The King's Speech

Tom Hooper's The King's Speech won four Academy Awards at the 83rd ceremony in February 2011 (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Colin Firth and Best Original Screenplay for David Seidler) from twelve total nominations, the most of any film at that year's ceremony. It also won seven BAFTAs at the 64th BFA ceremony, including Best Film and Best Actor for Firth. Firth had been nominated for Best Actor the previous year for A Single Man; The King's Speech was the role that converted his late-career standing into the Academy win.

The screenplay by David Seidler had a remarkable development history: Seidler (himself a stutterer as a child) had been working on the project since the early 1980s, but had agreed not to release the script during the lifetime of the Queen Mother (Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the wife of George VI), who lived until 2002 at age 101. Seidler waited until then to begin pursuing production; the film entered active development in 2008 with The Weinstein Company and UK Film Council financing.

The cast pairs Firth with Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue and Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, both also nominated for supporting Oscars at the same ceremony. Cinematography is by Danny Cohen, working in deliberately deep-focus 1.78:1 with extensive use of Academy-ratio framing in the speech-therapy sequences. The score is by Alexandre Desplat. Logue's grandson Mark Logue served as on-set consultant, having published The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy in 2010 with extensive material from his grandfather's diaries.