Actors who can't really speak the language.

[sfuqua]

To some extent,what actors do with language is similar to what students do when they learn from a course that involves memorizing dialogs.

Does anybody know an actor who regularly appears in movies speaking a certain language, but who cannot speak it in "real life?"

I have heard, for instance, that Sophie Marceau could not speak English at all when she did Braveheart.

Do actors, or for that matter, opera singers, actually learn languages, to some extent, by memorizing and performing dialog?

[tomgosse]

To some extent,what actors do with language is similar to what students do when they learn from a course that involves memorizing dialogs.

Does anybody know an actor who regularly appears in movies speaking a certain language, but who cannot speak it in "real life?"

I have heard, for instance, that Sophie Marceau could not speak English at all when she did Braveheart.

Do actors, or for that matter, opera singers, actually learn languages, to some extent, by memorizing and performing dialog?

A lot of actors have to learn their lines phonetically. Gert Frobe, who starred in Goldfinger, had to learn his lines phonetically. But his accent was so bad that they were over dubbed.

From Wikipedia's entry for the movie Goldfinger:

Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger: ... Fröbe, who spoke little English, said his lines phonetically, but was too slow. To redub him, he had to double the speed of his performance to get the right tempo. The only time his real voice is heard is during his meeting with members of the Mafia at Auric Stud. Bond is hidden below the model of Fort Knox whilst Fröbe's natural voice can be heard above. However, he was redubbed for the rest of the film by stage actor Michael Collins.

[galaxyrocker]

Sadly, this is most of the actors on Irish language shows. They get a bunch of non-natives to act, and thus they don't get the correct pronunciation a lot of the time, You'll often hear the English <r> instead of the Irish one, for example.

[arthaey]

I remember hearing that this was the case for Antonio Banderas when he started out in Hollywood. (Pretty sure he speaks English now, though.)

[James29]

The star of the legendary movie "Casa de mi Padre" did not speak Spanish and had to simply memorize all of his lines and "fake" it for the entire movie. I still think he does an incredible job faking it. For folks learning Spanish this is a great movie to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICCOTMHXNvM

[William Camden]

Béla Lugosi reputedly didn't speak English at the time he made Dracula and simply recited his lines phonetically.

[tarvos]

I'm sure this happens quite a bit, but some of them also actually learn the language. Viggo Mortensen, for example, actually did learn Arabic (and modified his existing but imperfect French) for "Far from Men".

[William Camden]

Lugosi certainly learned English later but though he lived in the USA for at least the last 25 years of his life he seems always to have struggled with it.
He probably also spoke German, which was widely known in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary.

[James29]

Erik Estrada's career crashed and burned. He went to Mexico looking for work, but could not speak Spanish. Here is his story about what happened and how/why he had to learn Spanish:

"I was in Mexico doing a movie in Spanish, but I was getting dubbed in Spanish, because I didn't know how to read or speak Spanish. So this producer from Televisa comes up to me and says 'We want to do a show. We'll make it so you were born in Mexico, you were raised in San Diego, then you come back to Mexico to live.' And I said 'oh cool, I'm going to speak Spanglish.' Then the first script came to me and it was all in Spanish, and I said 'I can't do this!' I couldn't even read it! So I asked my manager to tell Televisa I wanted $500,000 for 100 episodes, thinking they'd go away. But they came back and said ok. [So I told them] I want a car, a chauffeur, a bodyguard and a cook, and I want $75,000 wired to my account. I figured they'd go away after that. And they said ok. So now, I'm really stuck. So I went to a language academy, got an instructor for six weeks and learned to read Spanish. It [was] the longest-running, highest-rated soap opera in the history of Latin television. It was 457 episodes...I made over $2 million doing that show."

[tomgosse]

Erik Estrada's career crashed and burned. He went to Mexico looking for work, but could not speak Spanish. Here is his story about what happened and how/why he had to learn Spanish:

"I was in Mexico doing a movie in Spanish, but I was getting dubbed in Spanish, because I didn't know how to read or speak Spanish. So this producer from Televisa comes up to me and says 'We want to do a show. We'll make it so you were born in Mexico, you were raised in San Diego, then you come back to Mexico to live.' And I said 'oh cool, I'm going to speak Spanglish.' Then the first script came to me and it was all in Spanish, and I said 'I can't do this!' I couldn't even read it! So I asked my manager to tell Televisa I wanted $500,000 for 100 episodes, thinking they'd go away. But they came back and said ok. [So I told them] I want a car, a chauffeur, a bodyguard and a cook, and I want $75,000 wired to my account. I figured they'd go away after that. And they said ok. So now, I'm really stuck. So I went to a language academy, got an instructor for six weeks and learned to read Spanish. It [was] the longest-running, highest-rated soap opera in the history of Latin television. It was 457 episodes...I made over $2 million doing that show."

Love that story! The telenovela was Dos Mujeres, Un Camino. I watched it because I was in love with Bibi Gaytán.