Academy Awards Acceptance Speech Database

TOM HOOPER:
Wow. Thank you to all the members of the Academy. This is an extraordinary honor. I'd like to congratulate my fellow nominees: Darren, David, David, Joel and Ethan. Your work this year has been extraordinary and I'm honored to be nominated alongside you. Thank you to my wonderful actors. The triangle of man love, which is Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and me. I'm only here because of you guys, and Helena, I hope that reference doesn't make you too jealous. Thank you to all my cast; to my wonderful crew; to my producers, Iain, Gareth, Emile; to David Seidler, whose extraordinary journey from childhood stammerer to the stage of the Kodak I find so profoundly moving.

But most of all, thank you to my parents, my mum and dad who are in the audience tonight. And I know there's been a lot of thanking of mums, but this is slightly different because my mum in 2007 was invited by some Australian friends—she's Australian—in London to a fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called "The King's Speech." Now she's never been invited to a play reading in her entire life before. She almost didn't go because it didn't sound exactly promising, but thank god she did because she came home, rang me up and said, "Tom, I think I found your next film." So with this [holding up the Oscar] tonight, I honor you. And the moral of the story is: Listen to your mother.