Oscar's ridiculous accents
Friday, April 10, 2020 at 11:30PM 
The Academy loves transformative performances, ones where an actor's chameleonic abilities are on full display. While the recent avalanche of biopics winning acting Oscars may suggest such dynamics are a recent phenomenon, it isn't so. Since the 20s, we've seen it happen regularly. Just look at Warner Baxter who won the second-ever Best Actor Oscar for putting on brown face and playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona. That particular example also brings up another favorite bit of acting work that the Academy seems to adore beyond reason – accents. Bad ones at that.
Some performers, like Meryl Streep, are brilliant at mimicking regional and personal accents, doing them so naturally that one forgets the artifice. Many others, can't be helped and often fail at the task. To be perfectly frank, I'm not a person that's much annoyed by bad accents onscreen. Nicole Kidman's American accent in The Portrait of a Lady is quite unconvincing, for instance, but I still consider it one of the actress' best works. That said, sometimes there are levels of incompetence too flagrant to ignore.
Such is the case of some Oscar champions, including a Best Actor winner whose efforts are cringe-worthy…
As mentioned, we can find many bad accents throughout Oscar history, from Loretta Young's Scandinavian intonations to Michael Caine's inconsistent Maine voice. Options are aplenty, but one disaster shines brighter than all the others. I probably say this because I'm Portuguese and have many friends from Madeira, but Spencer Tracy's turn in 1938's Captains Courageous as Manuel, an American-Portuguese fisherman originally from the Madeira islands, always makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons.
First of all, the accent is a mishmash that even Tracy considered terrible. For years, it's said that the Hollywood titan thought his performance was undeserving of the Oscar in part because he didn't even try to perfect a Portuguese accent. Instead, he seems to have done an amalgamation of Yiddish with a pinch of Italo-American thrown in for some unfathomable reason. The worst, however, is when he's asked to pronounce some Portuguese word (like his name) and the sounds come out all jumbled, probably closer to an alien dialect than anything earthbound.
Comments like these may sound catty, but this isn't an attack on Tracy. He could be wonderful like in Bad Day at Black Rock, but chameleonic accents simply weren't on his wheel-house. The actor's longtime companion, Katharine Hepburn, was similarly lousy at accents and she's still widely considered as one of the best actresses of all-time. Spencer Tracy wasn't necessarily a bad actor, but his Manuel is a linguistic calamity, so much so that his dramatic moments become tinged with unintentional comedy.
With all that said, Captains Courageous wouldn't have been an unworthy Best Actor Oscar winner if only the Academy had bestowed its glories on the film's true protagonist. As a rich kid who is rescued from drowning by the crew of a fishing schooner, Freddie Bartholomew is surprisingly effective. Avoiding mannered affectations, this little thespian can be touching and funny, always able to evoke the bold emotional registers demanded by the screenplay. The film's newly available on the Criterion Channel, so go check it out.
In the meantime, what are some of your favorite bad accents in the history of the Academy Awards? Are you similarly horrified by Tracy's Portuguese?
Reader Comments (34)
kevin Costner in Robin Hood, he looked the part, but he sure didn't sound like an English nobleman. Julia Roberts cannot do an irish accent in Mary Reilly.
Dick Van Dyke is of course perfect as Bert except for an atrocious cockney accent in Mary Poppins.
For me it was a very strange experience to watch Frida
Salma Hayek, a mexican actress portraying a mexican character in a story that happend in México BUT she is speaking english AND with a bad accent typical of spanish language people who starts to speak english. Weird but "understandable".
BUT the moment when I hear how she pronounces 'Rivera' as if was an english language speaking person who starts to speak spanish I was like: WHAAAT am I watching?
I just...I can't
Meryl Streep has done some bad accents. Doubt and August: Osage County, among others, come to mind
All of Meryl's accents are 100% accurate, Owen.
What a great topic and article. You have a truly creative mind, please can you go into even more detail? I almost skipped over the blink and you miss it Caine inclusion as his was the first name to some to mind I thought he’d be the crux of the article. Plus Deborah Kerr’s yank in From Here To Eternity and Aussie in The Sundowners. Is she an early example of multiple noms for an actress doing an accent? This article is a great start, but like all things Cláudio we need MORE!
A bit of a regional one, even in the UK - Lawrence Harvey in Room At The Top... so wildly inconsistent that it took me out of the film entirely... thank god for Simone Signoret to reel me back in...
I don’t mind Nicole Kidman in The Portrait Of A Lady because Isabel is so well-travelled that a mixture of accents is believable, normal even - it’s when the script makes explicit that a character has only lived in one area and yet their accent veers all over the place. See also - Elisabeth Moss in Top Of The Lake (would it kill them to add a line that she’d lived in the USA? Instead they double down on her ONLY living in New Zealand and Australia for no good reason)
Dl -- Her irish in Dancing at Lughnasa is BAD
There's accurate and then there's verisimilar. Sometime's an accent is spot on, but if it sounds over the top to the majority of spectators, it is still, arguably, a miscalculation. Streep in Cry in the Dark and Natalie Portman in Jackie come to mind.
Keanu is obviously the worst in Dracula.
Don Cheadle and Brad Pitt's cockney
Roberts is gr8 in Mary Reilly but that accent.
Meryl in Doubt is her worst accent because it is so obvious like Leo in The Fighter.
Was Kate supposed to be American in Titanic,I can never tell,as good as she is she cannot do accents.
Yes to all of this Claudio, especially the fact that Freddie Bartholomew should have won the Oscar instead!
Another actress good at accents is Kate Winslet.
Dear Claudio, as good as this article is (as always), you must know that we all are oscar bitches and one or two names on a topic is never enough, we need lists! Hahaha
Love, Aaron
To be fair to Michael Caine, there is a line in the film about how he's a British immigrant.
Being a scotsman I'm probably overly critical but Mel Gibson in Braveheart. That was pretty wonky.
Having said that Scotland's most famous actor (and Gibson's apparent tutor) doesn't appear to try accents: Spanish in Highlander, Irish in Untouchables, English in countless other films (including Prince of Thieves). People alway mention Kevin Costner but what was Russell Crowe doing in the Ridley Scott Robin Hood?
I fel like post Meryl, people got naturally a lot more picky about what accents they would accept and not ridicule.
Al Pacino in "Scarface" he neither sounded Cuban or looked like one
Charlton Heston as a Mexican in "Touch of Evil" (1958), Nick Nolte in "Lorenzo's Oil" (2002).
A more obscure one - Brad Pitt put on the phoniest NY accent ever in Sleepers.
Love Streep’s accent in Doubt. It’s totally believable in a hermetic 1964 Bronx type a way that a nun would speak, to me.
Not a film but has anyone seen John Turturro in The plot against America The most annoyingly fake accent ever. Makes the show unwatchable
Yes to more accent posts, a great subject!
Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly was hilariously atrocious!
I'm not sure whether we're supposed to limit our comments to Oscar Winners or at least nominees, but since nobody else is, here goes.
Out of Africa sort of drives me nuts, but not because of Meryl's accent, it's because of Robert Redford's! The movie says he's British throughout and it's based on a real person, and yet Redford sounds lke, well himself, so a western American accent. Meryl is busting her butt to sound super Danish (or whatever that is) but Redford just gets to slide? If they're changing his accent, why not just call him an American and be done with it? Or at least not mention his nationality all the time? Phew.
Okay, and I want to say that BOTH of Spencer Tracy's Oscar wins steal a LOT from the child actors he worked with. Did he win the awards because people thought he somehow helped direct those "kids" to such good performances?
Ralph Fiennes struggling with an American accent in "Quiz Show" (1994).
Being a Boston native, seems to me nobody can do a Boston accent unless they really are from Boston.
Before anyone criticises Meryl Streep for butchering an Australian accent in A CRY IN THE DARK (aka EVIL ANGELS), Lindy Chamberlain was born in New Zealand and didn't move to Australia until she was about 20.
So Streep had to deliver an accent that was originally New Zealand but had been influenced by living in Australia for over 10 years, which could not have been easy. And she did a tremendous job!
@Dave in Hollywood- Yes on Redford. It's like they cast him to be British starting filming and realized that he can't do an accent and then just decided to drop it completely. He seems to be trying in the beginning (I have your ivory scene in particular) but it is so bad and after a while any attempts to do the accent go away.
Colin Firth in A Thousand Acres. His Iowa accent was a terrible Frankenstein’s monster of Texan drawl, New England long vowels and California.
An awful movie (my expectations were so high given that pedigree), but his accent was definitely the worst thing about it.
Oscar winner Kate Winslet’s German accent in The Reader is just bad. Leo was only a nominee, but whatever he was doing in Blood Diamond did not work.
Michael Caine's accent in The CIder House Rules is simply atrocious. The fact that he won an Oscar for that performance has always been mystifying to me, and having the screenwriter include a line about being a British immigrant is what I like to call the "Sean Connery Cop-Out," so named because for years it seemed that every Sean Connery movie would include some line or reference to being originally from Scotland, thereby not requiring an accent attempt (his awkward Russian-accent attempt in The Hunt for Red October shows us why).
Regarding Nick Nolte in Lorenzo's Oil, if you had heard the Italian accent from the real Augusto Odone, you'd discover that Nolte was pretty spot-on. I think the shock of hearing it come out of such a gruff, all-American type actor such as he was the real issue with why he got such criticism for it.
Tom G.: That's exactly what happened. Redford started off doing an English accent but then Pollack decided it would be better for Redford just to use his own accent. I still love the movie, though!
I wasn’t bothered by Tracy’s accent, but only in the same way that you’re okay with Kidman’s Portrait Of A Lady accent. And second your Bartholomew opinion!
Michael Caine winning for The Cider House Rules was pure Harvey Weinstein/Miramax maneuvers. Haley Joel Osmont was robbed for The Sixth Sense.
Re: Sean Connery - doesn’t he just give up trying to hold an American accent for The Untouchables? Another career achievement award.
Etc., etc., etc. - YB
TOM
It was Jude Law for "The Talented Mr Ripley" that was robbed.
Laurence Olivier's accent in The Boys from Brazil is dreadful.
And speaking in Portuguese, Stephen Daldry's atrocious "Trash" came to mind, and Rooney Mara and Martin Sheen babbling the Portuguese.