Dubbed?
I've just been watching this on Channel Five and was very curious - was Martin Shaw's voice dubbed over?
shareHe dubbed his own voice, I think. The director wanted a Canadian voice to reflect the fact that Sir Henry had been living there, and he wasn't happy with Shaw's original effort.
shareThe director was stupid then. Sir Henry may have been living in Canada, but he was still an English aristocrat. This was a hundred years ago, when social class was a much stronger factor in accent than geography. He would have sounded only slightly different from Sir Charles or Stapleton.
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The director was an idiot. Especially as Sir Henry refers to his "American" clothes. Just think of all the greenhouse gases released in making this travesty.
shareHe was an English aristocrat only by inheritance, he had spent the majority of his life in Canada. The book describes him as having an accent and his speech in the book is "Americanised".
shareIn reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, I've always imagined Sir Henry sounding like a young Christopher Plummer.
He's originally from Canada, but has lived most of his adult life in the United States.
Most Americans think that he sounds British, but I think most Brits can tell that he's not.
However, he has played Holmes and other British characters onscreen, and quite successfully too, in my opinion.
To Victorian ears, I'm sure that he would've sounded a bit more North American than English, but he still sounds somewhat more English than the typical present-day English-speaking inhabitant of North America.
In this version, Sir Henry clearly identifies as American. Remember how he mentioned he has no use for titles and that "we fought a war" against Britain to be free things like the old aristocratic social order.
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