David Seidler, childhood stammerer who won an Oscar for his screenplay for The King’s Speech – obituary
David Seidler, the screenwriter, who has died aged 86, was inspired by his experiences of struggling with a childhood stammer to write the true story of how King George VI overcame his own crippling speech impediment with the help of Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist, to give his first radio speech after the outbreak of the Second World War.
The King’s Speech (2010), directed by Tom Hooper and starring Colin Firth as the king, Geoffrey Rush as Logue and Helena Bonham Carter as the young Queen Mother, won seven Baftas and dominated the 2011 Academy Awards, winning best picture, best actor for Colin Firth, best director for Tom Hooper and best original screenplay for Seidler. It raked in more than $400 million at the box office, making it the most successful independent British film of all time.
The screenplay, however, had been a very long time in gestation. As Seidler recalled in a 2012 interview with The Daily Telegraph, he had been inspired by listening to George VI’s speeches on the radio during the war to think that if the King could conquer a stammer, then so could he: “King George was a childhood hero of mine, and as I grew up I wanted to write something about him, but I had no idea what the story was.”
He began his research in 1981 when he discovered that George VI’s wife Queen Elizabeth had hired Logue to help her husband: “When I started to research [Logue] I got these little blips on the radar screen... and one of the blips suggested that he wasn’t what he seemed. He wasn’t a doctor, he hadn’t had formal training. I thought, ‘That’s the story.’”
He tracked down one of Logue’s sons, Valentine, who was willing to show him his father’s papers, but asked him to gain permission from the Queen Mother before working on a script. She wrote back and asked Seidler not to write a script in her lifetime, as “the memories of these events are still too painful”.
“If the Queen Mother asks an Englishman to wait, you wait – or go to the Tower of London. And I didn’t think I would have to wait so long, she was a very old lady,” Seidler recalled.
In fact he had to wait more than two decades, and even after the Queen Mother died aged 101 in 2002 Seidler did not get cracking for another four years, eventually spurred to action by a diagnosis of throat cancer. He then found himself struggling until his wife suggested he write it up as a stage play, concentrating on the dynamic of the relationship between the king and Logue.
In 2007 the script was sent to theatre producers around the country but no one was interested. “A rejection note I will always treasure came from a reader at the National Theatre who sniffed, ‘This is not yet a play, and if it were to become one it still wouldn’t be for us,’” Seidler recalled.
But the script began to get attention as a potential screenplay when a reading was staged at a north London theatre. In the audience was Meredith Hooper, who enjoyed it so much that she rang her director son, Tom, and told him it would make a great film.
One particular scene was inspired by Seidler’s own efforts to conquer his stutter. “I’d reached the age of 15, and if you don’t get a handle on it by adolescence, your chance diminishes rapidly,” he recalled. “I found myself bouncing up and down on my bed shouting the F-word and basically saying, ‘I’m not a bad chap. I haven’t slept with my mother or killed my father, so why has God inflicted this on me?’”
It was through his anger that he found his voice. The film includes two scenes where the king spouts profanities to help force out his syllables.
In his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, Seidler dedicated his achievement to “all the stutterers around the world” and thanked “Her Majesty The Queen for not putting me in the Tower for using the F-word.”
Seidler was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in London on August 4 1937. His father, Bernard, was a fur broker and his mother, Doris, a print-maker and graphic artist. After the family home was bombed during the Blitz, the Seidlers moved to a house in Surrey, then to New York, where Bernard Seidler had an office, crossing the Atlantic in a convoy of three ships, one of which was sunk by German U-boats. “I’m pretty sure I left England speaking normally but I arrived in America a stutterer,” he recalled.
He attended Great Neck North High School with Francis Ford Coppola and it was while he was at the school that he conquered his speech impediment. Two weeks later he auditioned for the school play, Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, and got a small role, of a Christian getting eaten by a lion.
He went to Cornell University intending to study genetics with a view to becoming a botanist, before his love of literature led him to switch to English. His tutors included Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, and James McConkey, author of Crossroads.
It took him some time to establish himself as a writer. According to the Los Angeles Times, he began by writing translation dubs for Japanese monster movies, and he spent some time in Australia working on the TV series Adventures of the Seaspray, and in New Zealand working for an advertising agency.
As he approached 40 Seidler “decided to give writing one last shot” by moving to Hollywood. In the mid-1980s he had an idea for a film about Preston Tucker, the American automobile entrepreneur, wrote a script, and in 1988 Coppola directed Tucker: The Man and His Dream, which won a Bafta, a Golden Globe and three Oscar nominations. He also wrote the script for the Emmy Award-winning television film Onassis: The Richest Man in the World, which won him a Writers Guild of America award. But nothing matched the success of The King’s Speech.
Although Seidler owned the stage rights, he made very little from the film (“bad contract,” he explained). He was therefore delighted when the stage version, directed by Adrian Noble, was premiered at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in 2012, with Charles Edwards as George VI and Jonathan Hyde as Logue, before going on tour.
Seidler was twice married, first to Huia Newton, and secondly to Jacqueline Feather, but both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage.
David Seidler, born August 4 1937, died March 16 2024
