DAVID SEIDLER

(4 August 1937 - 16 March 2024)

The playwright and screenwriter David Seidler, who has died at the age of 86, had to wait several decades before he won thirteen awards for his screenplay of The King’s Speech in 2010. He had had a long career writing for films and television and had been nominated a few times but hitherto had only won a Writers Guild of America Award for his contribution to the 1989 TV film Onassis – The Richest Man in the World. Many of his screenplays were written in conjunction with his partner Jacqueline Feather who later became his third wife. Their collaborations were reasonably successful, but it was The King’s Speech, about the stuttering impediment of George VI, that brought him an Oscar among many other accolades.

The reason that The King’s Speech was such a success must lie in the fact that David Seidler himself suffered from a stammer as a young man. Born in London, Seidler was three-years-old when he moved with his parents to Long Island, New York. He already had his stammer but he did little about it until he was a teenager hoping to find a girlfriend. He practiced speaking by shouting swear words which seemed to release him from his stutter. He then attended Cornell University and graduated in English. Next, he took on work as a political advisor to the prime minister of Fiji, and also worked in advertising in New Zealand, a country he came to love and which he visited regularly after his writing career was over.

With success assured he began writing for Australian television in the late 1960s. After an episode to Another World, the long-running US soap opera, he wrote a TV film about the Hollywood gossip-mongers Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons called Malice in Wonderland with Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Alexander. Following the Onassis project, Seidler wrote – with Arnold Schuman – his first Hollywood film Tucker – The Man and His Dream with Jeff Bridges playing the inventor Preston Tucker, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. This led to more TV work with Feather, Time to Say Goodbye, about a doctor with Alzheimer’s, with Richard Kiley and Eva Marie Saint. In 1998 for Disney TV, they wrote Goldrush – a Real Life Alaskan Adventure, for Warners two animated musicals, The Magic Sword - Quest for Camelot and The King and I and as partners they carried on working mostly for television until 2008 when they divorced.

Then came The King’s Speech. As well as an Academy Award for Seidler’s original screenplay, he being the oldest-ever recipient of an original screenplay Oscar, while the film also won for best picture, best director Tom Hooper and best actor Colin Firth as George VI. There were nominations, too, for Geoffrey Rush as the therapist Lionel Logue and for Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, and nominations for art direction, costume design, cinematography, editing, sound and music. This pattern was repeated around the world, so that out of 185 nominations the film won seventy.

David Seidler married Mary Ann Tharaldsen in 1961 but they later divorced and she married the writer Thomas Pynchon. Then Seidler married a New Zealand waitress, Huia Newton, and they had a son, Marc, but they also divorced. With third wife, Jacqueline Feather, they had a daughter, Maya, but divorced in 2008.

MICHAEL DARVELL