‘60 Minutes’ highlights ‘The King’s Speech’

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CBS’ iconic newsmagazine show ’60 Minutes’ has spent a lot of time in the last six months looking into Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and, by extension, ‘The Social Network.’ On Sunday, a week before the Oscar telecast -- and a good 48 hours before the ballots are due -- ’60 Minutes’ turned its sights to the new Oscar front-runner, ‘The King’s Speech,’ which is headed into the big night with awards momentum on its side. The segment featured interviews with stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush and screenwriter David Seidler.

The program looked at the film’s origin, Firth’s relationship to the lead character -- the stuttering King George VI -- and even interviewed speech therapist Lionel Logue’s grandson, who discovered his grandfather’s diaries, long forgotten in an attic. The actors, it turned out, spent a lot of time reading those diaries even as the film was shooting and incorporated a lot of those details into the script.

The best part of the segment, though, has to be Firth’s love for all things spandex and the clip showing his dance montage from ‘Mamma Mia!’ (though that can’t be what the Oscar strategists are focused on). The fact that ‘The King’s Speech’ was instrumental in uncovering historical documents from that time -- including the original document read by the king during his historic speech telling his subjects that war had begun -- makes its claim for Oscar gold all the more legitimate.

Check out the segment below.

-- Nicole Sperling