Dialect coach Francie Brown keeps the accent on accuracy
WORKING HOLLYWOOD
Speech that's in character proves key to an actor's on-screen believability.
LIKE many Hollywood hopefuls, dialect coach Francie Brown first came to Los Angeles to act. Unlike most, she ended up actually making a living in the movies, though not in the way she had originally anticipated.
"I was always interested in accents," she says without a trace of her native Philadelphia inflecting her diction. "I collected dictionaries for years and always liked picking up bits and pieces of other languages. But I never realized there was actually a living to be had in it until a few years after I got into Hollywood."
While she knocked on agents' doors and struggled as a typist to pay her bills, one of her professors from UC Irvine's graduate acting program began recommending her around town as a dialect coach.
"My first job, I had 26 Norwegian actors," she recalls. "That was eventually called 'Shipwrecked' here in the States. My job was that all the Norwegian actors had to be intelligible in English. Norwegian is what was spoken on the set, which was a challenge because I'd never been on a set before. I would go back to my hotel room and have a good cry at being such a fool and study my Norwegian Berlitz book that I had brought with me."
Today, Brown, 48, has been on countless sets, including "Thelma & Louise," "The Sixth Sense," "Fight Club," "Almost Famous," "Batman Begins," "I'm Not There" and "Gone Baby Gone." Recently, she worked with Welsh-born actor Christian Bale, a master of accents and one of her most frequent pupils, to help give voice to Arizona rancher and Civil War vet Dan Evans for "3:10 to Yuma," due on DVD Tuesday.
Go west, young man: Bale has done many Yankee accents, so it took Brown only about eight hours to coax Evans' rural American sounds from him.
" 'Yuma' was fairly simple," she says. "What we wanted to do was be careful not to allow him to become Southern, because he was a character that was born in Boston and came west. The trap when you're doing a rural or an uneducated person is to fall into a Southern accent, because there are things native to the Southern accent, like dropping 'ings,' that are also native to a rural sound. Particularly for English and Australian actors, it's easy to go Southern, because it's such a musical sound and it's catchy and because so much of the Southern drops 'R' sounds, which are also dropped in English and Australian a lot."
Caught in the acting: Unlike most actors, who have Brown stay on set to monitor their accents, Bale sends her away as soon as the cameras roll.
