Anne's Emmerdale secret

Brooklyn-born Anne Hathaway has revealed her secret weapon to get the Yorkshire accent she sports in her new weepie One Day: she watched the ITV1 soap Emmerdale to try to get it right.

"Emmerdale's great," she told the Daily Telegraph. "We don't have programmes like that in America so it was actually quite exotic for me."

Hathaway, who stars as working class lass Emma in Lone Scherfig's adaptation of David Nicholls' popular book, has come under fire from critics, offended by her attempt to flatten her vowels. She has also admitted that adapting to Emma's accent was "a challenge", especially since her character moves from Edinburgh to London to Paris over the 22-year course of the story.

"One of the things I was struck by was that so often when people leave Yorkshire they don't hang on to the accent," Hathaway told the Associated Press news agency.

 "The accent evens out and starts to mimic some new sounds from where they're from, so you can have 10 people from Yorkshire and they have 10 completely utterly different accents. But I worked with a dialect coach and just kind of tried my best".

It's not the first time that Hathaway has taken inspiration from an unlikely source while researching a role. Last week she told Interview magazine that she had prepared to play Cat Woman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises by watching home videos of cats on YouTube.