The King's Speech star admitted he is struggling to lose the stutter that earned him an Oscar
Life appears to be imitating art for Colin Firth - he's admitted he can’t shake the stutter that earned him an Oscar for his performance as King George VI in The King's Speech.
COLIN FIRTH'S CAREER IN PICTURES
The famous Brit, who nailed the role as the stuttering monarch, recently lapsed into the speech impediment during an interview with a London magazine.
‘You can probably hear even from this interview, there are moments when it’s quite infectious,’ he explained. ‘You find yourself doing it and if I start thinking about it the worse it gets, if nothing else it’s an insight in to what it feels like.’
Poor Colin!
The actor fully immersed himself in the role by watching old archive footage of the monarch, before perfecting a stammer of his own.
‘I paid a lot of attention to those, not to impersonate, but to get what information I could about him. It was interesting to me, not so much what the stammer sounded like, but how he struggled against it. His job was to speak.’
But he’s not about to share the secrets of his own speech impediment: ‘I can’t really go too much into what the technical thing was, and I don’t want to frankly,’ he said.
‘I’ve got myself to a place where I was really, trying, to speak and sometimes it felt that way.’
The 50–year-old actor shares screen time with his friend Helena Bonham Carter, who played his wife Elizabeth, and said she deliberately attempted to put him off during shooting.
‘I’d known Helena for a very long time, and she’s fun, she’s quite filthy, she’s outrageous. 'Whenever I was stammering if I caught her eye she was usually looking at her watch or yawning, hoping the moment passes as quickly as possible, fortunately when the cameras are on her she looks delightfully supportive.’
And that's not all he had to say about his kooky co-star.
‘If I had to choose somebody to get stuck in the lift with she comes fairly high on the list because she’s amusing, attractive and very small.’
We wouldn’t mind being on the list to get stuck in a lift with Mr. Darcy either!