And embarrassing. "The shame, that's the hardest thing," says Blunt. And yet she's a hugely successful actress.
Blunt doesn't stutter when she acts. That's not unusual. Playing another character allows many stutterers to be fluent. It's why you probably don't know that Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and James Earl Jones stutter, too. They just don't stutter on stage.
Blunt discovered the benefit of "acting another part" when she was 12. Doing impressions, she became fluent. "I could mess around in the playground and do silly voices," she says. A teacher noticed that. He encouraged her to act in a class play. "I did a really stupid Northern English accent. It did allow for great fluency!"
Did that start her movie career?
"It would make a great sound bite, but I wouldn't say it became the moment where I decided to be an actress. But it did free up my speech in a huge way."
While actors can do other voices, I couldn't do that when I got a job as a TV reporter. I didn't choose that job. I fell into it, never imagining that I'd go on the air. Seattle magazine had offered me work in their circulation department, but the magazine closed before I got there.
"Want to work in our TV station?" a manager asked. "OK," said young me. I did research for anchors and avoided speaking myself. Then they forced me to cover a story. I'd get a film editor to cut out my blocks. I dreaded speaking.
What finally helped me was intensive therapy at a clinic in Virginia. They used computers to reward us stutterers if we initiated sounds gently. They also slowed our speech to two seconds per syllable.
"It really misrepresents you. You know what you want to say…but you can't convey it. It's just imprisoning."
I assumed that treatment would work for everyone, but it didn't. Maybe other stutterers, less motivated than I, didn't spend as much time practicing. In any case, that company is now out of business.
"I don't think one method will work for everyone," says Blunt.
It won't. It's good that we have choices.
That was really tedious. We sounded like cows mooing. But it helped me. Soon I learned to speak without blocking. It was as if a cork had been removed from my throat. You couldn't shut me up. That treatment allowed me to have a TV career.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. 3
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