British actors sound clearly different at US award ceremonies but these days you'd never know it on film
You probably won't remember Bonar Colleano (or unmemorable films starring him, like Good-time Girl). He was thin and, well, bony, with slicked-back hair, and just 34 when his car crashed 53 years ago. But he made a good living in British movies for a decade before that because he came from New York City, and was thus available to play GIs and mobsters on demand in a natural American accent Britain's homegrown B-movie actors couldn't mimic for love or for money. But now see how the world has changed.
Here's Christian Bale from Haverfordwest at the Oscars tonight after doing raw Massachusetts to the manner born. And, turning on the television, there's Hugh Laurie from Oxford still playing in House. That drunken McNulty cop in The Wire? Dominic West from Eton. (He could have been David Cameron's fag.) And the lowlife mayor of Baltimore he tussles with? Aidan Gillen, from Dublin via north London. You conceivably realise that Idris Elba, the drugs mastermind at the start of The Wire, comes from Canning Town. But did you know that Alan Cumming, the Chicago spin doctor in The Good Wife, is an Aberfeldy lad? Or that Tim Roth, from Lie to Me via Reservoir Dogs, hails from Dulwich?
None of this is one-way traffic, to be sure. Meryl Streep will make a great Mrs T. Reese Witherspoon was an immaculate Becky Sharp. Nevertheless, the sweep and the breadth of the change is incredible. Half a century after Colleano, the entire cast of Clybourne Park, from Emma Thompson's younger sister Sophie down, have American accents so pitch perfect that the Wyndham's programme claims this scabrous triumph of Texan authorship was in effect launched in Sloane Square and not off Broadway: London is becoming the natural showplace for transatlantic talent, apparently.
We should treat such sweeping claims gingerly, of course. British actors have carved out big Hollywood careers since films began. Think Richard Burton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Audrey Hepburn, James Mason … But think, too, how they kept their own rhythms of speech. They didn't do bog-standard US dialects. Now Brits who want to make an international living must master Arthur Miller as easily as Terence Rattigan. The era when English accents went with heavyweight villainy has faded. Now we just fit in anywhere. Only Cheryl Cole still finds problems with a glottal stop, because Santa Monica, let alone Georgia, doesn't do Geordie.
And the change involved isn't random, but root and branch. Accents are honed to acknowledge that, from London to LA, this is a single talent market, one great stage. You don't make it here, or there, but everywhere. Bafta night and Oscar night have rolled into an everlasting night of the Anglo-American soul, the Brits doting on scripts with royal stutters and po-faces, the Americans barely noticing that someone who sounds like them isn't one of them.
It's a demeaning process, in a way. At a political level – Obama or no Obama – the British can still bristle a bit (after fawning over special relationships). But when we're talking art and celebs there's only one level that matters. It's the Hollywood sheen they all need and strive for, anointment by Academy. We may talk about British creativity and British worth. We may even salute the BBC and reputations passed down generations. But Sky's new Atlantic channel tells a different tale, walloping scantier UK fare for sustained originality – and somehow Britain's wan attachment to Casualty seems feebler than ever.
When you look at the festival of Oscar night, you know where Britain's going: to cultural satellite statehood, to secondhand life in a reflected glow. No Colleano clones necessary. And when you listen to the voices of Oscar night, you increasingly know where we've gone.