Stevie's accent
Why did Stevie have a pronounced English accent when his sister, who was from the USA, did not?
shareShe wasn't from the USA, she was from Britain. She had only lived in the USA.
shareSo she lost that accent in the US in a short time?
I'm the kind of guy, when I move - watch my smoke. But I'm gonna need some good clothes though.
Well no. What I meant was that the actress was born in New York and died in New York, so it seems that she is an American all the way around. In the film, they tried to say that she lived in the US, but I don't believe they said for how long, did they? It appears that we're supposed to believe her not-so-good English dialect is faint due to her living in America for a while.
At least that is the impression I had.
In any case, I just love that movie. Hitchcock was surely the master.
Spare me your 6th grade Michael Moore logic! ~ Secretary Heller; 24, Day 4, 7:30:00 a.m.
I wonder why Hitchcock picked her for the role. She's a terrific actress, but it seems like a British lady would have been better. Sylvia Sidney doesn't have the typical Hitchcock leading lady look either.
I'm the kind of guy, when I move - watch my smoke. But I'm gonna need some good clothes though.
She was chosen so that they could sell the film in the US. On the DVD commentary, it's noted that on US posters, Sylvia Sidney's name was in the same type size as the film title whereas Hitchcock's name was only one-fifth the size of the title.
I think it was also considered changing the name (and maybe actually did in a re-release) in the US to "A Woman Alone" to further emphasize her role.
I don't exactly remember the details from the movie, but it seems conceivable that they moved to England from the US when Stevie was very young (he's much younger than her) so that his accent developed there.
My sister-in-law, born and raised in Manchester, England, still has a strong British (Mancunian) accent after 30 years in the U.S. Her sister, likewise born and raised in Manchester, lost her accent within a fairly short amount of time after moving to the U.S.
Patrick MacNee has lived in the U.S. for decades and admitted in an interview that he could never get rid of his British accent.
So it's not all that unlikely for brother and sister to have vastly different accents.
It's even regional. My brother sounds just like the Californian he was born and raised as. I picked up a combination of our parents' Texas and Missouri accents. I wasn't born in California but lived there from the age of 2 1/2 to 31 years.
Everybody's different.