Well I woke up bright and early this morning (well, it wasn’t so bright, actually!) for my first session with my dialect coach via Skype. He’s based in England, and several hours ahead so 7am was the only real reasonable time he had available for me. He’s in high demand! I was a bit relieved that his camera wasn’t working today, so he couldn’t see me propped up in bed with a barely smoothed over bouffant left over from yesterday and my ratty blue sweatshirt (hey, it’s been cold here!). I considered filming a few minutes of the lesson to share with you, but I look terrible and throughout the hour I became aware of how many funny faces I would pull (glad he couldn’t see me either!) when I wasn’t sure of what I was doing. I guess you’d probably get a laugh out of it. Maybe next week. We’ll see. 🙂
So I was thrilled to have a professional ear analyzing Audrey’s speech and helping me to break it down. Especially a British ear, because he’s familiar with British speech patterns that I’m not, and can also notice Americanized pronunciations that I might overlook.
He had four pages of notes to go over, of which we covered about three and will finish up next week.
He asked me to pull up a photo of Audrey to look at during the lesson as inspiration, and I chose this one:
A good, easy one to recreate, actually. Should put that on the “to do” list!
Anywho, we spent a whole hour going over his notes and practicing pronunciation. She has quite an interesting accent. He also had noticed that it changed slightly over time. That’s fascinating to me, and something I hadn’t noticed. If I get the role, I want to keep that in mind and hopefully work with him on each period of her life to get the accent right.
My homework this week is to choose a couple 2-4 minute audios of her speaking (interviews or acting – I think I’ll choose at least one of each) to work on verbatim, to prepare as I would a scene or monologue for a scene study class. Then we will go over them and work on improving them in our next session. I’ve gathered a few already from YouTube that I sent to him for the initial research, so I will probably choose a few from there, but if you can recall a good monologue from any of her films you want to suggest to me, please do! I know there are a few in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but perhaps some from her other films? This week I’m going to be rewatching some that I haven’t seen in ages – like Green Mansions and Secret People! What a busy, Audrey-filled week!
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