

Schneider bought an ambulance from the Los Angeles classified section, since it had AC plugs for her recorder, and set off across America. I figured it would take me about a month - and I've been doing it for 25 years." "The idea is, I would go and collect all of the dialects of spoken English of the entire world, starting with America. "There was no existing dialect material for actors other than a guy David Alan Stern imitating people," she said.

But like many of her Generation X peers, she found herself wanting more direct and authentic connections to people. "I am a Suzuki-trained violinist since age 7," she said, "and that is an ear training method, so my brain started applying that to languages - everything sound - so that anything I hear I like to mimic."Īspiring to be an actor, she got a full-time role in the children's show "Beakman's World" in the early 1990s. Schneider traces her knack for dialects to her early years, growing up on a Chippewa reservation with a German theater teacher for a father, a Jewish lawyer for a mother, and an adopted Vietnamese brother. She teaches dialects worldwide, and performs award-winning plays and one-woman shows, the newest of which, " Displaced," premieres Jan.
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She’s created characters for everything from the animated film “Finding Nemo” to the TV series “King of the Hill” to video game franchises like “Assassin’s Creed” and "Pirates of the Caribbean" (thus, the Keira Knightley). For five years, she played most of the female characters on "South Park": Wendy, Shelly, Mrs. In a way you are: Schneider has traveled the globe in her quest to record English in all of its myriad forms. She slides so easily between Southern Pentecostal, Nigerian street slang, Liverpudlian, and Keira Knightley–British (OK, just Keira Knightley). To have a conversation with actor Eliza Jane Schneider is to feel like you're talking with half of the English-speaking world.

In addition to voicing most of the female characters on "South Park," Eliza Jane Schneider has created characters for everything from the animated film “Finding Nemo” to the TV series “King of the Hill” to video games like “Assassin’s Creed.”
