THE Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has replaced her Californian lilt with a smattering of Anglo-Saxon to play a sexually voracious water demon in a film of Beowulf, the first great epic of English literature.

Jolie employed a voice coach and an Anglo-Saxon expert to help her play her character, who is mother of the wicked giant Grendel. They are two of the three foes who Beowulf has to defeat in the poem.

At a screening last week, reaction was mixed to her heavily accented performance, in which she also says some genuine words of Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Some critics said they were confused by the Old English. Others described the sound as a “strong Yorkshire accent”, while one said she was “a bit Irish, maybe”.

The first 20 minutes of the £80m film were shown at Comic-Con, a trade show in San Diego, California. It stars the British actor Ray Winstone as Beowulf but has not yet been completed. The cast also includes Sir Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar, whose hall is under attack by Grendel. The character played by Jolie, 32, wearing just a long braid, gold paint and hooves instead of feet, is bent on seduction and revenge against Beowulf.

Robert Zemeckis, the director, has adapted the “motion capture” technology used to create Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Jolie rises from a pool where she is lying in wait for Beowulf and morphs into a monster.

Sources close to the film said Jolie had learnt “some authentic Old English” for the role. “Angelina took it very seriously, working with a voice coach and an Anglo-Saxon expert to get it right, or as close as we can to understand a thousand years later,” said the source. “It has been cleaned up a little to avoid the need for subtitles, but it’s rooted in the original dialect.”

The script has been written by Neil Gaiman, a novelist born in Hampshire who is the author of the award-winning Sandman comic books. He admits he has taken some liberties with the original 3,000-line poem to make it suitable for Hollywood.

Beowulf is believed by some to have been composed in East Anglia, probably around the 7th or 8th century. It tells the life of a hero who fights three monsters – the man-eating giant Grendel, his unnamed mother and a gold-hoarding dragon.

Beowulf speak

When Angelina met Beowulf – some handy Old English phrases

I used to wear a phial of my husband’s blood around my neck: Aer ic baer faetels mines weres blod ymbutan minne sweoran

Mead gives you a monster headache: Medu macath heofodece micelne

I love the smell of dragonbreath in the morning: On aernemergen ic lufie thaes dracan orthes stenc

How do I adopt a Viking child? Hu maeg ic northman-cild fostrian?

Translated by Paul Cavill, specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature at Nottingham University

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