‘The King’s Speech’ Writer David Seidler Dies on Fly-Fishing Trip
David Seidler, who won an Academy Award for writing the 2010 film The King’s Speech, died on Saturday at age 86. Longtime manager Jeff Aghassi said that Seidler died while fly-fishing, one of his favorite activities.
“David was in the place he loved most in the world — New Zealand — doing what gave him the greatest peace, which was fly-fishing,” Aghassi said in a statement, per Variety. “If given the chance, it is exactly as he would have scripted it.”
Seidler’s screen career started nearly 60 years ago when he wrote episodes for the Australia television series Adventures of the Seaspray.
In the 1980s, he scripted episodes of the Days of Our Lives, Another World, and General Hospital.
Seidler is also renowned for his biopic work, having co-written the TV movies Malice in Wonderland (starring Elizabeth Taylor) and Onassis: The Richest Man in the World (starring Raul Julia) and the feature film Tucker: The Man and His Dream (starring Jeff Bridges).
He frequently collaborated with writer Jacqueline Feather, with whom he worked on the animated films Quest for Camelot and The King and I in the late 1990s.
Seidler wrote The King’s Speech after idolizing King George VI — the film’s subject and a fellow stutterer — as a child.
“When I was old enough to listen to the radio, my parents would encourage me to listen to the king’s speeches,” Seidler recalled in a 2011 interview with Filmcritic.com. “They would say to me, ‘David, he was a much worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect. But he can give these magnificent, stirring addresses that rallied the free world.’ And he could do that as a king, with everyone listening intently to every syllable this man uttered. That’s tough. But if he could do that, I felt that there was hope for me.”
