The power behind “The King’s Speech”
Interview with Jane Fraser
“We have been running around like
crazy for months since (‘The King’s
Speech’) premiered. It’s been wild,”
says Jane Fraser, president of The
Stuttering Foundation of America.
Donations to the nonprofit organi-
zation, which provides information
on stuttering and referrals to the
rapists nationwide, have shot up 20
percent since the movie opened.
Website traffic has jumped by more than 2 million hits a month
since the December premiere, and the organization was forced to
add extra phone lines to keep up with the rise in calls.
"People call in and say they saw the movie and finally decided to
get help," Fraser says.
“‘The King’s Speech’ has brought so much attention to the world
of stutterers,” Fraser tells us. “David Siedler’s comments at the
Oscars were so meaningful for people who stutter. It gave it a
realism for those that have to live with it daily. I think the other
thing is that Colin Firth is such a world-class actor that is truly
superb; he captured the fear that so many stutterers have, and
that was quite exceptional, really.”
“Everyone in that movie is so sensitive and understanding and
their comments throughout the last couple of months have been
extremely kind,” Fraser adds.
Colin Firth said in so many interviews that he had so much respect
for people who stutter and never realized how much they have to
go through. It wasn’t until he was in the role as King George VI that
he realized how much courage and grace the king had, and added
that he had tremendous respect for him.
“While I was visiting with Colin at an event in London, he asked
me numerous questions about stuttering,” Jane says. One of
the questions he asked was, “Why does it come and go?” Jane
explained it to Colin this way: “If I put an 8-foot plank down in this
room right now and told you to walk the plank, you could do it. If
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I lifted that plank into the air and said, ‘Now, I want you to walk
that same plank,’ you probably wouldn’t be able to do it.
“It’s not that you can’t walk; it’s not that your muscles don’t work;
it’s not that anything’s broken—but you might have a fear of
heights, you might be afraid to fall and break your leg,” she added.
“It’s a great analogy for people who stutter, why don’t they stutter
when they’re talking to their dog or cat or when they are at home
in a comfortable environment. Why do they stutter during certain
situations? It’s because they become a little more vulnerable.
I always suggest that people go to Toastmasters because there
they will find that ‘normal’ people are terrified of public
speaking. In some ways, we are all put in a situation that makes us
uncomfortable; it’s just that stutterers are a bit more fragile.”
Sixty percent of people who stutter have a family history of
stuttering. Jane tells us that in her family, both her father and uncle
stuttered. People who stutter process language differently than
those who don’t.
It’s especially hard for children in school because they get picked
on for stuttering and that makes it worse. If teachers would talk
about stuttering in class, it would help other children understand.
“What we’ve been hearing since ‘The King’s Speech,’” Jane tells
us, “is that a lot of children are now bragging about being
stutterers because, ‘The king was a stutterer, and Colin Firth was
a stutterer and he won an Oscar for it! That makes me happy!’ If
someone told me a year ago that kids would think it was cool to
stutter, we would have said, ‘Oh, you’re crazy,’” Jane adds.
“I believe all of this is happening because of Colin Firth’s
performance,” Jane says. “We have videos and very meaningful
tapes about people stuttering, but they don’t have the impact that
this movie has. It was about a real person with a real fear, and it
was presented with music and graphics—like that in the guillotine
scene, when the king was approaching the microphone to give
his speech with all those people staring at him.”
A number of famous people are stutterers, including actors,
singers, sports figures and entertainers. Among them: Nicole
Kidman, Emily Blunt, Bruce Willis, James Earl Jones, Carly Simon,