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Chapter 5: Acting

Essay: Voice Acting

To get a sense of voice acting's importance, consider Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge's performance as Pazuzu in William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). If you have seen the movie and can't remember what Pazuzu looks like, that's because McCambridge's "character" is the demon who possesses twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair). We never see Pazuzu, but we hear the demon's voice issuing from Regan's mouth. To create this deep, diabolical sound, which seems to come from both inside and outside Regan, McCambridge lip-synced the fifteen-year-old Blair's lines. This overdubbing resulted in one of the most uncanny and frightening moments in film history.

Decades later, while some commentators had feared that the advent of digitally animated "actors" would put real actors out of work, animated films continue to employ the vocal talents of humans, including many highly successful Hollywood actors. Robin Williams has played, for example, Batty Koda in Bill Kroyer's FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), the Blue Genie in Ron Clements and John Musker's Aladdin (1992) and Tad Stones's Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996), and Dr. Know in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001). Speaking and singing throughout Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson's Shrek (2001) are Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, and John Lithgow. The most sophisticated digitally animated film to date, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), uses the vocal talents of Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland, Keith David, and Ming-Na.

Case Study: Robert Duvall

In addition to overdubbing voices, actors employ their vocal talents during their own onscreen appearances. The coming of sound to the film industry made expressive voices a basic requirement for actors, but audiences often pay closest attention to vocal performances for which actors adopt accents or regional dialects. Since the studio era, Hollywood has employed voice and dialect coaches who help actors master the sounds, mannerisms, and colloquialisms of native speakers, often working with techniques developed in the theater. Some actors excel at imitating accents, and others shy away from the task. Robert Duvall, an American, is just one of many actors who has a gift for developing accents and voices for particular roles. For The Apostle (1997), which he wrote, directed, and starred in, Duvall develops a unique regional dialect for his character of a Pentecostal Texas preacher. In Michael Corrente's A Shot at Glory (2000), Duvall perfectly mimics a Scottish accent as he plays soccer coach Gordon McLeod. Early in the film, when team owner Peter Cameron (Michael Keaton) threatens to move McLeod's Scottish team to Dublin, Ireland, if they don't win a championship cup, McLeod responds forcefully:

In preparation for an upcoming match, McLeod takes his players to a grain storage barn to work out and offers this motivational speech:

At a banquet before the championship match against the much more talented Rangers, McLeod cheers the team on:

Case Study: Meryl Streep

Many give Meryl Streep credit for raising the accent bar in 1982 with her Oscar-winning performance as a Polish woman in "Sophie's Choice." (She's subsequently done everything from Irish and Italian to regional American-Southern, New York, etc.). Since then, many actors and actresses have altered their natural accents for film roles, with varying degrees of success, but Streep is still considered by most to be the standard against which other accented performances are measured. Now, in an increasingly international market, actors are expected to be masters of accents.
Ellen Baskin, "A Pronounced Trend," Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2000

Meryl Streep, who has the most Oscar nominations (thirteen) of any actor in history and is perhaps the most famous living female actor, is well known for her success at capturing the accents and dialects of numerous characters over her long career. While many movie stars' dramatic ranges are narrower than those of classically trained theatrical actors, Streep is that rare movie actor who becomes a star by creating an entirely new character with each performance. Part of her chameleonlike ability derives from her exceptional vocal talents. Rather than relying on dialogue coaches for help, Streep learns in her own way, by ear:

The movie [Dancing at Lughnasa] allowed Meryl to once more reveal her feel for accents—but this had not been an easy process. A dialogue coach had been brought on board to oversee the actors' efforts, but it hadn't worked for Meryl. Having each take criticised had thoroughly unnerved her, indeed she'd begun to deconstruct her ability to act at all. Eventually, she had to have the coach removed, and returned to her own "instinctive" method of nailing the accent.
Dominic Wills, "Meryl Streep Biography"

For some roles, such as her Oscar-winning performance in Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Streep uses a voice very close to her own. To better appreciate the extent to which Streep alters her natural voice when she plays a character with a heavy accent, listen to her performance as Joanna Kramer. Here, Kramer meets her husband (Dustin Hoffman) for the first time since leaving him and their son:

Joanna Kramer takes the stand and explains that she still loves her son:

In Mike Nichols's Silkwood (1983), Streep plays Karen Silkwood, an employee of Oklahoma's Kerr McGee nuclear plant who was active in the union and in exploring the health dangers of working at the plant. Streep perfectly captures a working-class Oklahoma accent during the scene in which Silkwood explains to new workers the process she is responsible for at the plant:

Silkmood reads to roommate Dolly Pelliker (Cher) about the dangers of plutonium:

At a meeting with union representatives in Washington, Karen mentions just one more thing that might be a problem at the nuclear plant:

In Sydney Pollack's epic Out of Africa (1985), Streep plays Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, an adventurous Dane who moved to East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. The film begins with voiceover narration in which the baroness speaks about her time in Africa:

A scene with Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) emphasizes the baroness's storytelling skills:

In this voiceover reverie, the baroness describes her affair with Finch Hatton:

Other films that showcase Streep's vocal performance talents include Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982), in which she plays a Polish survivor of the Nazi deathcamps, and Fred Schepisi's A Cry in the Dark (1988), in which she imitates an Australian accent for her role as Lindy Chamberlain.