David Seidler, Oscar-winning writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ dies at 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.”

The film was credited with shifting public perceptions around stuttering, which had been depicted on-screen for comic effect through characters like Porky Pig, and had also been used to suggest that a character was somehow cowardly or inadequate.

Seidler knew otherwise, having 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.

Working with a speech therapist, he tried to treat the condition using some of the techniques he later incorporated in “The King’s Speech,” like speaking with a mouthful of marbles or smoking cigarettes. (He picked up the habit at age 12 and stopped when he was 40.) His breakthrough, which he also used for the screenplay, came when he discovered cursing as a means of catharsis.

“I resolved that if I was going to stutter for the rest of my life, people were going to be stuck listening to me,” he told the Jewish Journal in 2010. “I had been depressed, but now I was angry – I decided I deserved to be heard. I learned some expletives, and I’d just leap around my bedroom like Tom Cruise in ‘Risky Business,’ shouting the f-word. And when I did, I didn’t stutter.”

Ever since he was a boy, Seidler considered George VI a hero, reading about the king and listening to his speeches with encouragement from his parents. He began thinking about a script while in college and was writing it in earnest by the early 1980s, when he tracked down Logue’s surviving son, Valentine, who offered to give him the speech therapist’s notebooks for his research.