Pajiba

What's ironic about Tom Hanks is that he's done Southern accents before, like in Forrest Gump, which was decent. Sally Field had a good one too in that movie and in Steel Magnolias, but I believe she's from the South so it wasn't such a stretch for her. Renee is from the South and can't do the accent? That is shameful but maybe she just doesn't want to be associated with the South or something...

what makes this even saddder is that reese witherspoon IS BORN AND RAISED SOUTHERN

PUT DAH BUNNEH BAWK IN THE BAWX

Excellent topic. Will there be others, like worst British accent?

Whenever I think of Varsity Blues, all I can hear is the Beek yodeling "I don't wa-ant your li-ife."

Someone's going to have to help me out here, because I never saw Cold Mountain, but is Zellweger supposed to be retarded? If so, she deserves to be retroactively included on that list, too.

It was quick, and it was for Brits, but even still Shannon Elizabeth's accent in Love, Actually turned me off. Which is weird, because a good southern accent has the power to do the opposite whether you like it or not.

Kevin Costner in JFK?

kevin costner in JFK so deserves to be on this list. as does john candy, in the same movie. first of all, it's overly hammy mississippi style southern accents. people do NOT sound like that in new orleans. oddly, we have weird jersey-esque accents. secondly, they were poorly done overly hammy mississippi style southern accents.

"Illustrious"? You sonuva...oh wait. Are there hidden sarcasm tags there? Oh Godtopus, my self esteem hurts.

The disappearing reappearing Southern accent gets me, like Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate.

#1 on the best accents list would obviously go to Michael Palin as Pontius Pilate in Life of Brian.
"Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly!"

Southern accents just sound bad. I've spent most of my life "right-smack-dab" in the center of the Southeast (still here). What makes a southern accent charming (i.e. matthew mcconaughey) is the mannerisms, body language, and facial expressions of the speaker. The drawl is irritating and sounds progressively more ignorant with each word spoken, even to those who've heard nothing else. It would take a "Coon's Age" to teach it completely, when it would be much easier to learn to speak neutrally. I have learned to erase my accent [it's nice to feel like an outsider here].

Oh Julie, I know what you mean. Sweet, sweet Eddie the vampire. Just a little newbie vampire, big cuddly gay blood sucker. Poor dude.

Oh Julie, no kidding.

True Blood has the worst accents I've ever heard. I think part of what sent me to grad school for linguistics is my disgust over how people do Southern accents on film. I hate it. And is Anna Paquin any worse than the girl who plays Tara? You can't do that to vowels AND say the Rs like that!!!!
Not only do they butcher Southern accents, but they're messing with Louisiana, which is doubly insulting.
Like movies set in New Orleans, they have people talking with Georgia accents!! Weirdos!

But I watched the entire season of True Blood, yes I did. It's just so camp, don't you think?

As a girl from Georgia I'm considering being insulted by that comment. You can't see me, but I'm shrugging my shoulders and letting it go, figuring you could say much worse and it'd probably still be true.

My accent kicks in when I talk to my family. My fiance got a little scared when we hit south of the Macon-Dixon line on the way home for the holidays and I started tossing around terms and phrases like "hankering" and "not a lick of sense".

And that last one was not referring to something Julie might do after one to many...

I think there needs to be a category for Sean Connery all by himself, which describes the nationality of the character he's playing (English, Russian, Japanese, etc.) and the accent he actually uses (Scottish, Scottish, Scottish).

I know it's not a movie, but the chick that plays Charlotte on "Private Practice" has the most godawful accent.(Yeah, I watch it. It's a sickness.)She's supposed to be from Monroeville, Alabama, but it's the most grating, annoying sound I have heard. I live in Birmingham, and Monroeville is LA(lower Alabama), so I'll accept that there may be regional differences within the state, but I have never heard an Alabama accent that sounds like hers.

As far as television depictions of Southern accents go, I think the women of "Designing Women" did the best job. That's probably because they were fully realized characters who just happened to be from the South. So many times Hollywood thinks Southern accent is just shorthand for stupid, ignorant hick.

Oh, and No One, NO ONE should ever be allowed to do a "Cajun" accent on film EVER again, for ANY reason. It's just not worth it.

But people from Georgia are weird.

Re: Ladykillers, I always thought that the accent was a put-on, b/c he's a con man, and probably thinks the over-the-top-ness will be perceived as real southern gentlemanliness.

Also, I think his performance, at least with regard to spitting out that dialogue for every second of his performance, is a bit of underrated virtuosity.

Oh, but since it seems silly at first glance, and it's Tom Hanks not playing a character dying of AIDS, it sucks. Right. Forgot.

/End bitter rant from only person who liked The Ladykillers.

True. I drive fastest through Mississippi.

"To me, the issue is that there is no "Southern Accent", it's more like dialects that vary from state to state (i.e. Texas does not sound like Alabama does not sound like West Virginia, etc...) Maybe if diction coaches taught specific regional dialects is would come out better..."

Thank you, jay too!

I'd nominate Lindsay from Angel. Not that the accent was particularly bad, I guess (I'm from WI/MN, no frame of reference)...just that it showed up literally in the one episode when the writers decided that from there on out he'd be Texan. "Did he just get Southern for no reason? WTF?"

Sharon: I read that, " . . . examining bowels in the Mississippi Delta . . ." and I got are really dirty visual.

Julie: You can no more pretend to be offended at the insinuation of impropriety than I can be by the Georgians sound weird comment.

It'd be like someone calling Skitz a freakazoid alcoholic. He'd yell "Hey!" all indignantly, but then he'd settle down, pass his flask of hooch back to Wendel, and tuck them both under his trenchcoat while walking away muttering about the brainfoot.

I love my Minnesota accent. You can tell I'm from the cities, and not from northern Minnesota. I have just enough long vowels without sounding like I'm almost Canadian.

feramones - You forgot the all caps. It's BRAINFOOT. To maximize the craziness that is BRAINFOOT. Say what? BRAINFOOT. I imagine radio host from the forties doing a horror show. brrrAAAAAINFOOOOOOOOOOT!

Reece is from Tennessee, isn't she?
And Julia Roberts is from my dad's hometown, Smyrna, GA. It's a small town outside of Atlanta.

As far as accents, there are Georgians that sound dashing and charming, and then there are ones that sound dumber than stumps. The media always seems to portray the dumb-sounding ones.

And rlr260- I completely agree with the Designing Women comment. They sound like all my family members... they have a very noctivable drawl, but they don't sound like they inbred with their siblings.

and feramones... your post made me laugh. I was born in California, and have lived here my whole life, but growing up with family from Georgia, I can get an accent on REAL fast. And most people don't get half the sayings my family has. I have also been known to drop many an "ain't" into a conversation.

I have just enough long vowels without sounding like I'm almost Canadian.

*clears throat*

And what, good Snath, is wrong with sounding almost Canadian? Are you insinuating that we carry our vowels? That we all run aboot soonding like characters from the Sooth Park movie?

I take offense.

ay.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with sounding Canadian. I just implied it. There's a difference!

And no, there is nothing wrong with it, really. I have a lot of Canadian friends, and I enjoy making fun of them when they pronounce pasta like "pass-ta." Teehee.

In all seriousness though, I love Canada and I love Canadians. I have actually thought about moving there several times, and not just that "Oh god if Bush is re-elected I'm moving to Canada" crap. I really thought about it. I like it there, and I've only been twice.

Canadians are afraid of the dark, so I've heard.*

*Bless you, How I Met Your Mother and the Jason Segaly goodness you bring.

Holy crap, forget Zellweger's accent, what about her freaking ACTING? I thought that movie was supposed to be decent.

I just remembered one of the worst Southern accents I ever heard:
Maggie Smith, Yaya Sisterhood (again, shut up). An Englishwoman trying to do a Cajun-ish/Southern Belle which came out more like a constipated French chef:
"Awww, bay-bay"

Ugh.

Like you had to ask.

Lifelong southerner here. Texas isn't the South. You could make a lovely list of bad Texas accents alone. I get told often that I cannot be southern as I apparently talk fast. If someone told me that there are different forms of English in the Southern US, I would not be suprised.

Sharon, yes, Mississippi is the weirdest state of them all. Especially if you are in the middle, which is nothing but a kudzu pile and some of the strangest people you will ever find. I lived just outside of Memphis in Mississippi for a while. It scared me. That state could West Virginia a serious run for it's money on the backwards-scary people factor.

Nicholas Cage absolutely needs a lifetime achievement award for "Atrocious Accents Used In A Motion Picture". They can even call it the "Nicholas Cage Award".

All the non-natives in Ghosts of Mississippi, particularly the kids.

Sean Penn, All the Kings Men. I must presume the only reason this did not make the list is that nobody but me actually saw this movie. Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins are just as bad, but I halfway forgive them because they're Brits.

Roberts is from Smyrna by way of Dunwoody -- both Atlanta suburbs. It's entirely possible to grow up in Atlanta and have a neutral accent (case in point, yours truly), but it's certainly easier to affect some kind of Southern accent than Roberts made it seem.

I say "some kind of Southern accent" because, as noted, there are lots of them. There isn't even a definitive Georgia accent. There's the plains drawl with a slow cadence (i.e. Jimmy Carter), the quicker Savannah drawl, the Appalachian twang (Zell Miller, Ralph Stanley), the Gullah Creole, etc.

I grew up no more than 100 miles from the foothills of Appalachia, but some of them mountain folk are completely incomprehensible to me....

I asked once, when I first started linguistics, if there was a reason for the New Orleans/Brooklyn similarity. Apparently it has to do with Irish immigrants. That's what I was told anyway.

Irish immigrants and SAILORS - they're both port cities and Brooklyn to New Orleans was a pretty common circuit.

True Blood - funny thing is, in the Sookie Stackhouse novels that the show is based on, the author doesn't bother with the accents at all. Apparently Sookie doesn't hear them.

Julia Roberts should be anointed Queen of Bad Accents. Anyone hear her Irish take in Michael Collins? Bitch can't brogue for shit.

Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear - ghastly, cartoonish.

All-time worst: Marlon Brando, Reflections in a Golden Eye. As a closeted Southern Army officer, he sounds like Truman Capote on uppers.

Herman Munster as the judge in "My Cousin Vinny"

As someone raised in Texas, yes, I too turn my accent on and off. I once had a job, in Austin, Texas, that required speaking with people from around the U.S. and U.S territories, imparting medical information. We had several crazy people that would call in daily, (the lesbian that would call in and have you talk her through a breast self-exam, which she would perform while talking to you, with MUCH moaning; the woman who was convinced she had prostate cancer..you get the drift). It was nothing for me to be on an hour long phone call with these people, with never a peep of an accent on my part; however, the minute I would hang up on them I would yell to my coworkers "Hey ya'll wouldn't believe the shit I jus herd." And yes, I have never, ever heard, in all my throughout the South, anyone talk as retarded as Renee Zellwegger in Cold Mountain

JESSICAN SIMPSON IN "THE DUKES OF HAZZARD!"

Yes, I know she's from Texas, but she decided to adopt some god-awful mockery of a Georgian accent and it sounded horrible. She might as well have been from Wisconsin as terrible as she pulled it off (actually, someone from Wisconsin probably would have done a better job). Just awful, awful, awful. Every time I hear her "Daisy Duke" accent, it makes me want to punch things. Preferably things named "Jessica Simpson." Oh, and her dad, just 'cause he comes off as a douchenozzle.;)

I was born in NC and my family is from NC and south Louisiana. I've lived in Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, southeast Georgia, and South Carolina. Every one of those places has a different accent, and none of them sound remotely like a "Southern" accent that you hear in a Hollywood movie. Who are these dialect coaches?? Have they ever heard native speakers?

As noted above, an accent can vary widely within a state; people in the mountains of North Carolina don't sound like the people from the coast or the people in the middle of the state. But also the South has more remnants of the hierarchical class system than some other parts of the country, and different classes have different accents. It's not unusual for an upper class person to sound totally different than a poor person from the same area. Whereas pretty much all people from, say, the north side of Chicago sound the same, rich or poor.

My nominee for horrific southern accent is Nick Nolte (originally from West Virginia) in Prince of Tides. Just torture for the ears.

dixiechik;
The class differences in speech occur almost everywhere, actually, and there have been some really interesting studies done. William Labov once researched the presence or absence of Rs in the speech of sales clerks in different department stores in NYC.
The latest wave of sociolinguistics uses the theory that people not only have certain speech features depending on where they're from or status, but also consciously choose features for social group alignment.

Yeah, this is me getting excited about speech and accents. Guess I went back to school for the right thing this time. :)

luthien26 -

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

And feramones, isn't it the Mason-Dixon line?

And I'm a tag dork.

I'd like to add the entire cast of "Gone With The Wind" to this list.

Really wish I had seen this thread earlier.

Anyway, I'm Dallas born and raised. Seventh generation Texan. And I majored in linguistics. So I have quite a bit to say on this topic.

Yes, the New York accent and the deep south accent do funny things with their r sounds, but they are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT things. The New York r is a harder rounded sound, if that makes sense. The classic deep south dropped r is just that, it's dropped. It's a very soft sound. It's like it has disappeared. It's not rounded, as Costner did in JFK. That drove me BATSHIT. Also, there honestly aren't a lot of people left in the southeast who do that classic dropped r (I also lived in Georgia and Alabama for a while and usually you hear that more among the older generation).

It blows me away when people actually FROM the south mess up southern accents in movies. My theory is they are trying too hard and it is inconsistent (see Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama for the latter example and Zellwegger in Cold Mountain for the former example).

The southern accent in GENERAL (people here are right that there are hundreds of Southern dialects depending on the state/region) is best done if the actor fucking RELAXES. It's a loose sloppy hold of the jaw. Let it relax. And it's not always necessary to throw in colorful, folksy phrases. We all don't sound like Paula Deen. I suspect not even Paula Deen always sounds like that. (I've actually heard her say "Ah cain't see DOO DOO without mah GLASSES!" Lord, woman.)

I'm freaky anal about dialects in movies just like my conductor friend gets crazy about actors obviously holding violins incorrectly and like my birding uncle freaks out over a bird sound from a bird only found in Canada when the movie is set in Florida. LOL. We've decided the three of us should NEVER view a film together.

sansho1, I never knew that.

As Melody said earlier, Texas isn't the south. A Texas accent is very different from a Southern accent--it's much more nasal (especially in west Texas, where I'm from). Julia Roberts was attempting a southern accent for a Texas character in Charlie Wilson, which is often what actors do. Drives me crazy. Sissy Spacek is Texan and sounds it; ditto Tommy Lee Jones.

i agree. the bad/wrong southern accents are to blame on whomever it is that hires the dialect coaches. either the studios consider their audiences too stupid to notice their inattention to the details and don't consider it worth bothering to correct even in an integral character... or it's outright insult to injury, delivered to further strengthen the stereotype of the reviled second class or lower class southerner; the dolt/hick, the dumb slut, the cruel barbarian, trailer park trash, or outright villain. much in the same way arabs have been portrayed as singularly faceted foaming at the mouth jihadists and terrorists. it just wouldn't do to have a highly educated and articulate southerner as hero.

and yes, southern dialects can vary w/in the same zipcode, within even the same family, dependant on the root stock, irish, scott, french and where those immigrant ancestors spent time as they moved into and across the south. with the coastal accents having more variation due to higher incidence of alien/alternate dialects acquired by influx of travelers into the port cities.

hollywood, can kiss my southern ass.

As several others have pointed out, the biggest travesty is that most of those people are actually from the South.

Although, to be fair, I can't do a Hollywood version of a Southern accent, either, and I'm born, raised, and still kickin' in Alabama, of all places. I do have an accent, which I quite like (I enjoy the way Southern accents soften words), but it's nothing like what the rest of the world thinks of as a Southern accent. Plus, I talk quite fast - even Yankees ask me to slow down when I talk sometimes.

The worst injustice is when someone butchers a Louisiana bayou accent. To my ears, there is nothing more beautiful than that accent - so musical and lilting, so unlike any other accent. And no non-bayou person can nail it, and furthermore, they should all be banned from even attempting it.

posted by Melissa:
Whenever I think of Varsity Blues, all I can hear is the Beek yodeling "I don't wa-ant your li-ife."
===
My husband and I love to quote that to each other in increasingly drawling melodrama. Yes, we have a sad life.

Seems that I'm a bit behind on this one, but I'll pipe in anyway. I'm no expert, being from Michigan and all, but Demi Moore gets my vote for The Butcher's Wife. It was just God-awful!

BTW, I second the person who suggested a list of bad British accents.

I LOVED reading these comments because I am a Los Angeles from NC who studied broadcast journalism classes for non-regional dialect. Oh yeah, and I'm black, which actually does make a difference. I absolutely ABHOR any attempt that Hollywood makes at a southern accent, because the biggest thing they overlook is that the south has TONS of very different accents. North Carolina alone varies from very neutral to very redneck/dirty south. (I know because I switch unintentionally depending on who I am speaking with, pre-coaching.)

A great mention also is Terrence Howard and the rest of the cast of Hustle and Flow, but I liked the film/acting, so I was able to forgive them.

True Blood is flipping AWFUL too, but I dig the series so much that I have decided that this is part of their schtick!!!

I wanted to reply to sooo many posters, but this convo was waaaay gone by the time I read it but for authenticity, Tommy Lee Jones does sound authentic southern/Texas no matter the movie, because I think that's just his accent. *BTW Texas IS the south, silly rabbits.

Reese isn't that bad in the clip... I went to high school in NC with people who sound just like that. And although some vowels/syllables, etc. are drawn out, it's too simple to say that we talk "slow." (piss my mom or me off, and you'll see). And who the F*** says "high falutin'?" (Sweet Home Alabama). I've only ever heard that in f***in' movies. Thanks Hollywood)

As you can see I have sooooo many issues with this subject!!!!

Brad Pitt in Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Assassination of Jesse James, Kalifornia and the upcoming Inglourious Basterds.

He just can't do it.