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?