A Quote by Fiona Hill

I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.

Fiona Hill

Quote Topics

Accent Advancement America Back Background Class Distinctive England Grew Grew Up Me Never Poor Professional Set Up Very Working Working-Class Would

Quote Author

Fiona Hill
American - Public Servant
Born: 1965

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.

Michael Caine

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.

Sting

The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies.

Stephen Daldry

My family supported me. I wasn't hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn't go to any kind of gifted school. They didn't exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew up in the 1980s. I had a great time to learn, had access to libraries and teachers who were patient and enthusiastic when I showed ability in some subjects.

Daniel Tammet

I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way - you have to understand the culture.

Idris Elba

I think one of the main differences between being an English actor and being an American actor is that we have things like the class system in England.I'm middle class. But I've got what some people might consider to be a working-class accent, so you've got those sorts of elements in this country to consider, which, in America, exist, but not necessarily in the same way.

Rafe Spall

An agent once told me that if I would lose my English accent, I would never stop working in America.

Jane Seymour

America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.

Michael Ignatieff

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

Maxine Peake

Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn't borrow from banks.

John Hume

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

Roger Ross Williams

We grew up very poor, and I hated being poor. I was the oldest of five kids, and I never got a pair of skates until I was nine. It was very difficult to get an education back then and play junior hockey.

Paul Henderson

I remember, growing up, you didn't wear an England shirt. The English flag was very much - and still is, to some extent - associated with the far-right movements of the 1980s that I grew up around.

Riz Ahmed

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

Graham Norton

My mum grew up in Oldham and was going to work at a cigarette factory till she decided to go to drama school, so there's part of me that wants to represent the Northern working-class background.