House, Homeland, The Walking Dead: British actors beat the Americans at their own accents Whether it's Laurie, Lewis, Dominic West and Idris Elba of The Wire, or Scotsman Alan Cumming playing a corrupt American politician in The Good Wife, a startled, if not stunned expression, comes over the faces of many obsessive American TV fans when they learn that these performers are British. But British portrayal of Americans perhaps has reached even greater heights. Although there may be no coveted awards forthcoming for a programme about zombies, both Andrew Lincoln and David Morrissey - currently in AMC's The Walking Dead, the most watched show in cable history - deserve praise for nailing the American Southerner. They've nailed it better than Gregory Peck's Alabaman lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Peck was a Californian native, by the way. As a South Carolina native, I feel specially qualified to educate y'all on this subject. The Southern character has been stereotyped and caricatured to death in American media. But to speak and act convincingly like a real life, multidimensional American from the South can be a challenge to foreign actors. And to many American performers as well. The look on my nephew Sam's face was priceless when I told him that Sheriff Rick, the deep and compelling hero of his favourite show, was not from the mountains of Georgia but the streets of London. "I never imagined that he could be British," Sam said of Lincoln. As for Morrissey - "Is he British also? I can't believe that he can be faking an American accent. Sam, a Georgian, grew up in Savannah and now lives in Atlanta, where The Walking Dead story is set and filmed. In the current storyline, there is a frightening showdown coming between Sheriff Rick and the chilling Governor, played to perfection by Morrissey. Perhaps he's drawing on his fine performance as the MP in the original State of Play. Didn't English actress Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara get this ball rolling, you might ask? In that iconic role, Leigh affected a stylised way of speaking, probably using the Virginia Piedmont dialect of the Old South's plantation owners as her guide. A drawl with dropped "r"s. Leigh was infinitely more convincing as a Southerner in Gone with the Wind than Clark Gable who was from Ohio. Rhett Butler was supposed to be a native of Charleston. I've never heard a Charlestonian talk as fast as Gable. But there also have been slip-ups in The Walking Dead. In a recent show, Morrissey as the Governor instructed the residents of his town to "go home, go home and turn your lights ahf." I giggled. In Southern, "off" would be "awf." When I asked my nephew what he thought about Walking Dead character Hershel, a veterinarian who functions as a doctor for Rick's band of survivors, he said, "Don't like him. Too fake in trying to act like a Southerner. Interestingly, Scott Wilson, the actor who plays Hershel, was born and raised in Atlanta. Years ago I had the pleasure of seeing Vanessa Redgrave and Rupert Graves in A Madhouse in Goa in the West End. Redgrave played Mrs. Honey, a character supposedly from Mississippi. Unfortunately, despite an otherwise enjoyable performance, the great actress's inconsistent, hokey attempts at a Deep South accent drove me nuts. But Andrew Lincoln is a different story. Like Laurie and Lewis, Lincoln maintains his American accent at all times on the set. He reportedly told his wife that he couldn't lapse for six months "because most of the crew think I'm American, and if I change now it's going to freak them out!" Not just an American, dear Andrew, but a Son of the South.