The King's Speech: set report

The relationship between shy and stammering George VI and his Australian speech therapist is the subject of a new film, The King's Speech. David Gritten talks to the director, cast and crew about its making

Until recently it was a scarcely known royal secret: while it was acknowledged that King George VI had a stammer, few people were aware that he employed, and befriended, Lionel Logue, a medically unqualified Australian speech therapist who had set himself up in Harley Street, to manage his condition.

Their relationship forms the story of the film The King’s Speech, which has been widely praised even before its release. Directed by Tom Hooper, it stars Colin Firth as King George, popularly known as Bertie before he acceded to the throne. Helena Bonham Carter plays his wife, Elizabeth (later mother of the Queen), and the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush is the raffish Logue.

Bertie’s affliction had embarrassed him for years, but in 1936 his brother, Edward, abdicated and he was crowned. As war loomed it became crucial for him to address his people clearly via radio broadcasts.

The King’s Speech was originally a stage play by the screenwriter David Seidler, 73. A stammerer in his childhood, Seidler recalls listening eagerly to George VI’s wartime radio speeches. This, the first big scene in The King’s Speech, shows Bertie’s disastrous closing speech at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium in 1925. His stammer was apparent to all. It was shot at the Leeds United stadium, Elland Road, where Tom Hooper had filmed The Damned United (2009), chronicling Brian Clough’s brief tenure as Leeds manager. ‘Because I’d shot there, I knew it was one of the few remaining period stadiums that look like the old Wembley,’ he says.

Firth’s main memory of the scene was the cold: ‘It was freezing for those of us who had to stand still for days. But a group of extras near me was a platoon of soldiers getting ready to go back to Afghanistan. They told me this was nothing in terms of cold or endurance. That put things in perspective.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8194866/The-Kings-Speech-set-report.html