A friend and I were talking about how some actors, no matter how good an actor they are or are not, have problems with certain accents and I would like people to give me some examples of cases they know about. My first example Robert Duvall as Dr Watson in The Seven Percent Solution. It is one of the worst attempts at an English accent I have heard in a long time especially when Duvall is narrating during the movie.
Hands-down, it has to be Dick Van Dyke as Bert in Mary Poppins. As Eddie Izzard put it, "Dick Van Dyke, he went for a Cockney accent. He sounds like he went to Australia to learn it!"
Did Connery even try to affect a different accent in Marnie? With him, it's practically a running joke how every role he plays, he has a Scottish accent regardless of the character's nationality.
I think the standard for bad accents is Kevin Costner in Robin Hood. Hell, I think halfway through the movie, he just gave up on it all together. Then there's Mickey Rooney's incredibly racist cartoon of a Chinese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's beyond offensive; I can't watch his scenes at all. And I'm still trying to figure out what the hell kind of accent Angelina Jolie had in Alexander. But the movie sucked in general, so her bad accent sort of blends in with the overall film.
I can't remember the name of the movie for the life of me because I only saw the last half of it on late night TV, but Patrick Stewart was playing an American in a crime thriller. His accent wasn't the worst I ever heard, but it wasn't the best either.
Alan Rickman in Die Hard, when he's trying to imitate an American accent. What's even worse is that McClane tells him that his accent was great, when it was absolutely atrocious.
Russell Crowe in Robin Hood (2010) - Scottish, Irish, anyone's guess - something about the subject matter invites bad accents for some reason.
I didn't dare mention the two Robin Hood movies to my friend. She is a great Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe fan and gets very touchy if I say anything bad about either of them especially Russell Crowe.
James Doohan's Scots accent. Though the best of the worst is hearing Connery playing an Egyptian with a Spanish name talking to a Frenchman playing a Scot, yet he sounds Scottish and the Frenchman doesn't.
No, as Auntihill says, that would be Kevin Costner in Robin Hood. So bad that Mel Brooks built his ad campaign for "Men in Tights" around it.
I read somewhere that the plan at one point was to not worry about the accent while shooting and they would just have Costner redub all of his lines with a British accent in post. But then they ran out of time, so they weren't able to dub any of it. It's really weird how hardly any of the actors in that movie are actually English, despite the fact that, IIRC, it was shot in England. Crowe & Blanchett are both Australian. Max Von Sydow is Swedish. Oscar Isaac was born in Guatemala to a Cuban father and was raised in Florida. Most of the Merry Men are American or Canadian (except for true Brit Mark Addy as Friar Tuck). The few genuinely British actors in the film--Mark Strong, Eileen Atkins, Matthew MacFadyen--are all playing characters with some element of French ancestry. I'm not sure I can speak to the veracy of the accent, but it's kinda disturbing seeing Michael Caine do a New England accent in The Cider House Rules. Nicola Bryant was inconsistent when she played American companion Peri on Doctor Who in the 1980s. Mostly, her accent was passable, although they often failed to capture an accurate American vocabulary. (No one from the U.S. calls it "The States.") Worse were the actors that played Peri's family when we first met her in "Planet of Fire." I think they were going for a general western-American accent. (They were supposed to be from New Mexico, IIRC.) Instead, at best, they might have been able to pass as some incredibly aristocratic family from Boston. The 1950s Sherlock Holmes TV show with Ronald Howard & H. Marion Crawford is a very rich source for bad accents. For some reason, it was shot in Paris. So other than Holmes, Watson, & Inspector Lestrade, all of the guest actors are French, many of whom struggle quite a bit speaking English at all, to say nothing of pulling off an English accent. There's one episode in particular, "The Case of Harry Crocker," where you've got the truly bizarre sound of an actor with a strong French accent trying to fake an extremely corny Cockney accent. (They also can't seem to agree on whether his last name is "Crocker" or "Croker.")
I'm sure I've heard that used by Americans, and may well have used it myself. It doesn't strike me as an odd usage. I wince every time they try to do Irish accents on Leverage. Since seasons 2-4 are set in Boston (but filmed in Portland), they sometimes did episodes involving Irish mobsters, and the accents were consistently terrible. (Indeed, most Irish accents on US shows are pretty dreadful.) And while Gina Bellman's American accents on the show aren't awful, they aren't nearly good enough to fit the character's supposed brilliance at adopting false identities. Though at least she doesn't fall into the usual British trap of assuming all American accents are Southern or New England. Matt Frewer's "Australian" accent on Eureka is pretty dire. I think I once mentioned it in an online thread and an Australian poster was surprised, having thought it was supposed to be a South African accent. Oh yeah, I just remembered a Mission: Impossible episode, "Chico," in which Leonard Nimoy did one of the worst accents in history. As I described it in my blog review, his character Paris impersonates "a sailor whose accent wanders all over the globe between Australian, Cockney, cowboy, a bit of James Doohan Scottish at one point, and Nimoy’s own normal accent, sometimes within the course of a single sentence." Although it may be intentionally bad, because the mark is supposed to penetrate the obvious con and thus be drawn into the deeper con.
The Australian guy who played Lincoln Burrows on Prison Break was terrible. Towards the end, he wasn't even trying anymore. Sam Neill is pretty bad on Alcatraz, which is weird, he's had literally decades to learn how to do an American accent. And the guy who plays the warden, I don't know what accent he's doing - is it Irish? Cuban? Southern? He's all over the place. The first season of The Walking Dead, some of the actors' "Georgia" accents were pretty sketchy, but they've apparently had some coaching between S1 and S2, because from what I can tell, they're much better now. Arlo Givens on Justified is supposed to be a Kentuckian, but makes almost no effort to conceal his New England accent. And on Falling Skies, supposedly taking place in Boston, not one character so far has a Boston accent. Maybe nobody even wants to try. Countess Dracula? And chalk me up as another American who has heard people refer to it as The States. I may have used that term myself. It might have a somewhat archaic cast to it, but it hasn't fallen entirely out of use.
True, I've used "The States" too but only in a very self-consciously British or Australian conversation where I'm trying to draw some attention to the foreign-ness of it. I'd never say "The States" in an unironic conversation with another American. I'd say "The U.S." or "America." I've heard David Boreanaz's Irish accent was pretty bad during some of his flashbacks on Angel. Personally, I don't think it's that bad but what would I know. We're pretty lacking in exposure to genuine Irish accents here in "The States" (). Whenever we think of Irish, we think of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. But then, I'm an actor and I can tell you that doing an Irish accent is hard. (I try to keep Colin Farrell in mind but it just doesn't work.)
Most of the attempts at Russian accents I've heard are hilarious. The best one is probably Arnie in Red Heat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWclGpT-CPY Most of the "Russian" in this movie is badly pronounced and is basically a lousy machine translation from English.
I recently rewatched season 1 of The Six Million Dollar Man, and what's bizarre is that in a couple of episodes there are characters who are supposed to be Russian, but the actors don't even try to do Russian accents. It particularly struck me in "Doomsday, and Counting," since Gary Collins's lines were clearly written to sound like the stilted English of a non-native speaker, yet he still delivered them in a completely American accent. They did much the same thing in an episode set in a fictional African country, where the leader of the soldiers ruthlessly hunting down any Americans had a completely American accent (yet at least one of his soldiers had a very broad faux-African accent).
Worst American accents by non-Americans: Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine in Resident Evil. Daniel Craig as an American in Tomb Raider. Worst accent period: Padma Lakshmi as a haughty princess in ST:ENT.