At 73 the oldest ever recipient of the best original screenplay Oscar for his script for the period drama The King’s Speech, David Seidler became an overnight spokesman for two beleaguered groups: stutterers and senior-age screenwriters. Finally receiving recognition from the youth-fixated entertainment industry after more than 40 years of service, Seidler, who has died aged 86, joked in his acceptance speech: “My father always said that I would be a late bloomer.”
That he voiced his satisfaction in flawless, actorly cadences was further testimony to Seidler’s persistence. The film – about King George VI’s struggle to overcome his speech impediment and rally the British nation against Hitler – was a labour of love born from his attempts to overcome his own stutter. These began in 1940, when a terrified Seidler, not quite three years old, embarked with his parents in a three-ship convoy taking the family from the UK to the US; one of the vessels was sunk by a German U-boat.
Once Seidler was safely over the Atlantic, the British monarch served as a source of inspiration: “[My parents] 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.’ If he could do that, I felt that there was hope for me.”
The potty-mouthed breakthrough depicted in the film, when Colin Firth’s king liberates himself through the power of expletives, happened to Seidler. After struggling through various attempts at speech therapy, frustration erupted through him as a 16-year-old outraged by his lack of prospects with the opposite sex. “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 – it was a huge relief,” he later told the Jewish Journal.
Seidler began contemplating a screen version of the king’s story in 1980, shortly after he began work in Hollywood. But the project was quickly stymied when he contacted King George’s widow, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, for permission. She refused, writing to Seidler: “Please, not in my lifetime. The memory of those events is still too painful.”
Seidler had to wait more than 20 years to pick up the project, after her death in 2002. But the delay may have been for the best. “To tell the story correctly, I had to plunge myself back into the experience of being a stutterer. That meant going back to the pain and isolation I knew as a child. I wasn’t ready until now,” he told the LA Times in 2011.
Directed by Tom Hooper, and starring Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter alongside Firth, The King’s Speech grossed $427.4m worldwide, as well as winning three other Oscars, for best picture, best director and best actor. Coming so late in Seidler’s embattled career as a screenwriter, it was particularly satisfying.
“I think it would be a wonderful signal in Hollywood that the mature writer still has something to give,” he said.
Beyond the traumatic Atlantic crossing, Seidler’s stutter may have been an emotional reverberation of the poisonous antisemitism in wartime Europe. It had already shattered the affluent Jewish family into which he was born in London, to Bernard Seidler, an international fur broker, and the graphic artist Doris Seidler (nee Falkoff).
After the war, in Long Island, the young Seidler found a stash of Life magazine clippings in his father’s chest of drawers depicting early shots of the concentration camps. “And then my father came into the room, ashen-faced, profoundly upset, and told me never to look at those pictures again. Later, I learned that his [own] parents had died in the camps,” the writer later said.
A fortnight after besting his speech impediment, Seidler won a role as a Christian devoured by a lion in a school production of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. But his stutter had already predisposed him to a more introspective path into the arts. “If you’re born with two conflicting traits – in my case, I was a born ham, but I was a stutterer – and if you want to be the centre of attention but you can’t talk, you find another channel, and that’s writing,” he said.
Seidler graduated in English in 1959 from Cornell University, where he was friends with Thomas Pynchon. The novelist later ran off to Mexico City with Seidler’s first wife, Mary Ann Tharaldsen, whom Seidler had married in 1961; they subsequently divorced. He made tentative screenwriting forays during this period, gaining his first credit on the Australian seafaring series Adventures of the Seaspray (1966-67) and writing dubbed dialogue for the US releases of Godzilla films.
For three years in the 1960s he worked as political adviser and speechwriter to the first prime minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara – but quit after being subjected to intimidation. He married Huia Newton, whom he met on a fishing trip to New Zealand, where she was a waitress in Rotorua; the couple had a son, Marc, but later divorced. He also worked in advertising as creative director for the New Zealand arm of the agency McCann-Erickson, before returning to the US in the late 70s to attempt with “immense ignorance and stupidity”, to break into Hollywood at 40, “the age when most people are getting out”.
Prior to The King’s Speech, Seidler’s most prominent project was Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), a biopic of the automobile entrepreneur Preston Tucker starring Jeff Bridges. But he fell out with the director Francis Ford Coppola, a former schoolmate, over accreditation. Either side of this, he continued with a prolific but somewhat journeyman’s output of made-for-TV films, usually in collaboration with his third wife, Jacqueline Feather, with whom he had a daughter, Maya. The marriage ended in divorce in 2008.
By the time he resumed work on what was then called “King George’s Speech” in 2005, Seidler had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. Refusing chemotherapy and opting to have just the cancer, not the organ, removed, he claimed to have visualised the malignancy away. “I know it sounds awfully Southern California and woo-woo. But that’s what happened,” he told CNN. “I spent hours visualising a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder lining, and then I went in for the operation, and a week later the doctor called me and his voice was very strange. He said: ‘I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s no cancer there.’”
The power of the imagination could not effect a similar miracle on Seidler’s career post-King’s Speech. “I really thought I would be able to make anything I wanted. How foolish I was,” he said. “I get hired continually, but for the wrong reasons: to have an Oscar-winning writer on the project. Once they’ve got my name on a contract, they really don’t want my vision.”
Among his scripts in development when he was in his 80s was a Miles Davis biopic for Denzel Washington to direct, and another about the Iraqi farmer who hid Saddam Hussein from the Americans. Cautioning budding screenwriters about getting “eaten alive” by Hollywood, as a veteran with a real-life path more reminiscent of Tinseltown’s first generation, he kept his priorities straight. He returned annually to New Zealand for a month-long trip in the wilderness with his son. “The most important script you will write is the script of your life,” he said.
Seidler is survived by his children, Marc and Maya.
• David William Seidler, screenwriter, born 4 August 1937; died 16 March 2024
