Please explain Tallulah Bankhead's accent

She was briefly married to Guy Ritchie.

I love you, R1.

OP, back in the day, actors, especially theater-trained actors, had to rid themselves of their regional accents and acquire a Mid-Atlantic accent, which was a blend of standard American and Received Pronunciation (RP). Bankhead also spent eight years working on the London stage. So, that likely influenced her speech patterns.

Thank you, r3. Now let us commence posting Tallulah Bankhead quotes:

"I'm as pure as the driven slush."

Her daddy, William Brockman Bankhead was the 42nd Speaker of the House. He, like his daughter, was a life long Democrat.

I love theater voice.

"My daddy warned me about men and booze, but he never said a word about women and cocaine."

She was robbed of a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Lifeboat.

George Raft gave her a venereal disease.

BOUGIE

Homosexual gossip columnist Earl Wilson: Miss Bankhead, have you ever been mistaken for a man on the telephone?

Tallulah: No, darling, have you?

She and Greer Garson always smoked cigarettes and asked among themselves who was cut or uncut

Tallulah on the john in the ladies room to the woman in the next stall:

"Excuse me darling, may I ask a favor? There's no toilet paper in this stall. Would you lend me some?"

"Sorry," came the answer back; "There's none here either."

"Well then, might I borrow a tissue, a Kleenex, even a piece of cotton wool?"

"Sorry hon," said the disembodied voice from the next stall, "We're in the same boat - I haven't got any, either."

Finally, in a voice that could only be Miss Bankhead's: "How about two tens for a twenty?"

During the thirties, Tallulah had entered the hospital for what was announced as an “abdominal tumor” but was actually a case of gonorrhea—contracted, she was to say, from George Raft—so violent it brought her close to death. It led to a five-hour radical hysterectomy, and by the time she left the hospital she was down to seventy pounds. Undaunted, she announced to her doctor, “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”

One of Tallulah’s party tricks was to escort guests to the master bedroom, fling back the covers from the bed in which her husband was sleeping, and crow, “Did you ever see a prick as big as that before?” So size mattered, but eventually, in his case, not enough. Soon she was telling people, “Well, darling, the weapon may be of admirable proportions, but the shot is indescribably weak.” Within a few years, the marriage, such as it was, was over.

When she was performing in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” so many people in the audience complained that Actors’ Equity had to order her to wear underpants onstage. When she was making “Lifeboat,” Alfred Hitchcock fielded complaints “with his much-quoted deliberation about whether the matter needed to be referred to the makeup or the hairdressing department.”

At least her sense of humor didn’t desert her: when people on the street asked, “Aren’t you Tallulah Bankhead?,” she’d answer, “I’m what’s left of her, darling.”

So much to post about the divine Tallulah but it's so late and I'm so drunk and I've learned those are not good times for me to post. But as an old southern boy, she was southern royalty and embarrassed the hell out of all of them, sublime girl.

She once telegraphed a lover when he was expecting an assignation that she was going to be late but to go ahead and start without her.