Posted
by
Leonard Pierce
It may not be the most glamorous career in Hollywood, but without dialogue coaches, we'd have a lot more Kevin Costner movies to contend with. As part of its occasional "Working Hollywood" series on the people in the industry who do the jobs that won't land you on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times profiles Francie Brown, who came to southern California to act and ended up helping other actors to embarrass themselves, and us, a little less.
Citing everyone's favorite Welshman, Christian Bale, as especially adept at wrapping his voice around unfamiliar accents (Brown was Bale's dialogue coach on Batman Begins and 3:10 to Yuma), Brown also sheds some light on some of the technical aspects of voice-coaching and why certain nationalities are easier to work with than others: "The trap when you're doing a rural or an uneducated person is to fall into a Southern accent, because there are things native to the Southern accent, like dropping 'ings,' that are also native to a rural sound. Particularly for English and Australian actors, it's easy to go Southern, because it's such a musical sound and it's catchy and because so much of the Southern drops 'R' sounds, which are also dropped in English and Australian a lot."
About Leonard Pierce
http://www.ludickid.com/052903.htm
