The Kings Speech

"The King's Speech proves there's fizzing life in old-school British period dramas " - Guardian

               
                                                         This is a film worth talking about. - Top critic


In The King’s Speech (starring Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter), the Queen’s parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), are portrayed as reluctant occupants of the throne. 
Not so in Madonna’s highly personal take on the story. In this version, the Queen Mother will be presented as a scheming, ruthless social climber, who plotted with her father-in-law, George V, to oust the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), from the succession in favour of her husband and herself.
Actress Natalie Dormer, cast as the Queen Mother, says of her character: ‘She was quite a savage and savvy game player’. The fact that this ­interpretation is categorically refuted by all surviving historical documentation appears not to disturb Madonna in the slightest.

THE CROWNING GLORY FOR GEOFFREY RUSH

With The King’s Speech opening today, all eyes are on Colin Firth, for his highly acclaimed portrayal of the bullied, ­timorous George VI.
The British-made film has already won a string of plaudits, including seven nominations for the Golden Globes and is tipped to sweep the board when the Oscar nominations are announced on January 25.
Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, who plays his queen, will undoubtedly ­figure, as will Australian actor ­Geoffrey Rush, who plays the King’s maverick voice coach, Lionel Logue.

Yet, if it hadn’t been for Rush ­(pictured), the film might never have been made. And in his quiet, down-to-earth way, he nearly steals the show!
The story of how Logue helped the King overcome his stammer was first conceived as a stage play by writer David Seidler. But when Rush was offered Logue’s role and read the script, he pressed Seidler to make it into a movie. ‘I loved the whole unlikely but true tale of how a wild, irreverent guy like Logue could be called upon to help a stiff-upper-lip King’, says Rush. ‘I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into it.’
Rush is a lanky six-footer, a genial man with a somewhat lived-in look. None of his frayed edges were tidied up for the character of Lionel Logue, ­ making the relationship between the rough diamond and the King seem all the more remarkable.
‘This is not a story about a man who wants power — it is about a man who will give anything not to have it. He was in so much turmoil that his health was being affected. Lionel Logue was the last card in the deck, and Palace officials did all they could to keep him out, but Elizabeth insisted on bringing him on board,’ says Rush.
When Seidler first planned to dramatise the story, he wrote to Buckingham Palace for permission, explaining that he didn’t want to upset the Queen Mother. Back came a letter asking him not to write the film in her lifetime as ‘the memories of these events are still too painful’. David, out of respect for her, agreed to wait.
He later discovered that Lionel Logue had a grandson, Mark. He still had all his grandfather’s papers, including a diary detailing his working relationship with the King, fragments of an autobiography, even the King’s ­medical card! The script was rewritten to include gems from the diaries.
For Rush, who won an Oscar for Shine in 1996, the acclaim that has greeted The King’s Speech is a further step towards being taken seriously as an Australian actor.
‘In the Eighties, a man needed pecs to be in an Aussie film. I’m just too weedy, so I really began to think of giving up and becoming a chef,’ he says. ‘Maybe the day of the muscle-bound actor — at least back home — is over at last!’

And in order to press ahead with her own view of the saga, she parted company, during the making of this strange film, with her co-producer, casting director, and one of her actresses — all of whom were said to have withdrawn owing to ‘artistic differences’.
These negative aspects of recent royal history may well be unwelcome to the Windsors, yet the surprising truth is that they invited these ­developments themselves.
It was the Queen’s father, George VI, who, in his Coronation year, 1937, first opened the floodgates of movie mania on the Royals when he gave his assent, and also certain special filming facilities, to producer and director Herbert Wilcox, who brought to the screen two flag-waving patriotic pageants on the life of Queen Victoria — Victoria The Great and Sixty Glorious Years — starring Wilcox’s future wife, Anna Neagle.
The fact that Neagle was descended from Victoria’s licentious uncle, the Duke of Sussex, on the wrong side of the blanket, was not then publicly known, and both films, which were hugely successful, were reverent and almost genuflecting in their presentation of the great Queen-Empress.
The first film in which any members of the Royal Family took part came in 1965 when American ­documentary maker Jack Le Vien ­produced A King’s Story, in which the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor were allowed to recount, with a ­commentary by Orson Welles, the saga of ‘the love story of the (20th) century’, the Duke’s ­abdication in order to marry Wallis Simpson, ‘the woman I love’.
The royal couple attended a premiere in London. Although their version of events has since been contradicted by the subsequent release of official ­documents, the film itself passed without controversy. However, it marked a watershed in the relationship of the royals with the public.
Even more surprisingly, given that this excursion into the world of ­movies was not to her taste, it was our Queen who decided to alter for ever the ­manner in which the House of ­Windsor would be regarded on film.
This happened in 1969, when she allowed producer-director Richard Cawston to make the BBC television documentary, Royal Family. It was Prince Charles’s self-publicising ­mentor Lord Mountbatten who was responsible for overcoming the Queen’s initial reservations.
‘We must not let in the daylight upon magic,’ wrote the Victorian historian Walter Bagehot, with regard to the fragility of the monarchy’s mystique — and the Queen’s decision soon had regrettable consequences.
A glut of royal films followed, including, after the Royal wedding in 1981, American-made television films such as Charles And Diana: A Royal Love Story, and more recently, a £2 million screen version of the relationship of Prince Charles and his divorced ­mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, in Charles And Camilla — Whatever Love Means. In one scene, Camilla was shown telling a dim, dithering and wimpish Charles: ‘You’re going to find out I’m a slut soon enough.’
Dignity, the most important factor in any monarchy, had gone.Now, not content with George VI uttering the F-word in The King’s Speech, the cinema is putting the Queen and her family at the mercy of Madonna. The pop star is said to regard her fellow American, Wallis Simpson, as having been very badly treated by the House of Windsor. As a result, the Queen Mother, who once referred witheringly to Wallis as ‘the lowest of the low’, will be presented as ­scheming and ambitious.
Such a version of events is utterly untrue, but how long is it before we can expect the next inevitable screen blockbuster, Kate And Wills: The ­Passion Of A Royal Love Affair?