Mid-Atlantic English - in Media

In Media

International media tend to reduce the number of mutually unintelligible versions of English to some extent.

Mid-Atlantic English is also a name that has been given to a pronunciation of English that was formerly cultivated by actors for use in theatre, radio, film, early television, and by news announcers. This dialect was formerly used by American actors who adopted some features of British pronunciation; it was used on stage generally – and especially in productions of Shakespeare and other pieces from the British Isles – and frequently in film until the mid-1960s. Orson Welles notably spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, as did many of his co-stars, such as Joseph Cotten.

This sort of stage-British is now used much less than it was; the recorded speech of Vincent Price in his more formal roles may contain an echo of its sounds, since Price was an American actor trained in England. The British expatriates Anthony Hopkins and Cary Grant, Americans Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, John O'Hurley, Patrick McGoohan, Richard Chamberlain, Eleanor Parker, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Jane Wyatt, Jonathan Harris, William Daniels, and Bette Davis, and Canadians Christopher Plummer and Lorne Greene have also exemplified the accent. Grant's accent is unusual in that he attempted to learn an American accent when he arrived in Hollywood but wound up with a hybrid with which he could play Americans or Britons equally convincingly.

Use of this accent declined rapidly after World War II. Actors such as Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne portrayed serious roles in various dialects of American English speech, and the export of American cinema familiarized the rest of the world with its features.