Maybe it's to balance, a little, Hollywood's fascination with portraying the Brits as EVIL KILL DIE DIE SCUM! in just about everything they can? :P
Hell, even when a Brit gets a good-guy role, he's not British.
Picard is FRENCH! Seriously??
That Cop-Wrongly-Sentenced-to-20-years in "Life" was British...
Ditto Cop-in-ZombiApocalypse-thingy-Walking-Dead is British, not from Atlanta :P

and the list goes on.

And on.

And on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on....

Not exactly how history went, but it is true that Scotland benefited disproportionately from the British Empire and while it may have been controlled from London, Edinburgh and Glasgow created most of its administrators (and benefited greatly from it as well). That is, however, another topic.

don't forget the double whammy.. Brits playing germans!

I was saving that, you BARSTEWARD!!

lol :P

Well you see the role of Brits in movies has always been more of a matter of accent than anything else. While in the States we have many regional accents it's true, ours have never been quite as intimately tied (only loosely) to a class structure as Britain's historically has. Thus it's easy to recognize different classes by their voices which is why Brits make excellent Romans for instance - portraying everything from peasants to patricians - or any society where one wants to quickly portray different societal classes quickly. Plus that patrician British accent just makes for such a wonderful malevolent bad guy voice. :)

I think we are well off-topic now :)
Is Michael Caine really that much worse than Omar Sharif playing a German? :P (Actually I thought they were both good in The Last Valley) Plenty of Americans also have played Germans both to acclaim ... and scorn. But yeah that aristocratic Brit accent - so versatile in its application :P

Think Die Hard etc... Hell even in our own national stories you give the heros american accents and the villains english ;) (think prince of theives)

Our dialects (variations in pronunciation of a single language is a dialect an accent is the effects of having a separate first language so you can speak with a French/German accent or have a Yorkshire dialect) actually vary more by geography 2 miles apart villages can have completely different dialects etc the class variance isn't as real as people think the queen for example has an estuary accent (though an old one) RP which most people think of as the aristocratic accent is a taught non localised dialect used for ease of understanding.

Sorry don't mistake. I didn't meant to suggest that there was little variance in English accent across geography and that those variances didn't trump class accent in most, if not all, cases - just that there are a lot more ties to class in English accents even if we americans exaggerate such connections to quickly stereotype class in movies. :) Of course we also make use of some of our own geographic-class stereotypes in movies, but since the English ones are more pronounced class-wise and are recognizably not American, it's easier to make them "foreign" and "class-based" even when the accents themselves had nothing to do with the class or society they're being used to portray. Also with the British Empire spreading out - a lot of people learned to to speak English with a mixture of English and native accents. So it works on that level too.

Plus come on. Alan Rickman makes such great bad guys! He was the bad guy in both of those films ... Besides Americans portrayed both the good and the bad guys in Braveheart ... so there! :)

EDIT: nvm, just me being thick

It's an interesting difference, because the class distinction in language in the US is sort of the opposite.

The taught, non-local dialect (SAE, "Standard American English", also called "newscaster") carries no prestige, other than not interfering with getting a job in broadcasting ("in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere" [Linda Ellerbee, from Texas]).

But the prestige "posh" dialects are local and not explicitly taught: Long Island Lockjaw (think Katharine Hepburn); Boston Brahmin (Maj. Winchester on M*A*S*H, though it is not David Ogden Stiers' native dialect); Virginia Tidewater (Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara).

(British actors can often pull off effective performances as US Southerners, because Southern dialects like Tidewater have diverged less from their British origins.)

And some local dialects vie with some of the British for incomprehensibility: Yat (New Orleans); Picksburgher; Hawaiian pidgin; Chicano.

umm braveheart you have an Aussie and the rest are mostly Scottish (or Irish in the case of the king...) Mad Max doesn't like the English :P

You're right it was an aussie and an American. Patrick McGoohan was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City, New York, USA - okay so he moved to Ireland when he was young, but he's still one of ours! :P

Uhh, except that Gibson is an American. Born and raised until age of 10 or something, in New York, when his family moved for some reason to Australia....

Huh so he was ... I didn't know that (when I originally wrote it was a mistake or so I thought). So they were both transplanted New Yorkers, one who moved to Australia and the other who moved to Ireland. Therefore my original statement was right ... both the main hero and the bad villain in a film about war between Scotland and England were played by Americans! :D

The result being that... everyone hated the English. In fact my brother went to uni in Scotland shortly after it (about 1 year), and said that it had galvanised the Scottish against the English more than anything else.

So... thanks America. Thanks for not making us the bad guys.

RP is prestigeless
Upper Estuary and Edinburgh brogue carry high prestige as does a "home counties" dialect
Glaswegian, Geordie and Scouse are percieved as low prestige
Welsh accents vary wildly in prestige...

Most of Scotland doesn't give a crap but Cameron being an idiot isn't helping most would prefer to stay in the UK many would even like to lessen devolution in exchange for more representation in westminster