meryl is of course fabulous in every other way.

Another Australian who's good at the American thing is Rachel Griffiths (arguably better than Nicole Kidman. . .)

Emma Thompson was a guest on Ellen (the sitcom). She played herself and she was a closeted lesbian!.. But she's not in real life, but she did played herself.. .. I know. it's complicated. She has secrets alright. She rocks the accent. You seriously have to watch this over and over.

I'm still freaked out about it.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chq09Rn0Pg

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLHPQdUCD4&feature=related

Part 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rVq_zKEPP8&feature=related

WATCH IT!!!!!

OMG!!!!!!

 I LOVE MERYL!!!!!

 She is the best with accents..... follow the link to a quick vid of appearnace she made in Ireland where she talks about how she does it.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHg5WET8Y0

I thought Hathaway's accent was pretty good. Easily on a par with Piper Perabo in Imagine Me & You*, I can't talk about Portman, since whilst I've owned V for Vendetta for quite a while, I haven't actually watched it yet.

I think this article's spot on about the rest... ...with the exception of Cate Blanchett's Hepburn. Now, she is a brilliant actress (/actor, delete as preferred), and she had the mannerisms down pat, but to my mind her accent was off. It's been a while since I saw The Aviator, but I seem to recall thinking that she lacked a liitle depth. As far as I'm concerned, she should've taken lessons from Kate Mulgrew**.

*According to some reviews I've read online, this could be considered damning with faint praise. It isn't.

**Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, if you didn't know. She's appeared as Hepburn in the one-woman play Tea at Five, apparently to some acclaim.

My favorite acting with an accent story is actually about a male. I'm a 28 year old lesbian who loved the Roseanne show back in the day. Partly because my family line up was the same. I was the tomboyish middle child with dark curly hair. Funny how melissa gilbert turned out to be gay huh. Anyway my point was that the character Mark (the oldest sister Becky's husband) was played by Glenn Quinn who was also on Angel. On Angel he had irish accent that I thought he did a good Job with. Being the crazy Joss Whedon fan I was, I checked out all the dvd extras and found out he wasn't doing an Irish accent He was born in Ireland. All along on Roseanne he was doing an american accent. He was my favorite character on Angel. I was shocked to find out he overdosed and died. This will probably only be interesting to Roseanne Fans, but I'm a child of the Eighties/Nineties so I have these useless facts and millions more. I am a trivial pursuit queen.

P.S. I love the Closer. I rented season three and took a break from watching to check out afterellen and found this article.

she played a Brit in Notes on a Scandal.

Jacinda Barrett (in the Bridget Jone's scene) is also Australian and had a great American accent in Ladder 49.

Winona Ryder always wins the worst accent competition for me. Especially, especially in Dracula. That, coupled w/ Keanu's emotionless delivery, makes Dracula a veritable feast for my ears. :)

"Most Lesbians are deliberate cowards. Usually they're too lazy or too full of themselves to go out and get themselves a man." (The Shadowy Sex, Hilary Hilton)

Besides being probably the worst movie I've seen in years, Kate Beckinsale's accent in Van Helsing is just plain terrible, and her acting doesn't help at all.

I love Kate Winslet's american accent in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

I havent seen 'A Cry In The Dark' however I have watched some clips on youtube and Meryl's attempt at the aussie accent is terrible!!! she gets the occasional word right but besides that it sounds like a strange mix of british/south african/american. Definitely not one for the 'best' list.

Also, by the looks of the trailers for that new Tatu movie, Mischa Barton should be added to the 'worst' list for that "Russian" accent or whatever it is supposed to be!

Not sure why, but Brits and colonials seem to do southern accents very well.

My favs: Dame Maggie Smith in Ya Ya Sisterhood; Emma Thomson in Primary Colors; Charlize Theron doing her southern cracker imitation in Monster (don't forget she's South African-Afrikaans); Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain.

Absolute disasters: sorry, but Miss Zellweger's attempts just grate on me like fingernails on a blackboard! It seems that she equates squinting and screwing up her cute little mouth with sounding English.

As for Cate in The Aviator, I really liked her Katherine Hepburn. However, no one can touch comedian Catherine O'Hara's version of Kate from the long ago, classic SCTV comedy series.

As a southern gal born and raised(in Mississippi), I have to say I'm not a big fan of Kyra Sedgwick's southen accent.  As with most actresses and actors trying to sound southern, it's a little too thick. Love The Closer but the accent put me off at first.  We don't really sound like that.  Overdone southern accents happen to be one of my pet peeves.   

Jodie Foster is an excellent actress, but she just can not do accents.  For example, her bad British accent in Anna and the King. 

The only time I thought she did a decent accent was in "Silence of the Lambs", with a character who was covering up West Virginian with standard American.  I know she speaks fluent French:  do any native French speakers have an opinion about her accent?

I agree that Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchette, Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths do great American accents.  But Americans shouldn't get an inferiority complex:  I've seen plenty of members of the British empire do terrible portrayals of American, usually too  loud and too broad with overused slang.

I adore Maggie Smith as an actress, but in Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, she had the WORST fake Southern accent of ALL TIME.

She sounded like a demented child with some sort of speech impediment.

You can hear a bit of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikS5j6drFzw

Kyra's accent is awful.

I'm very sorry to disagree. After going this long as a lurker here I had to join to respectfully yet strongly disagree. I live in Canada now but I'm from the South and her accent is one of the worst I've heard. I can't even bear to listen through an ad for the show. And I've tried to watch it because I've heard its good- but no go. I just start to feel more and more upset as the show wears on. 

It's FAR too thick. It's like a parody. It's the accent that a foreigner hears when they hear a Southerner talk. But not how we hear it. 

I was raised partly in France too and when I watch a Jodie Foster movie I rewatch it in French. She does the voice over herself and her accent is perfect and her voice luscious.

@Merry1 good that you bring Jodie Foster up. It's amazing how she can switch from American to French without an effort; she speaks fluently French, if I didn't knew her I would say she's French or from a French speaking country. She did graduated as the best of her class from the College Lycée Français.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodie_Foster  : As a teenager, Foster Frequently stayed and worked in France, and still speaks the language, dubbing herelf in French-language versions of most of her films. 

Watch the French trailer of Nim's Island, she synchronized herself : http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Jodie%2BFoster%2Bfrance/video/x4z6ss_lile-de-nim-bandeannonce-1-fr_shortfilms

She was 15 when she played in the French movie: Moi, fleur bleue

She even sang in French; I think a lot of you already have seen this video but anyway here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VGlAPRAe_Y (first part was with a very famous French singer Claude François; second part (1min30) alone).

I just searched on Dailymotion of videos of Jodie Foster speaking French and I found this: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Jodie%2BFoster/video/x3ofvw_claude-francois-jodie-foster-michel_music , it was my first time seeing this video; it's a Christmas special with Michel Drucker and Claude François.

And here are 2 links of a long interview: part 1: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Jodie%2BFoster/video/x2wrzi_jodie-foster-la-rencontre-pt-1_shortfilms and part 2: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Jodie%2BFoster/video/x2wrue_jodie-foster-la-rencontre-pt-2_shortfilms

In 2nd part she talks about that she really wants to do a whole movie in French and that she express herself differently in French than in American, that her voice is differently in French than when she speaks American and that she has another personality in France than when she's in the US.

Anyway...Meryl Streep and Jodie Foster are 2 of my favorite actresses!!!

..I feel i can only really comment on people's English accents with any authority.

I think Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in sliding doors,  and Cate Blanchett is good in almost everything she does. I seem to remember Natalie Portman's being quite bad in V for Vendetta, Bridget Jones is OK not brilliant.

Most commonly people are really overly posh (spot of tea? jolly good), which is sometimes ok if it fits in with the charachter, but often just makes them into a sort of caricature, or when people are inexplicaby cockney (alright guvna).

Much as i love it, some of the worst english accents i've ever encountered are in Buffy the Vamprie Slayer. Spike's start off really really awful and gets better as the seasons go by, but it's never really great. I was never sure if Dru is supposed to be English or not, but the worst (fresh in my mind because i'm watching season 7 at the moment) are the potential slayers, it's hilariously bad. Alexis Denisof does an alright job as Wesley though. 

~ nice music ~

Frances O'Connor did and amazing job at an American accent in both "Cashmere Mafia and "Iron Jawed Angels." I didn't even know she was English until I heard her in an interview.

Also, I tend to disagree with how Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway did with their accents. While I thought that Anne Hathaway's was better. I did not feel that either of them did a poor job.

Anne darling, you're gorgeous and all, but the accent was disgusting.

And sorry to drag the replies away from the feminine slant, but I just have to say that Leonardo DiCaprio's Zimbabwean/South African accent in The Blood Diamond was mind-bogglingly amazing.