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" Every year, right around Christmastime, I find myself indulging a grisly little fantasy triggered by trailers for Oscar-hungry films. Coming soon: Blood Diamond--and there&amp;#039;s a goateed Leo gallivanting over the Sierra Leonean countryside, barking at poor Djimon Hounsou, &amp;quot;What if I helped you find your family?&amp;quot; Trouble is, I&amp;#039;m not thinking, Boy, this looks exciting! I&amp;#039;m asking myself, Did Leo just say &amp;quot;femlee&amp;quot;? And that&amp;#039;s about when I start dreaming about performing a mass tracheotomy on every dialect coach in Hollywood. Movie stars should never do accents. In theory, their purpose is to allow the actor to disappear into character. But when Scarlett Johansson pops up midway through The Prestige, her English lilt might as well be a giant red clown nose; you can&amp;#039;t focus on anything else, because you&amp;#039;re too conscious of the smoky, slightly bored timbre she&amp;#039;s struggling to suppress. Even Meryl Streep, master of the semiforeign tongue, couldn&amp;#039;t quite pull it off. She&amp;#039;s won Oscars, sure, but she&amp;#039;s also had difficulty shaking the perception that she&amp;#039;s an actress of tremendous technique but little feeling.  The only people who care about foreign accents are the actors, who want to believe themselves chameleons. Audiences don&amp;#039;t give a damn. Nobody minded when Sean Connery burred his way through The Hunt for Red October as a &amp;quot;Russian&amp;quot; submarine captain. More recently, the only cast member to escape the glottal train wreck that was All the King&amp;#039;s Men was Anthony Hopkins, who refused to modulate his Welsh accent.  In its heyday, Hollywood was smart enough to recognize the futility of disguising the stars it had labored so mightily to brand. When the studios wanted a touch of exoticism, they imported a Charles Boyer or a Greta Garbo. Nobody demanded that Jimmy Stewart superimpose an Irish brogue onto his distinctive stammer/drawl. Movie stars didn&amp;#039;t insist that we admire their versatility. We were allowed to dream, rather than being forced to marvel. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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