Why the Voice
On the accent nobody quite places, and the discipline required to keep it that way.
The voice does not belong to Bristol, where he was born Archibald Leach, and it does not belong to Los Angeles, where he lived for half a century. It is a construction — mid-Atlantic in the true sense of the phrase, aimed at neither shore.
Actors who came up in the Cary Grant era learned diction the way musicians learn scales: repetitively, until the artefact of learning disappeared. What remained was a voice that could carry both a wisecrack and a confession without changing gear.
Later actors — Peck, Poitier, Clooney — inherited the setting even when they did not inherit the tone.
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