Emily Blunt was mercilessly bullied in childhood because of an almost debilitating stutter. Photo / AP
Emily Blunt was mercilessly bullied in childhood because of an almost debilitating stutter. Photo / AP
Emily Blunt's new movie, The Quiet Place, is about a family who try to live silently, lest terrible things befall them. She won't be speaking much — which is a tad unusual for the British actress. More often, her roles display flawless vocal abilities, via her American accents.
So it's difficult to believe Blunt spent her childhood bullied for a nearly debilitating stutter. But that might be what helped launch her acting career.
On the cusp of her teenage years, Blunt was relentlessly mocked by her classmates. As a defence mechanism, she essentially hid herself in characters.
"I used to do a lot of funny voices and funny accents because I could speak more fluently if I didn't sound like me," Blunt recently told People's Jess Cagle.
Her parents enrolled her in various therapies and relaxation classes, but nothing took — until she began acting.
A "fantastic teacher" overheard Blunt's impressions an funny voices, and asked the then 12-year-old to enroll in a school play despite her stutter, a suggestion she greeted with vigorous objections.
"This is kind of remarkable for someone who's not a stutterer, that he had this instinct. It was so special," Blunt recalled.
Blunt, bitten by the acting bug, eventually conquered her stutter, but it never disappeared completely.
"It still comes back and flares if I'm really tired, or when I was pregnant, it was really prominent again," Blunt said.
A stutter might seem to many to be a minor affliction, but it can be anything but. For example: Annie Glenn, the wife of astronaut and former senator John Glenn, stuttered so badly that when her 7-year-old daughter stepped on a nail, she couldn't speak well enough to call an ambulance. She had to fetch a neighbour, as her daughter gushed blood.
Others have trouble finding work.
Marilyn Monroe's stutter on one occasion riled a director during a line-reading. Photo / Supplied
"You have adults in the 40s and 50s who haven't been able to get the jobs that they deserve, because you're sort of misrepresented by how you speak," Blunt said.
Stuttering is a surprisingly common affliction in Hollywood — a place generally unkind to those living with disabilities — despite a main tenet of acting being flawless line-reading and enunciation.
Several big-name actors managed to enjoy a lucrative career regardless. Here are a few.
• James Earl Jones
The Great White Hope actor became one of Hollywood's most famous voices, lending it to The Lion King, Star Wars and CNN. But Jones stuttered so badly that he spent eight years of his childhood barely speaking to anyone — except his family and the animals on the Mississippi farm where he lived.
"Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter," Jones told the Daily Mail in 2010.
"My stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly."
But he loved words, specifically the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. One of his high school English teachers had Jones read poetry in class, forcing him to work on his stutter. He learned to keep the problem enough at bay to make a living with his voice.
"I don't say I was 'cured'," he told National Public Radio in the US. "I just work with it."
Jones'story inspired so many that in 1987 he became the first recipient of the Annie Glenn Award, which honours those who positively impact people suffering from communication disorders.
• Marilyn Monroe
Monroe stuttered from an early age, and a speech therapist suggested she adopt her famous breathy voice to overcome it. The voice became her trademark, but she never fully stopped stuttering. It followed her in her career, angering a director during a line-reading.
"He said, 'You don't stutter," she recalled. "I said, 'That's what you think!' Oh, it's painful. Oh, God."
As a boy, Willis' stutter led to such relentless bullying that, as he said, "I had to fight my way out". His remedy, much like Blunt's, was to become someone else.
"It took me three minutes to complete a sentence," Willis once said. "It was crushing ... Yet, when I became another character, in a play, I lost the stutter."
• Samuel L. Jackson
That booming voice once cracked, stopped and started with regularity — and still does at times.
"I stuttered really, really, really bad ... I stopped speaking for, like, almost a year in school," he said in 2016.
As a young man, it even led to fights. He went to the library to read about therapies, breathing activities, anything he could find. But the panacea to his stutter came in an usual manner — saying a word very much associated with him, but that cannot be printed here. Let's just say it begins with "mother" ...
"I have no idea why it helps. But it just does. It clicks a switch that stops the d-d-d, b-b-b-b-b." Washington Post
