Is accent work important to you when judging a performance?

It really depends on whether you're going for naturalism or not. I agree that if it's a movie where the story takes place in England for instance , then it helps for the actors/actresses to have accurate english accents so that disbelief can be suspended.

Depends but look at Mirren and Plummer who didn't even try them (!) in The Last Station and were great and nodded.

Usually it's the least important thing and often it's not the only thing right or wrong within a performance either. People seize on them wrongly and for the most part people punish established actors for trying accents because eventually you know a voice that you link to an actor.

It's also ridiculously overvalued by most who want to appear like they are rating the whole performance by addressing it (they're not). As Streep once said when she gets praise for accents "it's like people saying you have nice feet". Saiorse Ronan is positively great at them but that isn't why she's great after all, its incidental.

In general people use their personal experience to judge but that experience assumes an equal playing field which isn't true either. One of my best friends grew up in the South and moved to NYC as a still young girl. What comes out of her mouth people would call a bad accent if she was a film character.

Pacino - who I often call the best post-Brando American actor is a horror show of accents really but when he's awful at them he's at his most creative and inspired too - I know people that sound like Tony Montana because they mimic his speech patterns from Scarface. One of his 5 greatest performances is in the 50 minute long The Local Stigmatic where he has a shaky accent but it serves a performance that is a staggering tour de force on many levels and the accent has to be attempted since much of it is British slang dialogue - if he didn't do the role, no one would have done it. It's not like anyone else would have filmed it......and if you stop at the accent, you miss everything else he does so well in the role.

On the other hand, as Hoffa in The Irishman Pacino is going to have to pull off another voice - not an accent so much but something that isn't his own - Hoffa is too distinct a figure to pull off otherwise......big risk for him I think.

Not generally, but if it's super pronounced and obvious it can definitely feel like an affectation (Forest Whitaker in Crying Game, Audrey Hepbrun in My Fair Lady, Leo Dicaprio in Blood Diamond, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, etc) and it totally lessens the performance for me in those cases.

Conversely, Streep's flawless Polish accent in Sophie's Choice doesn't make the performance by itself, but it does make a great performance even more impressive.

Depends on if what the actor is doing vocally fits with the overall performance. I don't really care that much whether they're nailing the accent because I think what an actor is doing and the material they're working with should be strong enough that the accent is a secondary characteristic of the character. I've forgiven plenty of performances with inconsistent accents (Michael Keaton in Spotlight, Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs) because the performances were very strong otherwise and the shaky accent wasn't distracting enough to completely take me out of it, usually in those cases it's because they aren't using a strong accent and are instead being a bit more subdued in that vocal work. Going big with the accent is a major risk and I think much easier for people to criticize, but in cases like DDL in There Will Be Blood or Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, it adds a lot to the characters that they are vocally so defined.

I was going to say this. Not the accuracy but if its distracting it can be really bad. Like Anne Hathaway in One Day

Peter Dinklage is absolutely amazing in Game of Thrones and he probably has one of the worst English accents on television. For me, if it's preferable if you're doing the accent well... but if you're good, you're still gonna be good-- just with a crap accent.

English is not my first language, and I might not have a very good ear to accents, so it's not something I really pay attention to. Like, Saoirse Ronan is very good at accents and does it very naturally, but I don't think I pay attention to that. You could argue it's because she's that good, but some examples of bad accent like Hathaway in One Day don't bother me either.

When I'm bothered by that, it's more when americans do british accent, but I'm not familiar with Aussie accent, or the countless inner-USA accents, or other british accents enough to distinguish 'em.

With that said, I like when actors can nail very eccentric accents, like Streep in Sophie's Choice or Portman in Jackie.

English is not my first language either but I can usually tell it when someone's doing a good accent (Blanchett & DDL are two primary examples imo) and when someone's just phoning it in (The Departed. What a fucking mess that was). It's not really a make-it-or-break-it thing though. It could enhance a performance and the tone in a film, but if the actor isn't inhibiting a character, a good accent wouldn't help too much (ie a lot of Meryl Streep's work).

Generally not.

Unless it's flat-out bad, I don't really mind. Nicole Kidman has never been that great at masking her Australian accent, and she's my favourite actress.

He actually believes that it was Angela Bassett singing in What's Love Got to Do with It, which is quite funny.

I guess only locals are able to really judge an accent. Unless it's horrible or someone attempts to speak like northern Lombardy, I don't mind it.