Thinking back to my “Top Five Best Actors” list from last month…
One thing that was wrong with the list — not as wrong as leaving out Gene Hackman, but wrong — is that it fails to acknowledge comic actors.
I thought about that the other night while rewatching “Best in Show,” that descendant of the ultimate mockumentary, “This is Spinal Tap.” This is the one that did for dog shows what, say, “A Mighty Wind” did for folk music. Or “Waiting for Guffman” did for… well, you get the idea.
It struck me again that Christopher Guest, who is in all of those films (and I think directed all of them but Spinal Tap), is a wonder. Let’s just focus on one of the essential skills that distinguish a great actor — accents. (Or perhaps I should say “voices.”)
Among all those mockumentary roles, it’s easiest to remember Guest as Nigel Tufnel in “Spinal Tap.” Listen:
It’s a good accent, although that doesn’t really set him apart. Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are just as good as his bandmates. Americans can take pride in their portrayal of the Three Stooges of rock. We see Brits put on convincing American accents all the time (Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, or about half the “American soldiers” in Easy Company in “Band of Brothers,” or Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, and so forth). It’s nice to see we have some talent over here as well.
(Of course, one might note that Guest had an unfair advantage — his Dad was a British diplomat, and he spent part of his childhood in his father’s country. In fact, he ascended to the House of Lords when his father died. But Nigel Tufnel displayed an accent that was very different from the RP we generally associate with lords.)
But what really got me was his accent — and general characterization — of the man from a small town in North Carolina who brings his bloodhound to the dog show. It’s not just the accent, as perfect as that was (definitely not a cheesy Hollywood imitation of a generic Southern manner of speaking). It was the quality of his voice behind the accent, his facial expressions and other facets that made me like he was a true, unique individual I had met sometime in the past — not a “type.” Listen:
Hear it? There’s finesse in that voice, as well as in the accent, that few actors are able to display.
And it’s much the kind of finesse that Robert Duvall brought to his roles.
I just thought I’d acknowledge that…
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I’ve been meaning to write a post on accents for some time. Perhaps I should make it easier for myself by breaking it up into various different aspects of accents, rather than doing my usual thing of delaying writing about a thing until I have time to write something that is too long for most people to take time to read.
They fascinate me. I used to be really good at them when I was young. I could slide from one to another quickly and easily. Now I have to work at it. When I started doing Scripture readings in Spanish at church a couple of decades ago, I had to read the passages aloud, over and over, in the couple of hours before Mass in order to get the right muscles warmed up.
When I was in “Pride and Prejudice,” we had a Received Pronunciation coach to help us get the sound right. I had a tiny part, with only three or four lines. But I spent a lot of time backstage reading sceneds with other actors with larger parts. In the middle of one of those readings, our coach interrupted to compliment me on my RP. I was very warmed up and sort of in the zone that night. I couldn’t speak that way at the drop of a hat. I had to work at it. But I’m still patting myself on the back for that compliment.
I suppose an affinity for accents — the ability to do them as Guest does, or the tendency to be fascinated by them as I am — can be related to having been pulled in different directions when young. Guest has his both-sides-of-the-pond childhood; I bounced from South Carolina to Virginia to New Jersey to Ecuador to Louisiana to Tennessee and back here, my speech patterns being nudged this way and that all those years. It put a certain elasticity in the way I said things.
I wish I could still do that so effortlessly. Now, I’m sort of stuck, most of the time, with the vague Southern accent that I’ve settled into as I’ve approached my dotage…
Oh — and of course, it’s not just about accents (and other aspects of acting) with Guest. There are his remarkable talents as a writer and director. …