I like listening to him talk, and I noticed that he speaks with a very particular accent,{speech pattern}. I was wondering if it was due to a regional accent or if it is just the way he talks. I saw his father in The Oriental Express, he also has the same way of talking. Can anyone enlighten me?
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
No, he has no regional accent, but in fRnace, the way he speaks is considered as a real upper class accent, sort of aristocratic way of speaking.
natalia
Thank you very much Natalia.
L'absence est a'lamour ce quest qu feu la vent; il eteint le petit, il allume le grand.
This is absolutely untrue, I'm sorry to say. If anything, his accent would be more on the popular side. An aristocratic accent, if there is such a thing, would be more that of the likes of Lambert Wilson.
shareYou are absolutely right for the voices he is "creating " in some movies (as La haine or Sur Mes lèvres,or even Mesrine, for example), but if you hear his interviews, you will discover he as "another accent", which is kind of Lambert Wilson or Fanny Ardant typical upper class .
It is not be very stunning, after all his father was an actor and his mother a journalist, so a popular accent would be very strange.
natalia
Indeed, he is one of the few people with the last remnants of an "accent faubourien"...just like his father had, which used to be that of popular city-dwellers in Maurice Chevallier's times...but now is the particularity of the bourgeois upper middle class while the populace speaks like Cassel in his roles of "banlieusards"...imitating a North-African accent for some of them.
Lambert Wilson and Fanny Ardant's diction is not "upper class" IMHO (well it mixes with it in the case of Saumur-born Ardant...) but very "littéraire", that of old French thespians like Gérard Philippe...His father Georges Wilson was a theater man and it shows.
1 : Vincent Cassel does not have an upper-class accent. He actually speaks like the next guy in the street!
2: the "populace" does not speak with a suburban or North African accent. Why on earth would we speak like that? There is a large North African population in French suburbs, and they all speak with the region accent. The Parisian accent has nothing to in common with the North African accent!
"364 days... till the next Pretzel day."
-Stanley