I am from the Bronx but never developed a Bronx accent at all. Some people are surprised that i am a native New Yorker, they seem to think I should be from the midwest.
You know, it's funny. I had a business colleague who I'd speak to regularly on the phone some years ago and I was
convinced she was from Brooklyn. When I finally asked her if she was, she said that she was actually from the Bronx. She then said sometimes Bronx and Brooklyn accents are mistaken for one another because they sound pretty similar.
On a side note, one of my favorite actors, a guy I've mentioned on this board before-Richard Lynch, is from Brooklyn, and has an accent so strong it arrives 5 minutes before he does (even more than Johnny Karlen), but the very first thing I ever saw him in was an ep of Starsky & Hutch and for whatever reason, he dropped his accent completely for that role and I thought he sounded like maybe a mid-westerner. Really he had no discernable accent. Well, years later when I learned he was from Brooklyn I thought, 'well, he must have moved away when he was very young because he doesn't have that wonderful accent'. Then I saw a re-run of an early movie he did called The Seven Ups and
man, did he
ever have the accent!
So, I guess through training or whatever, he can drop his native accent at will. BTW, he does pretty good foriegn dialects too so I guess he did learn that at The Actor's Studio.