DAVID SEIDLER, R.I.P.
About a week and a half ago, there was a very quiet show business death—that of eighty-six-year-old Oscar winner David Seidler. I had met the man a little over a dozen years ago, at an event for the Golden Globes, and he made a very good impression on me. I’ve remembered him ever since. So now I want to pay a bit of a tribute to him.
David Seidler right after winning his Oscar.
David Seidler was a British playwright and screenwriter who penned both the stage and screen versions of The King’s Speech, for which he won not only a BAFTA, (of course,) but also the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The topic of King George VI and his stutter was one that was near and dear to Mr. Seidler—he stammered himself. The Stuttering Foundation reached-out to me last week to laud the impact his work has had on the eighty million people around the world who stutter, with the president of the organization, Jane Fraser, saying, “David Seidler made a profound difference for those who stutter around the entire world through his work on the screen and off. When watching The King’s Speech, we truly understood the plight of the person who stutters. As David said in his Academy Awards acceptance speech, ‘I accept this on behalf of all the stutterers throughout the world. We have a voice. We have been heard.’”
As the Daughter of a Speech Chairman at a well-known high school in New York, I’ve always tried to help people overcome their stutters. And I recently assisted a teenager in Austria with her paper on the topic, (because I adore her parents.) While doing a bit of extra research on stutterers for her, I was surprised by the number of famous people who suffer from the speech disorder. I always use Mr. Seidler’s movie as an example of triumphing over it.
David Seidler the day I met him.
Upon meeting him at that Golden Globes event a couple of months before his Oscars win in 2011, I wrote that the best celebrity at it, for me, was “a ruggedly handsome older man with whose visage I was not familiar, but was kind and gentle to all he met. (We were in several of the areas at the same time, so I got to observe his self-deprecating ways.) I finally got to find-out just who he was, and to my absolute delight, he’s David Seidler, the writer of The King’s Speech! At a private screening just the week before, Colin Firth had told us about Mr. Seidler’s three-decade-long journey* with his script, so meeting him meant much more to me than it normally would have. When I told him of Colin and Guy Pearce’s nice words about him the previous week, he replied, ‘Oh, they were just being kind.’ What a lovely celebrity to have met at GBK’s suite.”
*That long time to write his multiple-awarded script was because the Queen Mother, widow of King George VI, had asked David to not pursue the project during her lifetime. So he abandoned the project for over two decades! That’s so different from just about everyone in show business today!
So now R.I.P., David Seidler. And know that your work will benefit generations of stutterers, and movie fans, to come.
