The King's Speech

calmom
Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:20:20 +0000

Whenever I see a historical movie, I am always moved afterward to do some research into the accuracy of various points – usually, of course, I am disappointed with the liberties that the scriptwriters have taken.

But when I decided to check out The King’s Speech – I was amazed – apparently the movie is very accurate historically-- or at least hews very close to information in the published biographical accounts that also are cited as sources for various online articles. I was amazed that the speech given at the end appears to be verbatim, the actual speech that King George VI gave at the start of WW II (you can listen to the real one online).

The time frame is compressed somewhat --you’ll see in the movie that there is little change from beginning to end in the daughters, whereas in real life there was a span of more than a decade between the time the George VI started seeing the therapist and the speech at the end. That’s understandable to me – there would have been little point in casting a range of toddlers to teens to play the princesses, given that it is only a collateral part of the story.

It’s also not all that clear historically how often or frequently the King had sessions with Lionel Logue. Apparently Logue never wrote down the methods he used, so that is also somewhat a matter of conjecture – but everything depicted in the movie is plausible (the kind of stuff a creative speech therapist might do). So I think that it is about as historically accurate as you can reasonably expect any movie to be.