He wrote 'The King's Speech' from experience

'The King's Speech" screenwriter David Seidler, who was born in London and moved with his family to Great Neck after the outbreak of World War II, says his stutter began around the age of 3.

"For most stutterers, answering the telephone is an agony - the telephone rings and everything tightens," recalls Seidler, 73, now of Los Angeles. "I had trouble with the 'h' sound - I couldn't pick up the phone and say 'hello.' I would slide into it - 'This is David.' "

"Your stomach tightens, your chest muscles, your jaw gets locked," he says. "You are jammed up into a ball of tension, and it is just awful. You know you are going to stutter. It's a self-perpetuating thing."

When he was 16, he was told his stutter might get worse - and he got angry. The anger became the catalyst necessary to confront his anxiety and fear of speaking.

"If you ask a speech therapist, the mechanical techniques are invariably useful," he says, "but they don't fix the stutter. They give you the tools so that when the psychological change takes place, [they] can aid speech fluidity."

Seidler says he knew he wanted to write about King George VI from an early age: "He understood the social contract: If you have wealth, power or privilege, you also have obligations . . . he had a job to do, and he had to do it. As the constitutional monarch, he united the nation during wartime.

"Bertie didn't want to be king, he wasn't qualified to be king - he didn't have the voice for it. But he had to do his duty, and he did it. I found it moving how a man against all reason has to step up - and he does it."