Today there is no separating the accent from the man himself, but in the early days of his acting career Arnold Schwarzenegger relied on an accent removal coach to make his English sound less Austrian.
Appearing on the Graham Norton Show on Oct. 27, Schwarzenegger talked about the work he put in during his transition from body builder to actor, and what it entailed. “I had an English coach, an acting coach, a speech coach, and an accent-removal coach,” Schwarzenegger said. He explained that his accent-coach “has passed away since,” joking: “I should have otherwise gotten my money back.”
It turned out, however, that the very thing Schwarzenegger had been told would be the greatest obstacle to his acting career would actually become an asset. “Jim Cameron said what made Terminator work, and what made it successful, is that Schwarzenegger talks like a machine,” said Schwarzenegger.
Accent or no accent, Schwarzenegger recently celebrated 40 years of US citizenship. “I arrived here with empty pockets, but full of dreams, full of determination, full of desire,” the former governor of California said in an Instagram post, as photos of his youth in Austria, his arrival in America, taking the oath of U.S. citizenship in 1983 and highlights from a long, diverse career played in the background.
The 76-year-old also recently opened up about nearly dying after open-heart surgery. In a video shared on YouTube, Schwarzenegger said the operation took place several years ago, just before he started working on Terminator: Dark Fate (released in 2019). Schwarzenegger remembered waking up after the procedure and seeing his doctor, who told him the operation had not gone as planned. The actor said the procedure was supposed to be a relatively non-invasive one to replace a heart valve, but his doctors “made a mistake and poked through the heart wall.” That puncture caused serious “internal bleeding,” forcing Schwarzenegger’s doctors to open him up quickly to save his life.
