Actors who can't really speak the language.

[rdearman]

Let's not forget Sylvester Stallone who struggled with English through a number of films, most notably Rocky.

[July]

Most TV shows including some kind of espionage do this a lot. The one that most comes to mind right now is NCIS: LA in which (apart from one girl who is actually Portuguese) all of the actors speak multiple languages horribly. Especially Russian, which they use quite often. I don't speak it, but I have known enough Russians to know that it doesn't sound like that.

In one episode, they even had a character speaking Welsh. It was unfortunate. I think they may have just given the poor woman a line without any phonetics and asked her to take her best guess. I felt bad for her.

I think Agents of SHIELD this season had Mockingbird conversing in Mandarin with May (who is played by a native speaker). There was also a blonde actress in Quantico speaking Arabic. I would guess that neither actress is a native speaker, but I don't know how good they were as I'm sure I know less of those languages than they do, even if they only learned a couple of lines!

[ddich]

I remembered something I'm sure you're all going to find extremely interesting...or not.

Do you remember in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that old man in the village, who told them to go to such and such palace to get their kids back? Well apparently he couldn't speak a single word of english. So, when they filmed it, they had somebody speaking his lines to him and then he just repeated them out loud. That's why there's pauses when he's talking

[Brian]

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.

Yes, I believe he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and it would be logical to assume that German was the working language of the military.

[William Camden]

German was the language of command in the Austro-Hungarian Army and it was virtually impossible to become an officer without being at least competent in German, even if your first language was Hungarian, Czech, Polish or any one of the other languages of the Empire. Ordinary soldiers were expected to learn words of command in German (some sources say 40 words, others 70 or give other figures) so that they could understand commands.
Over 40% of soldiers came from Slav nationalities in the Empire and a pidgin language called "Army Slav" was also used to communicate. It seems to have been a very reduced form of Czech.
After the war and the turmoil of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lugosi worked for a time in the German film industry. This tends to strengthen the supposition that he knew German.

[reineke]

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[William Camden]

Let's not forget Sylvester Stallone who struggled with English through a number of films, most notably Rocky.

His rival Arnie Schwarzenegger has, I suppose, more excuse for his somewhat limited communication capabilities in English.

[William Camden]

Most TV shows including some kind of espionage do this a lot. The one that most comes to mind right now is NCIS: LA in which (apart from one girl who is actually Portuguese) all of the actors speak multiple languages horribly. Especially Russian, which they use quite often. I don't speak it, but I have known enough Russians to know that it doesn't sound like that.

In one episode, they even had a character speaking Welsh. It was unfortunate. I think they may have just given the poor woman a line without any phonetics and asked her to take her best guess. I felt bad for her.

I think Agents of SHIELD this season had Mockingbird conversing in Mandarin with May (who is played by a native speaker). There was also a blonde actress in Quantico speaking Arabic. I would guess that neither actress is a native speaker, but I don't know how good they were as I'm sure I know less of those languages than they do, even if they only learned a couple of lines!

My prize for "Worst Attempt at Russian" goes to the English actor Leslie Banks, who played a crazed Russian aristocrat called Zaroff in the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game. He gives orders to a servant in a gobbledygook that is meant to be Russian.

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4010000896/ ... m_phs_md_1

Here he is, hunting his prey with a bow and arrow, perhaps better at archery than at speaking Russian

[IchBinEinPoly]

It's fairly common for South Indian language movies to hire North Indian actresses (sometimes actors, but usually actresses) who don't speak any of the language. Why? Because of rampant colorism that privileges the lighter skin tones of North Indians than the darker shades of Dravidian India. It's pretty disgusting, really. The actresses are essentially just there for eye candy, do not add meaningfully to what little plot there is, promote colorist standards of beauty, and butcher the language- if they're even given major speaking roles in the first place. I have heard of movies where heroines have like one line in the entire movie.

[n_j_f]

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?

Uma Thurman in Kill Bill would be a relatively recent example that comes to mind although this doesn't apply to her co-stars as Lucy Liu speaks Japanese and Julie Dreyfus is fluent and apparently a well-known actor in Japanese films and television. Then of course, there are the American actors and singers that do Japanese commercials.

Mention has already been made of actors in Irish language programmes and I am sure this would apply to programmes in Scottish Gaelic and, to a lesser extent, Welsh.

I can't think of any specific examples, but I'm sure marquee American and English actors that appeared in European cinema — especially Italian cinema — from the 50s to the 70s would have learnt their lines phonetically. A lot of the films were shot in English, however, or shot silently and then dubbed into various languages.