David Seidler, writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ 86

David Seidler, who drew on his boyhood struggle overcoming a stutter to write the Oscar-winning screenplay for “The King’s Speech,” the hit 2010 drama about King George VI’s effort to subdue a stammer while rallying the British people against Hitler, died March 16 during a fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86.

His death was announced in a statement by his manager, Jeff Aghassi, who did not give a cause. Seidler, who lived in Santa Fe, N.M., had been diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-2000s. “David was in the place he loved most in the world — New Zealand — doing what gave him the greatest peace, which was fly-fishing,” Aghassi said. “If given the chance, it is exactly as he would have scripted it.”

With “The King’s Speech,” Seidler dramatized the relationship between the emotionally vulnerable king-to-be, Prince Albert (Colin Firth), and his imperturbable speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who helps the future George VI learn to manage his stutter. The film culminates with a wartime radio address in which the new king reassures the nation at the outset of World War II, speaking fluidly — with guidance from Logue — while stammering slightly on Ws.

“Had to throw in a few,” the king explains, “so they knew it was me.”

Directed by Tom Hooper, the film grossed more than $420 million worldwide and became the first hit movie penned by Seidler, a British-born writer who grew up on Long Island, tamed his stutter at 16 and took a circuitous journey to Hollywood, with stints as a political adviser for the prime minister of Fiji and creative director for a New Zealand advertising office. The movie received 12 Oscar nominations and won four, including best picture and best original screenplay for Seidler, who at age 73 was one of the prize’s oldest recipients.

“My father always said to me I would be a late bloomer,” he joked in his speech, before accepting the Academy Award “on behalf of all the stutterers throughout the world.”

“We have a voice,” he continued, speaking in a mellifluous baritone that seemed to belong to an actor, not a writer. “We have been heard.”

Seidler dealt with the speech condition ever since he was a toddler. The summer he turned 3, in 1940, he and his parents left Britain for the United States, fleeing what they feared was an imminent German invasion. They sailed aboard a three-boat convoy, and one of the ships was sunk by a German U-boat, according to Seidler, who developed a stutter around the time they arrived in New York.

David William Seidler was born in London on July 13, 1937, according to his manager, although other sources give his birth date as Aug. 4. His mother, the former Doris Falkoff, was a graphic artist whose work was acquired by museums including the National Gallery of Art. His father, Bernard, was a fur broker whose Jewish parents were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

After the war, the family settled in Great Neck, N.Y., where Seidler shed his stutter while in high school, successfully auditioning for a school play the next week. He studied English at Cornell University, received a bachelor’s degree in 1959 and earned a master’s degree at the University of Washington the next year.