Hollywood appears to be in love with the "'The King's Speech," honouring it with 12 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. The film is also earning raves from experts on stuttering, who say it's the first sympathetic and realistic portrayal of stuttering they've seen.

"This movie is a godsend as far as I'm concerned," Dr. Robert Kroll of Toronto's Speech and Stuttering Institute told CTV Toronto recently.

Until "The King's Speech", Hollywood's take on stuttering was reserved for comedy -- Michael Palin's rather hilarious turn in "A Fish Called Wanda" comes to mind. But Jane Fraser, the president of the 60-year-old Stuttering Foundation, says "The King's Speech" offers a more realistic protrayal of stuttering and the anguish faced by those with the condition.

In fact, she says the film has already brought more attention to the condition than 60 years of her group's public awareness work.

"The King's Speech gives the stuttering community a hero who inspires and a movie that promotes understanding and acceptance of the complexities of stuttering," she said in a statement this week when the Oscar nominations came out. "We congratulate the directors, producers, writers and actors for their work, and their humanity in helping millions of people who stutter with understanding and hope."

Perhaps part of the reason the film offers such a sympathetic look at stuttering is that the man who wrote the script suffered for years himself with the condition.

David Seidler, who is also up for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, overcame a childhood of stuttering but remembered well the pain it caused him. In the early 70s, he decided to write a play (and then a screenplay) about King George VI's own struggle with the condition. But when he sent a letter to the Queen Mother to request her permission to write a about her late husband, she rebuffed him.

"Not during my lifetime," the Queen Mother responded. "The memory of those events is still too painful."

Seidler decided to wait. Little did he know the Queen Mum would live to the ripe old age of 102.

With a new, more understanding focus now on stuttering because of the film, experts who specialize in the condition are conceding that while treatments have improved since King George's time, they really don't know much more about the condition's cause today than they did in the 1930s.

It is clear that stuttering affects more men than women -- at a ratio of about four to one. And the long-held suspicion of a genetic link is bearing out: studies are showing that as many as 60 per cent of stutterers have another family member who is also affected.

In recent years, a few of the genes involved have been identified. But since these genes account for only about 10 per cent of cases, more still wait to be identified.

It's also not clear why so many stutterers recover with no help at all. Somewhere between two and five per cent of children stutter, it's estimated, yet as many as three-quarters simply outgrow the condition. In adults, only one per cent stutter -- that's about 300,000 Canadians.

Cases can range in severity, with some struggling with every sentence they try to speak, and others having difficulty only when they speak in a public way, or when they are under stress.

Some stutterers find they can speak perfectly well in one language but stutter in another. Others find they don't stutter when they sing, or when they speak to young children, or when they act on stage and take on a different persona.

While stuttering was once thought to be psychological condition caused by anxiety issues, it's now recognized as a neurological condition stemming from an as-yet undetermined brain wiring issues.

"Until we can locate the specific areas of the brain that are at fault or sort of misfiring, then there really isn't a cure for it. But what we can do is re-train the brain," Kroll said.

Though a full cure may still be a way off, stuttering experts say "The King's Speech" has taken the first step in changing the public's perceptions of a condition that can affect anyone, from ordinary folk to kings. So even if the film doesn't take home Best Picture, a new compassion is a greater award.