David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
The King’s Screenwriter, Giving Back
By PATRICK HEALY, New York Times
April 17, 2011
The screenwriter David Seidler may have reached a career high point in February when he won an Academy Award for The King’s Speech, but the professional — and personal — returns on his long fascination with King George VI have not ended.
A London production of Mr. Seidler’s stage version of “The King’s Speech” is in the works for the fall, with Adrian Noble, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, attached to direct, Mr. Seidler said recently. He said he hoped that a Broadway run of the eight-character play would follow in 2012. And offers for speaking engagements and screenwriting jobs have also been arriving steadily.
Best of all, Mr. Seidler said, is the spotlight that the film has cast on the estimated 65 million people worldwide — including more than three million Americans — who stammer, as George VI and Mr. Seidler himself once did.
Last week, Mr. Seidler, 73, helped raise about $600,000 at the annual gala for Our Time, a theater and summer camp program based in New York for children who stutter. Founded in 2001, the organization raised just under $400,000 at last year’s gala, said the group’s founder, Taro Alexander, who attributed the fund-raising boom to the visibility that The King’s Speech and Mr. Seidler have brought to stutterers.
At the Academy Awards on Feb. 27, where The King’s Speech won four prizes, including best picture, Mr. Seidler said with statuette in hand that he accepted it on behalf of stutterers worldwide. “We have a voice; we have been heard,” he said.
During an interview before the gala, which included performances from the Broadway actors Kelli O’Hara and Ron Rifkin, he went back in time to share his own story. Mr. Seidler, whose family emigrated from England to the United States shortly before World War II, developed a stammer as a toddler that would remain until he was a teenager in high school on Long Island.
He tried to overcome the condition with various therapies that George VI, also known as Bertie, underwent, as shown in the film: placing marbles in his mouth to speak through, for instance, and developing a smoking habit. (Mr. Seidler began his at 12; he quit his two packs a day at 40.) None of the therapies helped, however.
As a boy Mr. Seidler kept his chin up. He recalled attending a pantomime show in Britain after the war, at which an actor called him from the audience to the stage and asked for his name. “I started stuttering ‘David,’ and the eyes of the actor and audience members started to widen,” Mr. Seidler recalled. “The actor tried sending me back to my seat, but I wasn’t going to have it.”
Adolescence brought an interest in girls, and Mr. Seidler grew depressed that he was too afraid to date them because of his stammer.
When he was 16, he said, he had a “profanity-laden, F-bomb-filled emotional catharsis” similar to Bertie’s memorable meltdown in the film in the office of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush). “I thought that if I’m stuck with stuttering, [expletive] you all, you’re all stuck with listening with me,” he said.
In two weeks’ time, the stammer faded during conversation, though Mr. Seidler still had difficulty reading from documents in class and speaking in a foreign language.
Mr. Alexander of Our Time, a 38-year-old actor and director who speaks with a stammer, said that Mr. Seidler’s catharsis was the exception rather than the rule, from what he has seen in his work with teenagers.
Still, he added: “So much of this is about confidence, about saying this is part of who I am. Living and dealing with a stutter is about having the guts to look someone in the eye when you stutter and refuse to turn your head away.”
By PATRICK HEALY, New York Times
April 17, 2011
The screenwriter David Seidler may have reached a career high point in February when he won an Academy Award for The King’s Speech, but the professional — and personal — returns on his long fascination with King George VI have not ended.
A London production of Mr. Seidler’s stage version of “The King’s Speech” is in the works for the fall, with Adrian Noble, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, attached to direct, Mr. Seidler said recently. He said he hoped that a Broadway run of the eight-character play would follow in 2012. And offers for speaking engagements and screenwriting jobs have also been arriving steadily.
Best of all, Mr. Seidler said, is the spotlight that the film has cast on the estimated 65 million people worldwide — including more than three million Americans — who stammer, as George VI and Mr. Seidler himself once did.
Last week, Mr. Seidler, 73, helped raise about $600,000 at the annual gala for Our Time, a theater and summer camp program based in New York for children who stutter. Founded in 2001, the organization raised just under $400,000 at last year’s gala, said the group’s founder, Taro Alexander, who attributed the fund-raising boom to the visibility that The King’s Speech and Mr. Seidler have brought to stutterers.
At the Academy Awards on Feb. 27, where The King’s Speech won four prizes, including best picture, Mr. Seidler said with statuette in hand that he accepted it on behalf of stutterers worldwide. “We have a voice; we have been heard,” he said.
During an interview before the gala, which included performances from the Broadway actors Kelli O’Hara and Ron Rifkin, he went back in time to share his own story. Mr. Seidler, whose family emigrated from England to the United States shortly before World War II, developed a stammer as a toddler that would remain until he was a teenager in high school on Long Island.
He tried to overcome the condition with various therapies that George VI, also known as Bertie, underwent, as shown in the film: placing marbles in his mouth to speak through, for instance, and developing a smoking habit. (Mr. Seidler began his at 12; he quit his two packs a day at 40.) None of the therapies helped, however.
As a boy Mr. Seidler kept his chin up. He recalled attending a pantomime show in Britain after the war, at which an actor called him from the audience to the stage and asked for his name. “I started stuttering ‘David,’ and the eyes of the actor and audience members started to widen,” Mr. Seidler recalled. “The actor tried sending me back to my seat, but I wasn’t going to have it.”
Adolescence brought an interest in girls, and Mr. Seidler grew depressed that he was too afraid to date them because of his stammer.
When he was 16, he said, he had a “profanity-laden, F-bomb-filled emotional catharsis” similar to Bertie’s memorable meltdown in the film in the office of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush). “I thought that if I’m stuck with stuttering, [expletive] you all, you’re all stuck with listening with me,” he said.
In two weeks’ time, the stammer faded during conversation, though Mr. Seidler still had difficulty reading from documents in class and speaking in a foreign language.
Mr. Alexander of Our Time, a 38-year-old actor and director who speaks with a stammer, said that Mr. Seidler’s catharsis was the exception rather than the rule, from what he has seen in his work with teenagers.
Still, he added: “So much of this is about confidence, about saying this is part of who I am. Living and dealing with a stutter is about having the guts to look someone in the eye when you stutter and refuse to turn your head away.”
