It’s December 1936 and the little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose spot their father during their last hours at the family’s private London home.
“Your Majesty!” they whisper to the new King George VI – surely among the first of his subjects to offer such fealty.
But as their daddy, he bends to cuddle them and the three share a silent loving gaze of such intense, bewildered, solemn, fearful desperation that my heart breaks and I continue to sob shamelessly until after the final credits roll.
The cinematic moment may be fiction but it’s small wonder that The Queen – doubtless the last living eye-witness to these events - also found The King’s Speech ‘moving and enjoyable’ when she watched it during a private screening at Sandringham House.
This is the same loving woman who reportedly clasped her hands together on meeting Geordie Greig, editor of the London Evening Standard newspaper and grandson of surgeon, Sir Louis Greig, recalling how the King and Greig had been “so close”.
But this astonishing movie, created with the deepest loving-care over a lifetime by Anglo-American writer, David Seidler is not about that friendship but another that the King developed with an unqualified Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue.
I have pondered long and hard on the power of this particular film. Why has it been the subject of so much attention and debate? What for example, caused a wholly disinterested audience at a cinema in Arizona, USA to ‘rise as one and applaud at the finish’?
Is it partly because of the linked scandal about King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson? Is it the prurient glee caused by watching a monarch swear?
Is it because it is a classic tale of heroism where a simple, if royal personality becomes great for the hour in which he must accomplish Herculean deeds?
Is it because he is empowered by the very disabilities which he believes prevent him from fulfilling his duties?
Or have we been touched to the core by the very commonality that may make a humble man a king?
Perhaps it is not one of these but all of them together. Senior members of the real-life Royal Family are blessed with a mutual sense of destiny layered with an exceptional weight of history that the film textures with a Shakespearian nobility and a near-biblical air of service over self.
This can be no accident. Seidler is the grandson of Jewish Holocaust victims, whose stutter began on board ship as he and his parents - the survivors - sailed from London to New York to escape The Blitz.
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