She Speaks Gooder English than Even Me (Foreign-born celebrity polyglots)

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As a child, Charlize Theron spoke Afrikaans

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Having heard that Oscar Best Actress Charlize Theron had learned English by watching television, I found these related facts about world-class language learners:

CHARLIZE THERON, Birth: August 7, 1975 in Benoni, South Africa:  “Theron's first language is Afrikaans, derived from 17th century Dutch” (Newsmakers, Issue 4. 2001).

RICHARD BURTON (Actor), Birth: November 10, 1925 in Pontrhydyfen, Wales | Death: August 5, 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland: Burton “spoke no English until the age of ten. His mentor taught him to speak English without a Welsh accent, to read the classics, and to hold a knife and fork.” (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

JOHN HOUSEMAN (Actor), Birth: September 22, 1902 in Bucharest, Romania | Death: October 31, 1988 in Malibu, California, United States. (Houseman was best known to American audiences as law professor Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase” movie and television series): “Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann, the only child of Georges Haussmann, a Jewish Alsatian grain trader, and May Davies, of Welsh-Irish descent, who married some months after the baby's birth. As a small boy, John traveled extensively with his parents, later claiming he had completed four trips on the Orient Express between Bucharest and Paris by the age of four. In this nomadic, international context he early became multilingual.” (The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume 2: 1986-1990”).

JOSEPH CONRAD (Novelist). Birth: December 3, 1857 in Berdiczew, Podolia, Russia (now Poland) | Death: August 3, 1924 in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England: Lord Jim author Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, Teodor Josef Konrad Koreniowski, Jozef Teodor Korzeniowski. “Writing in his ‘The Great Tradition’, the respected critic F. R. Leavis noted that Joseph Conrad ‘is among the greatest novelists in the language--in any language.’ Indeed, language is at the very heart of Conrad country. That he is widely regarded as one of the foremost prose stylists of English literature is no small achievement for a man who did not learn the language until he was twenty. English was, in fact, his fourth language, after Polish, German, and French. An outsider himself-- born Polish and naturalized as a British citizen--  Conrad explores the penumbral world of the alienated, the disillusioned, the isolated, and morally devastated” (Authors and Artists for Young Adults).

SAMUEL BECKETT (Dramatist and novelist), Birth: April 13, 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland | Death: December 22, 1989 in Paris, France: Beckett was a naturalized citizen of France, an Irishman by birth who wrote with mastery in both French and English. A. I. Leventhal wrote,"When Beckett changes to writing his novels in French he leaves behind him much of the humour, grim as it was, in his previous work. He has less interest in making his characters indulge in games to pass the time as in Waiting for Godot. They are now concentrating on their penible task of dying." (Contemporary Authors Online).

OSCAR WILDE (Dramatist and author): Birth: October 10, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland | Death: November 30, 1900 in Paris, France: Although Wilde published his drama, Salome, in French, he was not the master of the language that his compatriot Samuel Beckett would be. St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers said that two French authors “Marcel Schwob and Pierre Louys, helped him to fine-tune the language” of the play before its Paris premiere of 1896. The most-performed version of Salome is neither French nor English, however, but Hedwig Lachmann's German translation of Wilde’s drama for Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera of the same name.