NEWS'Young Victoria' Actress Emily Blunt: I Used to Stutter
Nov. 24 2009, Published 2:17 p.m. ET
Emily Blunt may have swapped Prada for corsets to star in Young Victoria, but the English actress says she owes her silver screen success to defeating a stutter that blighted her teenage years.
“Because I couldn’t talk very much, I watched the world go by more closely,” Emily, 26, tells New York magazine.
The Devil Wears Prada actress — who's planning her June wedding to The Office actor John Krasinski — beat her speech impediment by concentrating on learning various voices in her acting class.
“I’ve always been fascinated by accents, and the way people speak, and the intonations of it, and that was because I found it so hard to speak in my own voice."
And as for scoring the role of Queen Victoria in the movie (in theaters Dec. 18) in which she stars opposite Keira Knightley's beau Rupert Friend: "There was a tsunami of women behind me wanting the role, so I sort of bullied myself in,” she says.
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“Many period films are very arch and stiff, and I don’t respond to the characters. If I see ‘the rebellious English rose’ in stage directions, I’m already bored,” she says of acting in period movies.
“But this was a girl who was willing to expose herself to the world. That was what was different for me.”
