Moviegoers who enjoyed Colin Firth’s “Academy Award-winning performance in The King’s Speech may well want to view The King Speaks – a Canadian documentary that tells the whole story behind King George VI’s determined effort to overcome his debilitating stammer.

Those who saw The King’s Speech will recall that King George sought help from an unconventional Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.  The follow-up documentary contains interviews with some of Logue’s former patients, who provide personal insights into Logue’s methods and techniques.  In addition, period newsreels are interspersed with enlightening commentary from three royal biographers: Sarah Bradford, Robert Lacy and Christopher Warwick.

Speechwriters in particular will be intrigued to learn how Logue went beyond his role of therapist to actually editing the drafts of the king’s speeches – simplifying sentences, cutting out words and phrases that might cause the sovereign to stumble and changing words that began with difficult letters.  He became, in effect, “a kind of speechwriter” himself.

About 35 minutes into the documentary, we see newsreel footage of George VI making a speech at a British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, Scotland in 1938.  The first version we see is the BBC’s edited version, which shortened the king’s hesitations between words, to make his delivery appear smoother and less halting than it actually was.  Then comes the surprise: The makers of this documentary show us the unedited film, that captures the king’s speech as he actually delivered it – with all the pauses, hesitations and struggles.

It’s an affecting scene, and it dramatically illustrates something that the actor Sir Laurence Olivier once said about why the British people felt particularly close to conscientious, hardworking and fatherly George VI.  Beholding the obvious effort that it cost their sovereign to discharge the duties of kingship, Britons could identify his struggles with their own and, as Olivier put it, feel their hearts at once “swollen with pride, and wrung with anguish.”