Tim Monich

Tim Monich (born 1950)^[1] is an American speech and dialect coach who has worked on numerous stage and film productions. He is known for coaching such actors as Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds, Hilary Swank in Amelia, Cate Blanchett in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Matt Damon in Invictus, for which Damon received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Monich grew up in Corona, California.^[1] His father worked for a company that built freeways and his mother was a reporter for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. He attended the University of California at Riverside and then majored in directing as an undergraduate^[2] at Carnegie Mellon University.^[3] While there he studied speech and dialect with Edith Skinner^[4] and received a BFA and an MFA. Monich received a grant for graduate work with Skinner. He assisted her in revising her 1942 book Speak with Distinction.^[5] Following this, Monich became a faculty member of the Drama Division at Juilliard from 1975 to 1987; where he taught aspiring actors such as Kevin Spacey, Val Kilmer and Kelly McGillis. According to Alex Wilkinson of The New York Times, Monich is "pedagogically descended: from nineteenth-century philologist, Henry Sweet; who was the inspiration for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. Sweet taught the Australian elocutionist Williams Tilly; who in turn taught Edith Skinner: Monich's teacher."^[1]

Monich has worked as a speech and dialect coach on hundreds of productions for film, television and theater. His first on-location film was coaching Arnold Schwarzenegger on the film Conan the Destroyer in 1984.^[6][2] "I was just helping him speak English," recalled Monich. Actor Donald Sutherland, who Monich coached to speak in various films as a South African, an Englishman, a wealthy New Yorker, a New Englander, a Kansan, a Georgian, an Oregonian, a North Carolinian, a Mississippian, a Michigander, a Minnesotan, and a member of the Polish politburo, once said of him:

He’s not a mechanic, and he doesn’t impose. He comes in from underneath and supports your instincts; he doesn’t try to define them. There are many people who do what he does, and by and large they offer constraints. He offers liberation.

Leonardo DiCaprio states that Monich "goes around the world collecting voices like they’re coins … They don’t buy the performance unless I spend time with Tim and get verified."^[1] Monich has over 6,000 personally recorded accent and dialect samples, assembled over 30 years, from around the world archived in his collection.^[2] He is known to record accents from television shows such as Book TV, Charlie Rose, and Meet the Press; which are "good for foreign accents, especially those of diplomats, lawyers, and politicians."^[1]

He worked with Carey Mulligan on Felicia Montealegre Bernstein's dialect for Maestro (2023).^[7]

Monich lives in Westport, Connecticut with his wife, dance writer, Linda Szmyd. They have two daughters.^[1]

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• GQ. September 8, 2021. Matt Damon Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.
• GQ. November 26, 2020. Jude Law Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.
• Vanity Fair. January 6, 2022. Bradley Cooper and Guillermo del Toro Break Down a Scene from 'Nightmare Alley.

• Tim Monich at IMDb
• Tim Monich at the Internet Broadway Database
• Playbill: Tim Monich
• Tim Monich: The Man Behind the Voices. Rappaport, Dana. April 16, 2010. Inkling News.