Stage and Screen Dialect Coach Sam Chwat Dies at 57
(© The Sam Chwat Speech Center)
Dialect coach and speech therapist Sam Chwat has died of lymphoma, according to a report in The New York Times. He was 57 years old.
His Broadway credits include the 1990 revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which starred Kathleen Turner as Maggie, Herb Gardner’s Conversations with My Father, the one-woman show Rose, which starred Olympia Dukakis, and the 2005 revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which featured Alan Alda, Liev Schreiber, and Frederick Weller, among others.
For films, he worked with Marcia Gay Harden on Pollock, Robert De Niro on Cape Fear, and Wilem DaFoe on Shadow of a Vampire. Among the other celebrities with whom Chwat worked are Abigail Breslin, Sean Combs, Harry Connick, Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio, Taye Diggs, James Gandolfini, Richard Gere, Kate Hudson, Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Isabella Rossellini, Mark Ruffalo, Annabella Sciorra, Patrick Stewart, and B. D. Wong.
In addition to his work in theater and film, Chwat founded New York Speech Improvement Services, which treated dysfunctions like lisping, stuttering and stroke-related pathologies, in 1982. The organization is now known as the Sam Chwat Speech Center, and has a staff of six therapists, treating over 100 people a week.
