What do Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Orson Welles, and Bette Davis have in common? Besides being some of the most memorable stars to grace the silver screen during Hollywood’s “golden age,” they also employed what has come to be known as the “mid-Atlantic accent.” This is an unnatural, learned way of speaking English that attempts to convey wealth and sophistication. The result is a sort of hybrid of American and British English, wherein speakers drop “R” sounds and soften vowels with the goal of sounding more refined.
Ironically, this accent has very little to do with the mid-Atlantic region — in fact, accents from the actual mid-Atlantic region, such as the Baltimore accent, are not known for being especially refined. Take, for example, the way Baltimoreans pronounce their city’s name: “Bawlmer,” or “Baldamore” — in many ways, the opposite of the elocution favored by Hollywood’s mid-Atlantic accent. So where did this way of speaking come from? And why did it become so popular? Let’s dive in.
Speak With Distinction
Edith Skinner, author of the 1942 book Speak With Distinction, was a famous elocutionist (one who teaches the skill of clear and expressive speech, especially of distinct pronunciation and articulation). Skinner was Canadian, but studied linguistics at Columbia University before going on to teach at the elite American schools Carnegie Mellon and Julliard. She detailed the method of speaking she called “Good Speech” in her book through diagrams, exercises for drama students, and specific ways to pronounce thousands of different words.
She described what would eventually be called the mid-Atlantic accent as such: “Good Speech is hard to define but easy to recognize when we hear it. Good Speech is a dialect of North American English that is free from regional characteristics; recognizably North American, yet suitable for classic texts; effortlessly articulated and easily understood in the last rows of the theater.”
One clause — “free from regional characteristics” — sums up the accent quite nicely. It sounds American, but you couldn’t put your finger on just where in America the speaker hails from.
The accent began to assert its dominance on Hollywood with the advent of “talkies,” or movies with sound. During silent films, it didn’t matter what actors sounded like when they spoke. But it became a problem with sound. Case in point: the actress Clara Bow.
Bow made a name for herself during the silent era with her masterful expressionism, but her career took a nosedive when talkies came into vogue and audiences heard her strong Brooklyn accent. She became a cautionary tale, and Edith Skinner became Hollywood’s most sought-after speech coach.
The mid-Atlantic accent fell out of vogue by the late 1960s, with the advent of the New Hollywood movement. Grittier directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and John Cassavetes were more interested in depicting the world as it was, rather than as some fantasy of wealth and sophistication (and with an unnatural accent).
How to Speak With Distinction
So, how exactly does one speak with a mid-Atlantic accent? Start with “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” Just kidding — but My Fair Lady does illustrate this desire to sound sophisticated quite nicely, with a speech coach trying to train Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney accent out of her.
Edith Skinner wrote, “In Good Speech, ALL vowel sounds are oral sounds, to be made with the soft palate raised. Thus the breath flows out through the mouth only, rather than through the mouth and nose… the slightest movement or change in any of the organs of speech during the formation of a vowel will mar its purity.”
Furthermore, all “R” sounds are dropped, and the “agh” sound — for example, “chance” — should be halfway between an American “agh” and British “ah.” “T” sounds should always be enunciated — “matter” should never be pronounced “madder.” Skinner also banned all glottal stops, as in the cessation of air between the syllables of “uh-oh.” One exercise in her book was to say the following phrase with no glottal stops: “Oh, Eaton! He’d even heave eels for Edith Healy!” Give it a try — the mid-Atlantic accent is harder than Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made it seem.
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