Early in her career, the globally acclaimed actress just wanted to blend into Hollywood, but she soon realized standing out was a hidden gift.
The idea that full success for entertainers in Hollywood can only be achieved by conforming to American culture and accent is charming but misguided. At least according to Oscar-winning Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong’o and Grammy-winning South African songstress, Tyla.
For the first episode of her new podcast, movie star, Lupita Nyong’o opened up about her intimate journey to fully accepting her identity and battling the “complicated relationship with the way I speak” for years.
Early in her career, the globally acclaimed actress just wanted to blend into Hollywood, but she soon realized standing out was a hidden gift. Born in Mexico to Kenyan parents, but was raised in Kenya from the age of three, Lupita identifies as a Kenyan-Mexican and is fluent in Spanish. Despite currently living in the United States for twenty years now, she revealed that “to create this podcast, I had to get very comfortable with my voice.”
Although she embraced her Kenyan accent while enrolled at Massachusetts’ Hampshire College, Lupita recalled the shift happening when she joined the Yale School of Drama to pursue acting. To ensure she mastered talking like an American, Lupita dedicated several days out of her week to voice lessons.
But a compliment from a casting director about her accent only left her feeling bittersweet: “She said, ‘Oh my goodness, you don’t have an accent.’ And I was at once so elated and also so crushed. I had ridden myself of myself, kind of.”
Lupita Nyong’o wins the Supporting Actress Academy Award during the 2014 Oscar Awards. /FILE
So, in 2014, before starting the press tour for 12 Years a Slave (the debut feature film that instantly made her a global household name), Lupita decided to make a change. She called her publicist and said, “I’ve decided that from tomorrow, I am going to return to my original accent. I want to send a message that being an African is enough. They had never heard me speak in a Kenyan accent.”
When Tyla exploded into global music stardom with her hit song Water, the South African singer did not just gain attention for her silky R&B vocals, viral dance moves and accent. Tyla’s proud description of herself as “Coloured” also caused controversy, particularly in the US, where the word has a painful racist history and is no longer in use.
During her first international TV interview, she appeared on a Swedish talk show and was praised for sticking to her South African accent. Before her rise to fame, the 2023 breakout star made a video proudly talking about her mixed-raced heritage on TikTok. In it, she slicks her coily hair into Bantu knots, while donning a traditional beaded necklace, with the words, “I am a coloured South African” splashed across the clip like a badge of honour.
The singer says this means that she “comes from a lot of different cultures”. It was a simple video intended to share a part of herself with her audience. But instead, her racial identity has stoked flames across the internet, most notably, in the US.
Americans see the word as a slur, unlike Tyla’s South African community, who see it as a part of their culture. In South Africa, it is a distinct identity that is officially recognised.
One US user on X said: “We are not gonna call her coloured here and if she demands it, her career will end before it begins.“She’s trying to cross over into an American market, she won’t be able to use that word here, she can use it somewhere else though.”
In the US, the word harks back to the Jim Crow era, when segregationist laws were instituted in the southern states to oppress black Americans after slavery was banned. Water fountains, toilets and bus seats were marked “whites only” or “coloured only”.
This dark history of racial segregation mirrors that in South Africa before white-minority rule ended in 1994. Apartheid was a political system with a racial hierarchy privileging white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 required people to be registered into one of four racial categories – white, black, Indian or coloured. Another law designated residential areas according to race.
According to Michael Morris, head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations, the history of the coloured community is complex, but “quintessentially South African”. The community has disparate origins but was brought together under apartheid rules.
“Being a mixture of black, white, Asian, it was forged in the southern African geography in a way that no other can claim,” Morris told the BBC.
But because of this mixed heritage, the community was sometimes derided and dismissed in a system obsessed with categorisation. Marike de Klerk, the late wife of apartheid South Africa’s last president, once said of the coloured community concerning the regime’s segregation laws: “They are the people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest.”
But this pressure of accent adoption and ‘want-to-belong’ has not only been felt by immigrant Hollywood stars but also the natives. Have you ever watched an old movie and been thrown off by the strange half-British, half-American accents employed by actors in the thirties and forties?
Why were Native American stars cultivating faux-British accents? Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, classical theatre actors were in the habit of imitating upper-class British accents onstage. Many of them followed the teachings of Australian phonetician William Tilly, who introduced a phonetically consistent standard of English – called World English – that would eventually come to “define the sound of American classical acting for almost a century (Knight).” Interestingly, Tilly himself had little interest in acting. A linguistic prescriptivist, he boldly labelled World English a ‘class-based accent.’ In other words, it was meant to be used as a marker of an ‘educated,’ ‘cultivated,’ or ‘cultured’ person.
In 1927, Warner Bros and the Vitaphone Corporation released the very first feature-length ‘talkie’ – a black and white film called The Jazz Singer. Its release signalled the end of the silent film era and the ushering in of sound films. For the first time, the voices of onscreen cinema superstars started to be heard on the big screen.
And many actors were less than thrilled by the added pressures of vocal performance. Clara Bow, a superstar of the twenties, famously hated ‘talkies,’ and in 1930, at only twenty-five years old, her career came to an abrupt end when she was admitted to a sanatorium. Katherine Hepburn, another actress, also struggled with the transition. As a result of nervously blurting out her lines again and again, she was fired from her first production in 1928.
Soon many actors, including Hepburn, were enrolling for elocution classes to train their voices for the big screen. Then, in 1942, Edith Skinner – a Broadway Consultant and student of William Tilly – published a book called Speak with Distinction, which was the first codification of Tilly’s teachings and quickly became the manual for Hollywood’s standard English.
Directors liked the accent for its neutrality and sophistication, which made it easy to use in films that weren’t setting-specific. Soon enough, mastery of the accent became a prerequisite for actors trying to break into the industry.
The Trans-Atlantic accent (a nickname for various accents of English that are perceived as blending features from both American and British English), made it difficult to tell what street someone grew up on. While film executives adore the accent for its trilling, all-treble sound, on-screen cast and audiences alike abhorred the accent for its woeful pretentiousness. By the mid-forties, native Americans were no longer buying the neutrality argument.
Through the success of a couple of breakthrough actors notably lacking the Trans-Atlantic accent – including Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart – Americans finally began to see themselves reflected on the big screen. Soon, the accent’s inherent classism began to be rejected. By the late fifties, it had all but disappeared.
Despite the complex history of cultural representation, celebrated pop culture icons like Lupita and Tyla, who identify as Black or people of colour, have woven a rich cultural tapestry. They have not only defied the odds but also served as inspiring role models for young girls with dreams of making it big in the global media and entertainment industry.
Ooro George is a Kenyan journalist, art critic, digital stories, and cross-cultural curator. You can reach him via LinkedIn here, through email: [email protected] and on X @OoroGeorge
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