Best British accent by an American

Never saw the Sherlock with Robert Downey Jr but he sure did have the accents down in Tropic Thunder, being a dude, who was playing a dude, that was playing another dude. And I guess they had to nominate him for best supporting that year since the character he played in the movie had won like 5 oscars for various roles.

"I think my percentage of Chimp DNA is higher than others" Cleaver Greene

According to her wikipedia page her father is of Swedish and English ancestry, but I don't know if that has played a part in her accent.
Her mother is from a Jewish family who immigrated from Russia and Lithuania.

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Her accent is very similar to Carey Mulligan's, and I believe she's a friend, too. Maybe she based it on her?

It's an ordinary high school day. Except that it's not.

It IS very good and I don't want to take anything away from her but she and Rene Z and Gwineth P (sliding Doors/ Emma etc.) do all suffer from a slight skew towards the nasal end of the OOOOoooober posh when they 'do' English.

It's fine here because MG is playing someone with a very privileged background, who's been to all the posh schools and has that slightly 'other,' 'posher than poshness' that you usually get from well bred Brits abroad (like Richard E Grant's accent - Who is THAT posh outside the royal family???). It was also fine for GP playing Emma and RZ playing Beatrix Potter (costume drama = totally fine to play it mega-posh).

However, it's not really fine when playing more 'normal' characters, unless you can work it into the script somehow that that girl that does the office sandwich run (GP in Sliding doors), or is just your average girl about town (RZ in Bridget Jones) or is the mother of some ordinary kids out in the countryside somewhere in the home counties (MG in Nanny McFee 2) also happens to be some kind of renegade member of the royal family too.

They're all fine, they're just a little bit TOO posh for some roles I think.

I read, somewhere, that MG said she studied Emma Thomson's voice for quite a while, it' based on ET's, and I tried closing my eyes and just listening. I think she's got it.

Well, actors trained in the British system have to learn all kinds of accents to get any kind of work. So from the first moment at RADA or Central School or any other superb acting school at which they are trained, accents are first and foremost their ticket to work once they graduate.

Look at the resume of a typical British actor--the key thing they list are accents in which they are proficient: Estuary, Manchester, Newcastle, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Received Pronunciation, Cornish, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Welsh....etc. etc. etc.

Those are the basic tools of their working lives. Watch their tv shows and see the same actors and actresses using different accents week to week, depending on where the show is set and who their character is...

So add American to that? No problem! Ha

American actors are lucky to be trained to stand and hit a mark, much less be proficient at the level a British or Irish actor is. As Laurence Olivier once said to Dustin Hoffman when filming together, as Dustin was going on and on trying to Method himself to death, "feel" his character and running miles and miles to exhaust himself in order to "feel tired," Laurence drolly remarked: "Why don't you try.....ACTING....my dear boy."

That sums it up nicely!

Who says Brits do great American accents? I think they're pretty terrible most of the time.

Sorry, but I disagree. I don't think either Gyllenhall or Zellweger had convincing English accents.

I wonder why the Brits can do such a good job at American accents, but Americans have such a hard time doing any accents at all.

her delivery was so slow and her prosody unusual to me,

Yes, I think so too. She does sound English, but I keep wondering why she is talking so slowly and languidly. It makes her seem kind of odd to me, like she's on Valium and doesn't have a care in the world. But of course she does and is often distressed, so her way of speaking is at odds with that.