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

Mr. Seidler told the site filmcritic.com that during the war his parents, with the aim of inspiring him, had tuned the family radio to George VI’s speeches as object lessons in mastering stuttering.

‘They said to me, ‘David, he stuttered much worse than you, and now listen to him. He’s not perfect. But he can give these beautiful, moving speeches that brought the free world together,” Mr. Seidler said.

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

Soon after, his stuttering in conversations disappeared.

David Seidler was born in London on August 4, 1937, the son of 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 for “The King’s Speech” remained in Mr. Seidler’s hands for decades. During job interviewshe said he had put the project aside for years until after the 2002 death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, widow of George VI, who asked him not to pursue it during her lifetime.

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

“As long as you have a toothache, all you think about is it, but once you go to the dentist and he or she takes away the pain, the last thing you want to think about is how that tooth hurt,” he said. . ‘You put it out of your mind and forget about it. Same with stuttering. So it was only by waiting until I had reached the stage of… let me use the euphemism of adulthood… when you naturally start to look back on your life, that I was able to look again at that pain, at that feeling of isolation and loneliness, which I think helped the script immensely.