How a Canadian elocution 'expert' from the 1930s crafted the Mid-Atlantic accent used by Katharine Hepburn and other Hollywood stars

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Canadian elocutionist Edith Skinner wrote the book that inspired an era of fake Mid-Atlantic accents in Hollywood 

In the Golden Era of Hollywood, actors such as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn spoke with a strange form of English that placed them somewhere between America and Great Britain. 

The so-called Mid-Atlantic accent actually wasn't an accent at all, but an affectation concocted by a Canadian elocutionist. 

Edith Skinner, from New Brunswick, Canada, studied speech at Columbia University at the end of the silent film era, and afterwards she got into the business teaching drama at Carnegie Mellon and Juilliard and assisting leading stage-speech consultant Margaret Prendergast McLean. 

By the the mid 1910s, Skinner moved to Los Angeles and by the 1930s she was the go-to advisor for speech in Hollywood.  

Her 1942 book 'Speak with Distinction' laid out her idea of 'Good Speech' - an accent that is 'free from regional characteristics,' 'effortlessly articulated and easily understood in the last rows of the theater'. 

The point of Good Speech was to eliminate regionalized accents, to create one a neutral American sound. 

The accent was thought to be in response to silent film stars like Clara Bow whose Brooklyn accent was jarring when talkies came about 

The accent (popularized by actors such as Katharine Hepburn, left) was thought to be in response to silent film stars like Clara Bow (right) whose Brooklyn accent was jarring when talkies came about

'Your voice expresses you,' Skinner explained in an interview with The Milwaukee Journal. 'You don't want to lose that individual voice God gave you. What I try to do is get rid of the most obvious regionalisms, the accent that says, "you're from here and I'm from there," the kind of speech that tells you what street you grew up on.'

But in reality, her Mid-Atlantic accent sounded like a mix of an upper-class New England accent with a general British accent. 

Most Americans today will recognize the accent as the ones old Hollywood stars like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

In Grant's case, his accent was really 'mid-Atlantic' - since he was born in England but moved to the U.S. with an acting troupe at 16.

Some typical characteristics of the accent are the dropping of r's from speech, and the soft pronunciation of vowel sounds. 

'In Good Speech, ALL vowel sounds are oral sounds, to be made with the soft palate raised. Thus the breath flows out through the mouth only, rather than through the mouth and nose,' Skinner wrote in her book. 'Each vowel sound is called a PURE SOUND, and the slightest movement or change in any of the organs of speech during the formation of a vowel will mar its purity, resulting in DIPHTHONGIZATION.'

'T' sounds are also enunciated so that a word like 'butter' does not sound 'budder,' as most Americans today would pronounce it. 

Words beginning with 'Wh' are also given a strange gutteral hacking noise so that a word like 'what' sounds more like 'cccwhat'. 

Glottal stops are also banned, which is awkward in practice for the English language. 

While Good Speech was the golden standard during the Golden Era of cinema, it became a thing of the past in the 1960s with the rise of the New Hollywood movement, in which directors like Francis Ford Coppola and John Cassavetes sought to portray average Americans in their more realist films. 

However, the Mid-Atlantic speech up until recently still continued to be taught in some drama schools.