The first American actor to win an Oscar for playing a British person
It’s pretty much a rite of passage for British actors to play Americans if they want to break into Hollywood, and sometimes they’re so convincing that you can go years without knowing that an actor is actually from a posh suburb of Surrey, not California.
So many people are still unaware that Christian Bale was born in Wales and grew up in England, with his performances as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and of course as Batman, tricking people into thinking he’s from the United States.
Sometimes it works the other way around, like when people discovered that Renée Zellweger, who played the well-spoken Briton Bridget Jones, was not in fact English, but from Texas.
Accents are simply a key part of being a good actor, though, so when a star successfully fools people into thinking that they’re from a different country entirely, you know they’re good at what they do. We British people are pretty critical when it comes to judging the attempts at different regional accents by Yanks, but you can hardly argue if a performance lands the actor an Oscar, so who was the first American actor to go as far as winning an Oscar for putting on an English accent?
The first American actor to win an Oscar for playing a British person
Way back in the 1930s, when the Oscars was still in its infancy, with only a handful of ceremonies to its name, Fredric March scooped up the first ‘Best Actor’ award for an American playing an English character, while also becoming the first actor to win the award for a horror movie.
He starred as both Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde in 1931’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, forgoing his Wisconsin roots in favour of two variants on an English accent as he switched between the refined doctor and his crazed, darker alter ego. The pre-Code film was a huge success, and it remains one of the most strikingly influential films of the Old Hollywood era, proving how much power the horror genre had to reach a wide audience.
As an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, it became well-known for the transition sequence in which March morphs from Jekyll into Hyde, and it was this dual role, contrasting the well-spoken Victorian doctor with the unhinged tones of his murderous shadow, that majorly impressed critics.
March earned the Oscar alongside Wallace Beery, who shared the prize for his performance in The Champ (even though March actually earned one more vote than him). I would’ve been pretty upset if I were Alfred Lunt, the only other actor in the category, who had to sadly walk away empty-handed.
Since then, a handful of other Americans have won Oscars for British roles, like Meryl Streep for her turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady and even Rami Malek for his performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody; yet, it’s March who will always stand as the first, his turn as Jekyll and Hyde one of the most indelible in horror history.
