Now it's SIR Danial Day Lewis !

It is hard to forgive the Lincolns without their southern Illinois drawls. The producer and director would not have wanted that (unless it helped them sell a toy) but I believe that Daniel Day-Lewis, the great method actor, could have carried the argument if he had cared to make it. Tommy Lee Jones sounded more like Lincoln than Lincoln.

The knighthood is well-deserved. If he ever plays Fagin, I hope he lets the poor shlub speak Cockney. Then I will learn to call him Sir Andrew.
 
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Piso Mojado said:
It is hard to forgive the Lincolns without their southern Illinois drawls. The producer and director would not have wanted that (unless it helped them sell a toy) but I believe that Daniel Day-Lewis, the great method actor, could have carried the argument if he had cared to make it. Tommy Lee Jones sounded more like Lincoln than Lincoln.

The knighthood is well-deserved. If he ever plays Fagin, I hope he lets the poor shlub speak Cockney. Then I will learn to call him Sir Andrew.
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If I remember correctly? Lincoln was born in Virginia and moved by his father to Illinois as a boy of 12? So he may not of had as much of an accent as a native born?

Since there are no recordings of anyones voice from back then, we will never know!
 
I remember a historian on the radio saying that Lewis got Lincoln's voice right--based on descriptions of his voice by Lincoln's contemporaries. It was supposedly much higher than previous actors have portrayed it.

Btw, we do have recording of Theodore Roosevelt's voice. Easy enough to find using google. Old Teddy sounded almost like a chipmunk! :)
 
Rhinoknives1 said:
If I remember correctly? Lincoln was born in Virginia and moved by his father to Illinois as a boy of 12? So he may not of had as much of an accent as a native born?

Since there are no recordings of anyones voice from back then, we will never know!
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Kentucky.
 
Scott Free said:
I remember a historian on the radio saying that Lewis got Lincoln's voice right--based on descriptions of his voice by Lincoln's contemporaries. It was supposedly much higher than previous actors have portrayed it.

Btw, we do have recording of Theodore Roosevelt's voice. Easy enough to find using google. Old Teddy sounded almost like a chipmunk! :)
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I saw an interview with a lady presidential historian that said that about Lewis's portrayal. No amplifiers back then. The politicians with the wispy high voices could be heard at a greater distance.

I would never have gotten elected to anything back then! I'm a baritone B flat off key! LOL
 
Rhinoknives1 said:
If I remember correctly? Lincoln was born in Virginia and moved by his father to Illinois as a boy of 12? So he may not of had as much of an accent as a native born?

Since there are no recordings of anyones voice from back then, we will never know!
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Abraham Lincoln was born at Sinking Spring farm in what is now LaRue County, Kentucky. When he was two, his family moved to another farm a few miles northwest on Knob Creek. Knob Creek bourbon should not be held against them.

Thomas Lincoln lost two farms because of bad land titles. Someone wanted the land and challenged the title, there was a survey and that was it. It happened a lot. In 1816, the Lincolns crossed the Ohio and and settled at Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County, Indiana, where Thomas wouldn't have to compete with slave labor. That is where Abraham Lincoln grew from a 7-year-old boy to a 21-year-old man.

In 1830 there was an outbreak of Milk fever all along the Ohio. Milk fever is a disaster if you keep dairy cows. There was no question of returning to Kentucky, so the Lincolns moved to Illinois and settled on public land 10 miles west of Decatur. In 1831 the family moved again, to a farm on Goosenest Prairie south of Charleston in Coles County, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln never lived there and visited infrequently. He returned there for his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas at the Coles County Fairgrounds.

I have relatives all over southern Illinois and southern Indiana. People there don't all sound alike. Educated people sound more like Shelby Foote. Good ol' boys sound more like Dennis Weaver on Gunsmoke. But they all drawl, it is a distinctive regional accent. One of my cousins went to school in Normal and she got really tired of hearing people call her a hillbilly.

People who met Lincoln were impressed by his high pitched voice. They were not favorably impressed. Lincoln did not have an actor's or a singer's beautiful voice. He was a great orator, but that was all about the quality of what he said. And he had the ability to speak "like a book" in long, complex sentences and paragraphs that most of us need two drafts to set down on paper. There is a brilliant example of this in Lincoln, when Lincoln explains why the 13th Amendment must pass. Daniel Day-Lewis caught Lincoln's manner perfectly, even though he gave him a Peter Jennings accent.

No one commented on Lincoln's accent, so I assume he shared the regional speech pattern.

We have no recordings of Lincoln's speech, but part of it survives in his writings.

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150162793087491
 
I wonder if Lincoln ever said "you-uns" in his speeches? :D

Daniel Day Lewis... meh. I can't say if it's him personally, the movie subjects, or perhaps the dialog writing, but his characters always comes across as too self-aware and pretentious.
 
mete said:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nner-Daniel-Day-Lewis-receive-knighthood.html

One of my favorites ,especially Last of the Mohicans.Good work !
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His Hawkeye was better than Cooper's Hawkeye. This is Mark Twain on Cooper's original Hawkeye AKA Natty Bumppo.

For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so – and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some "females" – as he always calls women – in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn't strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn't it a daisy? If Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature's ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance: one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were that person's moccasin-tracks. The current did not wash them away, as it would have done in all other like cases – no, even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader.
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The movie should have been advertised as "based on Last of the Mohicans" because the two were almost completely different. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. I loved the movie. I thought the book was stupid and almost unreadable.
 
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