Robert Easton on "Get Smart" with his co stars of
Ann Prentiss and the memorable Arlene Golanka
As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
As is one of my hobbies, I enjoy watching old performances and then looking up the people while watching to see how their lives turned out.
TL and I were watching the old series Gunsmoke, the role which John Wayne turned down and others wanted, when the Christmas program came on named Magnus. It had to do with Magnus Proudfoot the dufus brother of the deputy Chester, played by Dennis Weaver.
It really was a delightful screenplay and for a half hour show in black and white, which had begun on radio, I really appreciated what they could do with a program of that kind of talent. I started looking up Robert Easton and was stunned by this Wisconsin native. This was a most accomplished man who literally taught the stars of Hollywood and public figures how to speak. What Robert Easton had accomplished was to overcome stuttering as a child, by changing his voice to a different dialect. He then got so typed cast that he was fed up playing hayseeds, where upon he moved with his English wife to England and began an intense study of language, recording them, and learning to speak them like a native.
Struggling with a severe stuttering problem throughout his childhood also made Robert keenly aware of the "minutiae of speech" and the mechanics of pronunciation. Much later, in a 1998 interview with The New York Times, he explained, "When you have a big [stuttering] problem like that you compensate", adding "I found it easier to do voices other than my own."All of those early experiences of coping with his speech disorder and fine-tuning his ear to the peculiarities of regional accents and the subtleties of voice patterns proved to be, career-wise, great advantages for Robert. He not only became a successful character actor, he later gained a reputation in Hollywood as one of the more effective and highly respected dialect coaches in the entertainment industry
From a stuttering boy, he became a pioneer in language study and dialect and was teaching the most accomplished actors in the world, how to speak in character.
As Easton's command of foreign and American regional accents continued to grow, so did his reputation as a dialect coach. He mastered in time over 200 ethnic, historical, regional, and sociological accents. By the late 1970s, his work as an instructor eclipsed acting as his principal vocation as increasing numbers of actors, screenwriters, directors, and studio executives were recognizing him as the entertainment industry's "dean of dialects" and the "Henry Higgins of Hollywood".
Easton coached hundreds of notable character actors and stars, helping them to speak convincing dialects in their roles. A few of the actors he tutored in speech included Gregory Peck, who required an accurate German accent for his dialogue in the 1978 film The Boys from Brazil; the English actor Laurence Olivier, whom he helped to speak in the style of a native resident of Michigan for The Betsy (1978); Ben Kingsley, another Englishman, whom he assisted with his Indian accent for Gandhi (1982) and his dialogue as a New Yorker in Bugsy (1991); Al Pacino with his Cuban dialect in Scarface (1983); Arnold Schwarzenegger, in adapting his Austrian accent to Russian for Red Heat (1988); Irish actor Liam Neeson for his role as a Kentuckian in Next of Kin (1989); Robert Duvall in his portrayal of Virginia native and Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals (2003); and Forest Whitaker, whom he coached to speak with specific regional African intonations and inflections for Whitaker's Oscar-winning performance as Ugandan political leader Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (2006).
When Robert Duvall first asked Easton to teach him how to speak like a Virginian, the seasoned dialect coach reportedly responded, "'Which one? There are twelve distinct accents'"
Not only that, Robert Easton, taught at the University of California in speech study. A boy who could have given up as an excuse in stuttering, then a man who could have given up as type cast, kept taking the lemons of his life and turned that yellow fruit into the gold, not of money, but enriching the world.
I have a personal interest in this, because like Jonathan Winters, I had a rather bad childhood. I survived in fantasy, and when you are a child working in the fields for hours in the hot day or left alone to your own fears, you began creating characters. To this day, I relish changing characters and dialects. I can move and meld into Asian, European, African and American dialects. I have favorites like the Indian who was screaming at me on the phone to not yell at him to my special Virginian accent which I would have loved to have performed on screen or stage.
TL and I both have discussions often about people we hear or meet in just where they are from as we pick up the differences in dialect in America.
One of my favorite dialects is Canadian, or I should say a niche Canadian. I used to get a skip signal from CJOB out of Winnipeg Manitoba, was a little gal who did the traffic report. I can do Charles Adler like he is my brother, but this gal I never could get down. She spoke almost in a backwards lilt. I have heard this a few times on public television in what seems to be a specific dialect of the Manitoba and Ottawa regional overlap. It is so unique and it frustrates me I never had recording of her to figure out how she was making the sounds she did. I used to have problems with the Kennedy dialect until I got into pronouncing the signature 'for good": which is of that Irish Boston people. I just love being a mimic in sounding like famous people or sounding like someone from another place.
I love language and I love the harsh and soft words in their interplay in every language, and how languages like Russian, German and French almost speak their own accent as the words just form themselves to those beautiful accents.
There are not many people who starred in Gunsmoke and Star Trek. There are no people except Robert Easton who taught Gregory Peck how to annunciation in German or taught Robert Duvall how to speak the correct regional Virginia dialect.
Robert Easton was a man you have seen a hundred times over and never thought much of it, and yet you have heard his work thousands of times and it was so perfect, that you never marveled in how easy he made it all work.
Nuff Said
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