"He knew he had to do the occasional royal duty but they were very minor.  Until the occasion of the closing of the Wembley Stadium Empire Exhibition.  It was just heartbreaking, he absolutely freezes he just can’t do it. 

"Bertie understood that for privilege you pay the price of duty.  I think Churchill chose his word perfectly when Bertie died. Churchill presented a wreath of flowers with just one word on it: 'Valour'."

Hooper takes up the story. "He had seen every top speech therapist and doctor and got nowhere.  Lionel Logue was the last record card in the box, he was the maverick and what saved Bertie is their friendship, more than the talking cure.  

"When he broadcasts Logue is in the room with him and he tells Logue the speech like you would tell a friend a speech.  It’s really a story about that friendship."

Rush explains of Logue "He got into speech therapy when he started to work a lot with soldiers returning to Australia from the front in Europe who were suffering from shell-shock and were verbally locked. 

"He knew a lot about anatomy and muscle therapy and breathing exercises. He pioneered an almost psychotherapeutic approach. He knew the problem was not simply a physical one, that there was something, mostly around the age of four or five, some kind of trauma in the child that creates stammering.

"It's unblocking that that gives a little bit of edge to Lionel trying to get inside this royal persona who is very formal and stamped by centuries of tradition."

Hooper was eager to tell the well-known story of the abdication from an unusual angle. "One of the reasons why this appealed to me was it is such a subversive look at the abdication.  It's the 'B' plot in history, the abdication crisis and Wallis Simpson being the 'A' plot. 

"It's not general knowledge that the man helping Bertie was Australian.  I wanted the film to have a modernity and not to be stuffy and traditional."  

For half-Australian Hooper, the fact that Logue was Antipodean was immensely important, "There is something in the Australian culture that is very democratic, that’s anti-hierarchy, anti-class, and it's someone coming with that kind of relaxed energy that could break through all the problems created by Bertie’s class and his incredibly austere upbringing. 

"As the son of an English father who went to boarding school from the age of five after his own father died in the war, and an Australian mother, I know from my upbringing a little bit about the story of an Australian unpacking the effects of a tough English childhood!"

Rush adds, "The relationship between Bertie and Lionel is fuelled by the unlikelihood of them meeting. There's something that's really intriguing about that cultural and class gap between this unknown figure from Perth, finding his way into the upper echelons of into the English royal household.

"Australia would have been a fairly unknown quantity in the 20s and 30s to most English people and they probably had a slightly, shall we say imperial attitude to the Australians. 

"The film looks at the contrast between their families, there is a more open, easier feel to the Australian lower-middle class family as opposed to the pressure that Bertie feels."

The King's Speech

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