"Can the Biopic Subjects Speak? Disembodied Voices in The King's Speech and The Theory of Everything." A Companion to the Biopic, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 269-282
The adaptations of King George VI's and Stephen Hawking's life stories show their uneasy relationship to the "troubled-white-male-genius" genre and to the vocal embodiment of their subjects who lose and gain a voice through therapy, technology, and their will to live a full life. The films carefully skirt the edges of public disgust and pity of differently abled bodies: how the stuttering King George VI struggles to find his voice and adapt to the then emerging and increasingly important radio broadcasting technology; and how the physicist Stephen Hawking speaks through a speech synthesizer.