David Seidler

Biography

David Seidler (4 August 1937 – 16 March 2024) was a British playwright and screenwriter. His first job in Hollywood was writing Tucker: The Man and His Dream for Francis Ford Coppola. In the early 1980s Seidler started working on a stage version of The King's Speech, but after receiving a letter from the Queen Mother's private secretary asking him not to pursue the project during her lifetime, he abandoned it. He returned to the story in 2005, this time developing it as a screenplay. The script was eventually produced as the 2010 feature film The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hooper and starring Colin Firth as King George VI, for which he won he won an Academy Award.