Why does her name have an accent in it when no one pronounces it that way?

How come Padme's name is spelled Padmé? I have not heard anyone actually place the emphasis on the last syllable, which they would do if they were actually following the accent mark. So why write it that way? Because it just looks cool? Everyone puts the emphasis on the first syllable, so I don't bother spelling it with the accent.

For some reason I just find this annoying.

I think it's more for pronunciation than for accent.

They don't say - Padmee They say - Padmay

The accent is being used not to indicate syllabic stress, as it might in an English dictionary, but to indicate the quality of a vowel, as it does in French. (I think this goes back to ancient Greek accents deriving from augmented vowel length, but that's probably more than you need to know.)

The more I think about it, the more I think that the stuff I'm recalling about Greek stresses is irrelevant to the original question. We're talking about two different uses of the accent mark here: the first, to indicate the stressed syllable of a word, the second, to indicate the pronunciation of a vowel. While those things are indeed connected in ancient Greek, I don't know if the modern dual use of the accent mark derives from that at all.

Hmm, all right. My knowledge is mostly limited to English and Spanish. I actually did study a bit of Greek too, but I don't remember that.

This was something my Greek professor (years ago) mentioned in passing. While the ancient Greek I learned, and most people learned, has pitched-based stresses, an even more archaic form used vowel lengths in place of stresses as we know them. Vowel lengths are just what they sound like - vowels pronounced for a little bit longer a period of time. Later Greek has some remnants of them such as the letters Omega ('big O' and Omicron ('small O'.

As far as the pronunciation of 'Padmé' goes, first of all consider the letter 'e' as pronounced in French or Spanish: 'eh.' Now draw that sound out for a longer period of time: 'ehhhhhh...' You should sound a little bit like the Fonz; it's a very minor change to get 'ay'. (There are ways of distinguishing the differences between those sounds, but let's leave it at that for the moment.) Thus, while Padme (no accent) would be pronounced 'pad-meh', Padmé is 'pad-may'.

(If any better-informed linguists want to respond to this, please be kind. The various language and linguistics courses I took were all more than a decade ago.)

Heh, even without the accent I would never have pronounced it 'pad-meh' because whenever I'm not sure how to pronounce something, I just give it a Spanish pronunciation, and it almost always works.