Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that he once had a dialect coach who was tasked with completely removing his accent.
Arnie was born in Thal, Austria on 30 July 1947. He moved to the United States in 1968 and officially became a U.S. citizen in 1983, which led to his 40th anniversary celebrations recently.
As time has gone on, his Austrian accent has become less pronounced, but in his earlier movies like Conan the Barbarian, it is still extremely prominent.
"I had an English coach and an acting coach and a speech coach and an accent-removal coach, who has passed away since then, but I should have otherwise gotten my money back," he said on The Graham Norton Show.
"The bottom line is, I worked on it. I remember he'd say, 'You know you always say s-ree. It's three, with a T-H.' So he had me say, 'Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three and one-third,' with the T-H and not with the S."
Schwarzenegger's accent became an asset
Eventually, Arnie's accent became a key part of his persona in his movies. James Cameron, for example, loved that it made him sound like a robot, which was, of course, perfect for The Terminator.
"The funny thing was all the stuff that they said, the Hollywood producers and the directors and all the geniuses, they were saying this was an obstacle for me to become a leading man, became an asset," he continued.
"When I did Conan the Barbarian, John Milius, the director, said to the press, 'If we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger, we would have had to build one,' because I was the only one that had the muscles to play that character the way Frank Frazetta painted it and the way Robert E. Howard has written about it. Then when I did Terminator, Jim Cameron said, 'What made Terminator work and why it became successful is because Schwarzenegger talks like a machine.'"
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