Emily Blunt embodied elegance while raising awareness for a cause near and dear to her heart last night.
The actress was among the hosts at the 17th Annual Benefit Gala for the American Institute for Stuttering, a nonprofit dedicated to affordable speech therapy services, held in New York City. She wore a striking long-sleeved red gown featuring a collar and bow paired with matching red heeled sandals. She topped off the look with Anita Ko gold-and-diamond rings and wore natural, rosy makeup.
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Blunt attended the gala to help raise awareness about stuttering, a speech disorder she dealt with growing up.
She told Access Hollywood ahead of the event, “I understand the plight. I understand the journey. I understand how hard it can be, when you have so much to say and so much to share with the world, how limiting it is. It’s like a cage on people’s true character. So, it’s an emotional cause and it’s one that I’ve lived, and I understand. I love coming here because you hear people’s stories.”
She added: “That’s really what I tell everyone is that it’s not all of you, it’s just a part of you. Everyone’s got something, this just is your thing.”
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Blunt has previously opened up about her experience dealing with the speech disorder, and how it ultimately led her to study acting. “Stutterers are some of the most courageous people because it’s such a minefield every time you open your mouth,” she said in an interview with You in 2021.
“I really didn’t want to be an actress,” she added. “I had a deliberate resistance to it because I couldn’t imagine doing a job where you had to speak all the time.”
The actress said she was able to improve her speech by speaking in different “silly” accents, her first lead-in to performance. “It actually gave me a fluency I wasn’t otherwise capable of,” she said. “It was the making of me, in many ways.”
Sabrina Park is a Digital Fellow at HarpersBAZAAR.com where she covers news, fashion, and culture stories. When she’s not writing she loves hanging out with her cat, reading outdoors and scrolling the depths of TikTok.
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