David Seidler, Oscar-winning writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ dies at 86

David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of World War II — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died Saturday on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

His manager, Jeff Aghassi, disclosed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause. “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.”

On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,” he said.

The movie, a historical drama in the form of a buddy picture about an afflicted future monarch (Colin Firth) and his talented but unlicensed speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), was a commercial and critical success. It also won Oscars for best picture, best director (Tom Hooper) and best actor (Firth).

Seidler, who was born in England but emigrated with his family to the United States as a child during World War II, spent much of his career writing little-noticed television projects, including soap operas; a biopic of the Partridge Family singers; and the TV movie “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World” (1988), written with a longtime co-writer, Jacqueline Feather. That same year, he broke onto the big screen as a co-writer (with Arnold Schulman) of “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” about automobile inventor Preston Tucker, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

But Hollywood’s doors did not swing open widely for him before “The King’s Speech” or in the years that followed. A stage version of the film that he wrote toured England in 2012. After transferring to London’s West End, it closed earlier than expected because of poor ticket sales.

Seidler’s stammer, he told Patrick Healy in an interview for The New York Times in 2011, developed when he was a toddler, shortly after his family had moved to the United States — it might have been set off by the trauma of wartime relocation — and persisted through his high school years on Long Island, New York.

He tried to conquer the impediment using some of the same therapies that Lionel Logue, played by Rush, imposes on the future George VI in the movie: placing marbles in his mouth as he speaks and taking up smoking. None of them worked.

Seidler told the site filmcritic.com that his parents, aiming to inspire him, tuned the family radio to George VI’S speeches during the war as object lessons of mastering a stutter.

“They would say to me, ‘David, he was a much worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect. But he can give these magnificent, stirring addresses that rallied the free world,’” Seidler said.

At 16, he recalled, he had a “profanity-laden, F-bomb-filled emotional catharsis” like one that King George, who was known as “Bertie,” his childhood nickname, experiences in the film. “I thought that if I’m stuck with stuttering, you’re all stuck with listening with me,” he told the Times, inserting an expletive.

Soon after, his stutter faded away in conversations.

David Seidler was born Aug. 4, 1937, in London, to Doris (Falkoff) Seidler, a painter and printmaker, and Bernard Seidler, a fur broker. He graduated from Cornell University in 1959. He is survived by two adult children, Marc and Maya Seidler.

The screenplay of “The King’s Speech” gestated with David Seidler for decades. In interviews, he said he had set the project aside for years until after the death in 2002 of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, widow of George VI, who had asked him not to pursue it in her lifetime.

In a 2011 interview with the Times, he compared the process of drawing on his experiences as a stutterer to remembering from afar a bad toothache.

“While you’ve got the toothache it’s all you think about, but as soon as you go to the dentist, and he or she takes away the pain, the last thing you want to think about was how that tooth ached,” he said. “You put it away from your mind and forget about it. The same with stuttering. So it was only by waiting until I had reached the stage of … let me use the euphemism maturity … when by nature you start to look back on your life anyway, that it allowed me to revisit that pain, that sense of isolation and loneliness, which I think helped the script immensely.”