I know of at least two norwegian actresses who lost their spark when audio became a main-stay in cinema. Not exactly because they had "weird" voices, but mostly because they did not speak the language fluently enough, or they retained too much of an 'odd' accent.
Greta Nissen lost her role in Hells Angels (the Howard Huges flick) to Jean Harlow because of her prominent norwegian accent. She did however continue working for some time.
Aud Egede-Nissen was prominent in german cinema in the early era, but again lost out when audio became prevalent as her less than good german was not up to scratch for a leading woman.
I'm sure there are plenty of other similar stories to be found, as early Hollywood and german cinema was very international, with both directors and actors/actresses from all over europe being employed.
Oh my yes. There a very, very brief overview of the transition at filmhistory.org, but here are the main takeaways:
Many Hollywood actors/actresses lacked good voices and stage experience, and their marketability decreased.
...
Many stars of the silent era with heavy accents and disagreeable voices saw their careers shattered (e.g., Polish-accented Pola Negri, Emil Jannings, Ramon Novarro, Clara Bow, Vilma Banky, Colleen Moore, Rod La Rocque, Gilbert Roland, Nita Naldi, Renee Adoree, Blanche Sweet, Agnes Ayres, and John Gilbert), while others like Joan Crawford, Paul Muni, Greta Garbo, Ronald Colman, Lon Chaney, Sr., Richard Barthelmess and Gloria Swanson survived the transition - but elocution lessons from diction coaches became a necessity for some. Other silent stars, such as Mary Pickford, failed to make the transition to talkies and retired in the 30s. Many new film stars and directors that had to be imported from Broadway, would become familiar Hollywood names in the 1930s.
A foreign accent wasn't necessarily a death knell when sound came along however. Greta Garbo had a pretty thick one, as did Marlene Deitrich. (Quick aside, in the article linked above, it is mentioned that at the very beginning of the talkie era films would be shot twice, once silent and once with sound. This also happened with some foreign-language films, such as Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel filmed simultaneously in German and in English, so there are two separate versions available with neither being a remake. Directed by Joseph von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings, who went on to become and honest-to-god card-carrying Nazi while von Sternberg and Dietrich GTFOed and immigrated to America, along with a very significant portion of the German film industry).
Some actors had other problems with sound than just a weird voice. Clara Bow, while she did have a heavy Brooklyn accent, just straight up didn't like the technology. In Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild, David Stenn talks about how Bow, who not only was box-office gold in the Twenties but was also the only star who managed to not have a morality clause in her contract after the Hayes Code was introduced, just shut down when it came to talkies. She had never really been given great roles by the studio (she made bank in movies like It, so why not just make that movie over and over and over again?), plus they weren't as protective of her from the media consequences of her lifestyle (not only personal scandals but also a trial in which she charged her former secretary and best friend with financial mismanagement/embezzlement that ended up making Bow look really, really terrible in the public eye), so when the pressure was on to produce a hit without any kind of leniency from the studio (basically she had run out of chances with them, so any setback was a huge setback) she freaked out at the added pressure of 1) speaking, 2) speaking toward the microphone, and 3) speaking toward a microphone while not looking at the microphone. It didn't go well. She went from receiving 45,000 fan letters in the month of January 1929 alone to her career being effectively over by 1931, and finally retirement in 1933 at the ripe old age of 28.
In short, yes, but it was often more complicated than just "you sound weird, mister." For some really very entertaining essays on film stars and early Hollywood, I highly recommend Anne Helen Petersen's work over at The Hairpin. That bio of Clara Bow linked above is also a great read, and while her life is very fascinating and sad and it could stand very tall on that material alone, it also talks about the rest of Hollywood and its culture to a very satisfying degree.
And finally, from Sunset Boulevard:
This movie is so gloriously meta I die a little. Norma Desmond, former silent movie star, is played Gloria Swanson, former silent movie star. Her butler Maximillian "Max" von Mayerling, was the director of several of her silent movie hits, and is played by Erich von Stroheim, director of several of Swanson's silent movie hits. A group of her friends, all former silent movie stars, are all played by former silent movie stars, such as Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner. At the end of the movie, she's brought out of her house by Cecil B. DeMille, played by Cecil B. DeMille, who directed some of the biggest movies of the time with casts of literally thousands of extras.
Edit: Here's an essay from Sheza Naqi at the University of British Columbia about the transition and some of the popular myths. It touches on Singin' In the Rain and The Artist, which have both been mentioned in earlier comments.
Foreign actors definitely had trouble, but the problems for American actors were definitely not as extreme as portrayed in Singin’ in the Rain. Perhaps the most famous example of an actor failing to make the transition is John Gilbert, who my dad happens to be named for. Anyway, he was one of the biggest male stars of the silent era but he faded pretty quickly with the transition to sound. It had less to do with his voice and more to do with his terrible relationship with Louis Mayer of MGM. This was during the studio system, when actors were stuck in a contract with one studio. In his first talkie, His Glorious Night, Mayer had his pleasant voice recorded at a higher pitch, which turned audiences off. And that was it, he was in nine more pictures (this was when studios were factories and actors and directors were expected to churn ‘em out) but the box office draw was gone.
But silent stars did run into other problems, probably the biggest being the new style of acting. Silent acting is hardly subtle. When you watch movies with sound, you have body language and tone of voice to understand what the character is feeling, but without that voice you need big gestures. And a lot of actors simply couldn’t tone it down.
