Silver is a complicated villain who charms the reader just as he charms young Jim. Long John Silver is “one of the truly great characters in classic literature,” writes Jeff Wells for Mental Floss, and Newton, whose previous experience playing equivocal bad guys included a turn as Bill Sykes in 1948’s Oliver Twist, rose to the role. Along with his swagger and eccentricity, Newton brought to the 1950 version an exaggerated interpretation of his own rusticated West Country accent, which after his era-making performance became the voice of a pirate. The "talkie" version of 1934 shows a ship full of vaguely grubby pirates speaking in British or American accents. The iconic adventure story with its colorful pirates was ripe for the big screen, and film adaptations date back to the 1910s. Treasure Islandwas originally a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson, who was born on this day in 1850. “A good many of his scenes were played opposite a 10-year-old boy, but Newton had a way of making everyone in the movie react to him like astonished children, agog at the snarling, bug-eyed, peg-legged creature in their midst.” “As Long John Silver, he seemed convincingly possessed of a lifetime's worth of rum-soaked, roguish scheming,” Almereyda writes. Newton was a British character actor who stood around six feet tall, according to the Internet Movie Database, and had a huge presence. “When Robert Newton first showed up as a pirate in Disney's 1950 Technicolor version of Treasure Island, he had been a vivid presence in plenty of other films,” writes Michael Almereyda for The New York Times. In the 1950s, Newton helped to create the way that many film and TV pirates would speak going forward. They owe that distinctive accent to an actor named Robert Newton. You probably know what a pirate looks and sounds like: Films like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise have served up tricorn- or bandanna-wearing characters, many with eyepatches, who speak in much the same way. Yarrr, maties! It be time for some piratical history!
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