Alison Jones talks to actor Colin Firth about his latest role as the stammering King George VI.

Colin Firth’s many months spent learning (or pretending how to learn) to speak flawlessly in public are proving unexpectedly useful.

His name has already twice emerged from the “Best Actor” envelope as awards and nominations for them are heaped upon The King’s Speech. He is also one of the front runners in the prestigious Golden Globes, the results of which are often seen as a guide to what might happen at the Oscars.

Colin, who was nominated for an Academy Award last year for A Single Man, has already perfected his technique for having to address large crowds and possibly millions of television viewers.

“I pretend I am a very confident person and hope the apprehension goes away,” he laughs.

“There is always apprehension but I manage it better. I am much better at not being hounded by the fear. I delay it. I don’t get nervous until 10 minutes before instead of 10 days before.”

His role as King George VI is about conquering something far harder than pre-speech butterflies.

The war-time ruler suffered from a stammer so debilitating that pubic engagements were the stuff of nightmares for him.

It was bad enough when he just had the duties of being the Duke of York to cope with, but then he found himself thrust even further into the limelight when his older brother, David, abdicated, and he assumed the throne in his place.

“Our screenwriter, David Seidler, was our authority on stammering,” explains Colin.

“He had had the problem and was extremely expressive about it. He compared it to being under water, that there was this panicking, drowning sensation which seemed to have no way out. An endless silence that you can’t climb out of.

“He also talked about how it conditions how you approach your day. If you have an important encounter, the outcome of which might change your life, you are still only focusing on whether you will be able to get the words out, whether you are going to be able to say the thing fluently that you want to say.

“It affects what you order in a restaurant – whether it begins with this letter or that letter. Whether you answer the phone.

“It is something that absolutely consumes you and your identity. The struggle we witness in the film isn’t about curing a stammer, it’s about managing it.”

Colin also watched footage of the King making speeches and even such small glimpses proved to be remarkably enlightening.

“There’s a kind of little narrative to what I think he’s going through. He hits a word, you realise he knows it’s not going to come out. You see the dismay. You see another attempt. You see him going through that moment of containing himself and when you watch that you find out about him.

“For me, there’s something quite heroic there – there’s an entire epic going on in those few seconds. And then you see him come back out of it and carry on with the same dignity, as if there’s nothing to do but go forward.

“That revealed more to me about the character than anything and I found that out through the stammer.”

The Duke who becomes the King is supported by his determined wife Elizabeth, best known as the Queen Mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter.

Once described by her friend Cecil Beaton as “a marshmallow made by a welding machine” she has the confidence that her husband, “Bertie”, has had crushed put of him by the bullying of his father and brother, and an abusive nanny in his childhood.