Or maybe it was the way Tippi Hedren spoke, but either way, her speech pattern was unlike any I have ever heard. She is originally from Minnesota, and I'm pretty sure they don't have an accent like that. Did she have some sort of coaching on how to speak like that? It's kind of a posh way of speaking that doesn't sound natural to me.
shareI think she just sounded sophisticated, not unnatural. Why unnatural, because she sounds like every other person with their non-descript type voice?
If something deviates from some perceived ideal, it's cited. Thats why you see threads about the size of an actor's damn forehead, because it may be 1/2 inch taller than some role-model. What the hell is wrong with people.
Her daughter, Melanie Griffith, has an unusual voice too. Perhaps it runs in the family.
shareYes, I noticed this too. It wasn't so much that her voice itself was all that unusual but the way she pronounced certain words. In particular, there is a scene early in the movie where she is in the pet shop. Mitch has just left and "Melanie" is on the phone giving Mitch's license plate number to an employee of her father's newspaper. She says "California plate." The way she pronounces the word "plate" sounds a bit odd but it also sounds kind of adorable.
She was speaking in an affected accent, probably picked up in an elite finishing or boarding school. Many social-climbing women in that era learned to speak in accents which were
considered more cultured or elite because they sounded vaguely British or European. It simply would not do for "upper-class" women to speak with Brooklyn
or some Southern accents; even Midwestern accents were sometimes thought of as
flat and "common." Listen to the speaking voices of Claudette Colbert, Jane Wyatt,
and other actresses. They were taught to speak that way for the movies. Even the actress who practiced her diction in Singin' in the Rain was expected to use pronunciations such as "cahhhnnn't."
Melanie's real voice emerges briefly in the scene in which she complains to Mitch about her mother, because she's flustered by the topic--it sounds lower and flatter. Then she recovers and resumes her twittery voice and vague accent.
That's her excuse. More odd is how some of the presumably long-term residents of Bodega Bay possess out-of-place accents--Miss Bundy and Lydia both have English accents, while the two storekeepers sound like they're straight from Maine.
I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!
Hewwo.
If you watch films from the early 20th century, sometimes you'll hear well-educated or upper-class American characters speak as though they were trying and failing to assume a British accent. For years I thought this was horrible and fake and the result of poor training of studio actors, but then I read an interview with a linguist who says that regional accents can come and go over the course of a generation or two, and that the actors from the 1930s were imitating a speech pattern that was actually in use among the well-to-do on the eastern seaboard.
So yes, accents come and go, and it's entirely possible that Melanie was imitating a genuine upper-class woman's speech pattern of the period. Nothing like that is in use in modern-day San Francisco, of course, I've lived around the area my whole life and have even been to some "society" events, and I've never heard the like.
“Seventy-seven courses and a regicide, never a wedding like it!
It was a combination of Hedren's polished Park Avenue inflection, and a fad that was rife in the early-'60s of women trying to seem, sound and walk oh-so-sophisticated to the point it was funny -- kind of a Jackie Kennedy era thing.
Oddly, I kind of like it, although it's laughable.
Have you ever listened to Stephanie Powers speak in DIE! DIE! MY DARLING (shot in 1964)? It's hysterical.
Even the way women would run, even if it was just across a lawn to pick up a baby --- with their knees together as if in a tube skirt even when they were actually in slacks or shorts!
I really think Tippi Hedren was perfectly cast, though -- she literally looked like a bird and even her name was "Head Wren" when she did, indeed, have wrens on her head for much of the movie.
--
LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA
Okay now you really made me laugh with your reply and I mean that in the nicest way LOL
shareHow about she was closely coached by Hitchcock on "acting", and probably picked up on some of his speech patterns.
shareshe was a posh socialite.
share