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Paul Meier (born February 17, 1947) is a British-American dialect and voice coach, theatre director, playwright, stage and screen actor, and voice-over artist best known for founding and managing Paul Meier Dialect Services and the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA). [1]
Meier was born in Devizes, England, and grew up in London. He received an Honors in Phonetics and Dialects from Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London; a BA (Honors) in English and American Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England; and a Certificate of Proficiency in Phonetics (first class) from the University of London. Meier has also authored books. [2]
Before relocating permanently to the United States in 1978, Meier was a member of the BBC Drama Repertory Company, acting in more than 100 radio dramas alongside such colleagues as Richard Burton, Sir Derek Jacobi, Dame Flora Robson and Paul Scofield.
Following many years of acting, teaching, and directing at a number of theaters and universities, such as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, Austin Peay State University and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Meier turned most of his attention to the study and instruction of accents and dialects of the English language. [3] In 1998, he founded Paul Meier Dialect Services and, three years later, published Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen, [4] a dialect-instruction textbook for actors, and his more specialized Dialects of the British Isles. In addition, Meier is the author and publisher of dozens of smaller books, CDs, and custom recordings of close to 200 plays and musicals. His dialect training is known for its seven-step method and proprietary "signature sounds".
Meier provides training for actors [5] wishing to learn a dialect and ESL students wishing to reduce their foreign-language accents. He is currently professor emeritus of theatre at the University of Kansas. [6] He has coached many feature films, including Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil, starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich and Jewel Kilcher; Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, directed by Paul Cox and starring Peter O'Toole, Kris Kristofferson, Sam Neill and Tom Wilkinson; and Virginia, directed by Dustin Lance Black and starring Ed Harris and Jennifer Connelly. [7]
Meier has been heard internationally in commercials for such clients as Ford, Coca-Cola, Sprint, Bayer and Walmart. He was the voice of the Walmart icon Smiley in 2003. He has also recorded numerous audiobooks, the most recent being Ayn Rand's Anthem.
Meier is a Shakespeare scholar, teacher and coach. His Voicing Shakespeare ebook [8] addresses the linguistic challenges of Shakespearean language while explaining such terms as iambic pentameter, alexandrine, tetrameter, enjambment, trochee, spondee, pyrrhic and epic caesura. As a member of the BBC Drama Repertory Company, Meier acted in more than a dozen of Shakespeare's works.
In his teaching at universities and conservatories, and in his classes at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon in England, he has trained two generations of actors in Shakespeare's works.
Fusing his work with dialects and Shakespeare, Meier has contributed to the revival and study of Original Pronunciation (OP), the Early Modern English pronunciation of Shakespeare's day, [9] and has contributed articles on the topic to scholarly journals such as the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare. [10] In November, 2010, he directed a University of Kansas production of A Midsummer Night's Dream spoken entirely in OP. With David Crystal supervising the dialect work, the play was produced for the stage, as a radio drama, and as a DVD. It was only the fifth fully produced OP Shakespeare production in living memory. [11]
Meier created IDEA in 1998 as the first online archive of primary-source recordings of English dialects and accents from around the world. [12] It has since become a tool of dialecticians, linguists and international business. Meier is its director and principal contributor.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, and how the accent has changed over time. The name itself is controversial. RP is an accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other areas relevant to the study of language standards, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered.
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside, the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, or influence from their first language.
The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a consciously learned accent of English, fashionably used by the American upper class and entertainment industry of the late 19th century to mid-20th century, that blended elements from both American and British English. Specifically, it blended features from both prestigious coastal Northeastern American English and from Received Pronunciation, the standard speech of England. The accent was embraced in private independent American preparatory schools, especially by members of the Northeastern upper class, as well as in schools for film, radio, and stage acting, with its overall use sharply declining after the Second World War. The Mid-Atlantic accent is not a native or regional accent; rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".
John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.
David Crystal, is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of the English language.
Ian William Richardson was a British actor from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Verse drama is any drama written significantly in verse to be performed by an actor before an audience. Although verse drama does not need to be primarily in verse to be considered verse drama, significant portions of the play should be in verse to qualify.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
A dialect coach is a technical advisor who supports actors as they craft voice and speech patterns for characters in the context of productions be it in an on-camera setting, stage setting, or voiceover setting.
Louis Colaianni is an American voice, speech, dialect and text coach and director in the professional theatre, with specialisation in Shakespeare performance.
Metatheatre, and the closely related term metadrama, describes the aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre, or to the circumstances of its performance. "Breaking the Fourth Wall" is an example of a metatheatrical device.
David Rintoul is a Scottish stage and television actor. Rintoul was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, and won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Kathleen S. Dunn is an American certified dialect coach, accent reduction coach, voice and body movement instructor, and professional actress.
Sir Gregory Doran is an English director known for his Shakespearean work. The Sunday Times called him 'one of the great Shakespearians of his generation'.
An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is ὑποκριτής (hupokritḗs), literally "one who answers". The actor's interpretation of a role—the art of acting—pertains to the role played, whether based on a real person or fictional character. This can also be considered an "actor's role", which was called this due to scrolls being used in the theaters. Interpretation occurs even when the actor is "playing themselves", as in some forms of experimental performance art.
The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) is a free, online archive of primary-source dialect and accent recordings of the English language. The archive was founded by Paul Meier in 1998 at the University of Kansas and includes hundreds of recordings of English speakers throughout the world.
Matthew Tennyson is an English actor of stage and screen. He won the Evening Standard Award for Outstanding Newcomer in 2012.
Hiran Abeysekera is a Sri Lankan actor. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the stage adaptation of Life of Pi. On television, he is known for his roles in Russell T Davies' A Midsummer Night's Dream (2016) and the tween dance series Find Me in Paris (2018–2019).
The pronunciation of the phoneme in the English language has many variations in different dialects.
Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation (OP) is a movement dedicated to the examination and subsequent performance of Shakespeare's works in the phonology, or sound system, of Early Modern English.
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