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Terrible French accent in Mad Men


The French accent Julia Ormond does in Mad Men is atrocious. Overall she's not a bad actress, but to anyone who speaks French, it's like nails on a chalkboard. It's utterly incomprehensible. I don't understand why they didn't get an actress who actually speaks French to play Marie.

As for Jessica Paré, I'm still not sure why they have her pretending to speak with a Parisian accent when, like her, Megan Draper is from Montreal. I understand that the script has her as the daughter of a professor, but that would just make her joual less noticeable and her accent more refined -- it wouldn't make her European.

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Exactly. I'm freaking Canadian and Ormond's accent is NOT a Quebecois accent. We don't speak 'elegant' sounding French here; it's different. This is absolutely sloppy continuity and annoying. Season 5 was not very good in general. I also think Jessica Pare is NOT a good enough actress for this show either.

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Marie Calvet is supposed to be French on the show. She said so herself on the latest episode. She is NOT supposed to speak Quebecois as her dialect. Having said that, Jessica Pare is a crap actress and is clearly an Anglophone herself in real life. Her English sounds very Modern California Dialect to me and not at all the way I would imagine a Francophone from Quebec would speak English in NYC in the 1960s, especially not a daughter of a professor and a prissy Frenchwoman. She sounds like she should be taking orders at a Santa Monica Starbucks. Alison Brie, the woman who plays Trudy, speaks the English I would imagine an upper-class person from NYC speaking at that time.

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I thought it was acceptable, better than most non-French actors anyway, but I know from personal experience how fussy the French are when it comes to their language being spoken by foreigners. It is particularly ironic considering that most French people speak poor English at best, even when they have studied the language at university, often making no attempt whatever to approximate a native accent.

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Alison Brie sounds like a non_ivy League person doing her impression of an Ivy Leaguer without ever having met one.

I'm not Ivy, but everybody in my family is, and most of my ex-girlfriends are.

Brie sounds like got her notion of proper elocution from Hermione in Harry Potter.

Ivy girls sound like Gwyneth Paltrow in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Pare sounds educated. Her speech just has no affectation.

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Well, your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.


When I'm gone I would like something to be named after me. A psychiatric disorder, for example.

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So,that's the answer.....Don Draper kills himself over their accents

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I thought I was crazy! I'm French Canadian and I couldn't understand a damn word she was saying. Had to read the subtitles, which never happens. So I figured, well maybe she speaks a particular dialect of French which I'm not familiar with? Then I saw that she's actually British and everything started making sense.

I think Megan's French is a lot better, but I don't understand why she speaks that way. As others have said in this post, that's not how people from Montreal speak.

http://jeangable.tumblr.com/

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