“I feel bad saying this, but her accent is not exactly an Italian accent, it sounds more Russian,” De Martini recently told The Daily Beast in an interview about Gaga’s performance.
According to De Martini, Salma Hayek personally requested a dialogue coach after her first day of filming on the movie. “I think she heard the accent wasn’t right and she was worried—she wanted to do well,” the coach said, while noting that it did not appear that any other dialect coaches were present on set.
As reported by The Daily Beast: “When listening in to Hayek’s scenes with Gaga, De Martini says she heard right away the accent was a bit off: ‘I was noticing when I was on set, because I had earphones working with Salma and hearing what she was saying so I could help her to get it right, so I could hear Lady Gaga as well.’”
– Italian actress and dialect coach Francesca De Martini on Gaga‘s transformation into Gucci’s Patrizia Reggiani.
[via indiewire]
Except that’s not what Russian sounds like either, and Gaga sounds *exactly* like Patrizia Reggiani’s distinct Modenese accent.
Get it right, lady.
It’s almost as if Stefani Germanotta is not really an actress and is a pop-singer. Her one big role involved her playing someone just like herself. A good singing voice doesn’t mean that you have a good speaking/acting voice or the skills to match dialects.
The same was true for Beyonce Knowles and Jenifer Hudson who are both pop-singers rather than actors. Neither one of them can deliver a good line reading with an American accent let alone a non-US one. Knowles gargled her lines in Lion King while Hudson mish-mashed hers in Smash.
Some people can do both and can play different people because they spent their lives studying acting and singing: Streisand, Judi Dench, Angela Landsbury, Hugh Jackman, etc.