Many of voice coach Beverly Inman-Ebel’s clients come to her for help shedding their Southern accents.We asked a question of Times Free Press readers on Facebook, and the Chattanooga Theatre Centre posted the question on its Facebook page: What are the best and worst Southern accents you’ve heard in movies or on TV? More than 150 responses came back. Below are the frontrunners.WORST1 Kevin Spacey for “House of Cards” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Former Times Free Press reporter Adam Crisp, who lives in Savannah, Ga., said: “He has the slow coastal drawl, but there’s just something about it that’s off.”2The vampires and Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse on HBO’s “True Blood.” Especially Sookie. Kristi Davis calls the accents “HORRIBLE!,” and Dana Chadwell echoes with “Gawdawful … and each accent seems to hail from a totally different region of the South, none of which are anywhere near Louisiana. Pitiful.”3 Nicholas Cage in “Con Air.”4 Julia Roberts, who grew up in Smyrna, Ga., outside Atlanta, in “Steel Magnolias” and “Something to Talk About.” Brooke Reynolds commented: “Julia Roberts took lots of classes to overcome her Southern accent and then uses a fake one in ‘Steel Magnolias.’ So odd.”5Emma Stone in “The Help”; in fact, any white actress in “The Help.”6 Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger in “Cold Mountain”; Zellweger won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her role.7 Jessica Simpson in “The Dukes of Hazzard.” (Scott Boles: “A special kind of awful.”)8 Sandra Bullock, a Texas native, in “The Blind Side,” in which she played a woman from Memphis.9 Luke Kleintank who plays Finn Abernathy in “Bones,” the TV forensic detective show. (Adam Smart says: “without equal, a hamfisted caricature of an accent varies from antebellum Georgia to bad Harland Sanders impression from episode to episode … Adding insult to injury, the writers manage to shoe-horn in forced colloquialisms that are just crazier than a dog in a hubcap factory. I de-clare!”BEST10 “The Walking Dead Cast” and Tom Hardy in “Lawless.” Stephanie Gravitt: “British actors do an awesome job of Southern accents.” Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick in the show, is British.11 Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday in “Tombstone.”12 Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club” and “Mud.” “Alright, alright, alright! Matthew McConaughey is wonderful in Mud,” says Anu Gona Cheemakotl.13 Robert Duvall in “The Apostle” (Kristie Taylor’s nomination snagged 12 Likes).14 Tim Blake Nelson in ” O Brother Where Art Thou?”OTHER – Some actors got votes for both best and worst.15 Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer,” a role for which she won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series; she was Emmy-nominated for the role five times.16 When the Hollywood Reporter polled voice coaches about the best and worst Southern and worst Southern accents two years ago, Vivien Leigh’s turn as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” was ranked as merely mediocre. But it was also ranked one of the most influential, since so many non-Southern actresses across the decades since seem to regard it as the lodestar to guide them.
The pale, lime-green cottage with stone trim is tucked into a quiet residential neighborhood in Chattanooga, yet it attracts U.S. senators, governors, bank presidents, network news anchors and rising Wall Street stars.
The sign outside says “Talk Listen Communicate LLC.” Inside, people pay Beverly Inman-Ebel $157 per hour to help them reduce the accents they grew up speaking. Overwhelmingly, her clients are Southerners.
“The clients who come to me feel that non-Southerners project biases about a person with a Southern accent, sometimes negative perceptions about education, life experience and leadership ability,” Ebel says.
“It is unfair to judge someone’s intellect or social graces based on something as superficial as an accent. It’s unfair to judge someone on how they dress or wear their hair. But those judgments are made all the time in the business world. And when people come to me, they are feeling as if the Southern accent has become a distraction from who they really are.”