h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone able to recall any villains with a broad Brummy accent?

no? shame, really?

'Ow, allo Mr Bond, oi've bin expecting gyou!' Ooh, feel those evil juices flow!

Jim Baines in Crossroads, especially after he became a pools millionaire

I suspect that the main reason why villains tend to have English accents is that in the past British thesps had a better range that their American counterparts and simply could play villains better. Hence eventually the part of villain became associated with a British thesp by default.

Talking of a comment upon the role of the Brit in Hollywood, one of the best in Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest, who has to utter some moronic quasi-mystical phrase over and over again. Alec Guiness's ghost mus have been pissing himself.

I see you've added quite a few to the list.

I wondered (despite the fact that you've included several BR films into the list) whether it wouldn't fit nicely into the Robin Hood para to specify that Basil Rathbone provided Flynn's sparring partner in that RH, in the role of Guy of Guisbourne (sp).

just a thought.

oh, and another - you say quite early on that 'the vast majority' of Hollywood films shun dialogue, character development etc. I don't really think that's fair.

You might say that 'few of the biggest-grossing Hollywood productions' go in for this kind of thing. i just thought that would temper the 'anti-Hollywood' tilt to this piece.

cya
spiff

I decided early on that the "British actors are cast as villains because they are more talented" reasoning would not be used in this article, despite it having been suggested many times before its writing and as a response to it.

Spiff,
I'm working on a revision to the entry that will incorporate most, if not all, of your comments. Part of this revision will involve changing the title to "Why Villains in Movie Have English Accents" and altering the content to suit.

In the meantime, niggles, pedantry, complaints, suggestions, revelations, and picking the fly crap out of the pepper are heartily welcomed.

Theanthrope,

English, Welsh and Scottish accents are all British accents. I don't object to the use of that term in the plural when it means 'accents used in Britain'. But using the singular gives a very strong impression that there is such thing as a unified 'British accent'. Britain, though small, contains four separate countries with pretty diverse accents, a greater number of mother-tongue English accents than all of North America, in fact.

I'm not just being pedantic. No, really

I'd use the plural term 'British accents', though the vast majority of the members of the list speak RP or something close to it, and RP is an English accent, so you might want to go with that.

Two-Bit, I think that's a wrap. Very few Americans understand the difference between terms such as 'English', 'Scottish' and 'British', although, it has to be said, some English seem to have difficulties with them sometimes...

And I really feel that part of the attraction of having English villains is the campness factor. Terence Stamp, Lawrence Olivier, anyone?

I prefer cool and camp villains to all-out psychotic power-hungry maniacs because they are just on the whole more interesting

How about Christopher Lee?

But Oliver Reed in 'Oliver!' still cracks me up... he used to scare me when I was little!

Caper Plip

Exactly. It's all to do with the Boston Tea Party. No really. After that, the Americans all became coffee addicts - passionate, hot-blooded and jittery.

OK, the Bob de Niro/Al Pacino mould makes for one good type of villain, but as an alternative, Hollywood looks to the sang-froid that suave, tea-drinking Englishmen possess. It's so much more unexpected when they stick the knife in!

Except Christopher Lee, who you just know is up to no good...

Interesting and informative question !




A.R.Shams
author of the "Creative Living Spirit"
series of messages...................

Jack Naples,
I have been convinced (mostly by you and S. Spiff) to change the entry to "...English Accents". Would you agree that with a simple substitution of the word "English", and some tweaking of sentences, the gist of the entry will hold up?

Very nice.

I'm miffed that you didn't include my Alan Rickman example of Joe the bad fish in the 'Help! I'm a fish' cartoon. And he reprised his Sherrif of Nottingham Bad Guy (TM) in Quigly Down Under.

I was going to mention the RP entry which is also in PR right now but I see the writer got here first.

So: well done, can't wait to see this on the front page.

Must have missed that example. All is mended now.

Then, in England, do many of the villians have american or non-british accents, ever notice something similar to what the americans do?

I think that Christopher Lee should be included in the list... Saruman in LoTR, Scaramanga, numerous Hammer-Horror roles... too many evil roles to list here...

Caper Plip

Done!

Oh heck, I was only joking... but

are you going to group the actors so that all Alan Rickman, then all... well, I can't remember now. but you know what I mean I think

Done!

And there's a major revision coming up. I'll try to resolve the British/English issue.

Still working on this...

Scouts, please wait before picking this. Go over to F48874?thread=215596 and pick the RP entry first.

I've fixed the british/english thing and added a link to the recommended RP entry.

Any more comments?

Scouts, in my opinion this is ready.

In my opinion it won't be ready until you remove Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs from the list, because he didn't have an English accent in that film. Does anybody support me on this?

There are also three items at the end of the list which are just the word "in".