In this paper, we propose a novel method for speaker adaptation in lip reading, motivated by two observations. Firstly, a speaker's own characteristics can always be portrayed well by his/her few facial images or even a single image with shallow networks, while the fine-grained dynamic features associated with speech content expressed by the talking face always need deep sequential networks to represent accurately. Therefore, we treat the shallow and deep layers differently for speaker adaptive lip reading. Secondly, we observe that a speaker's unique characteristics ( e.g. prominent oral cavity and mandible) have varied effects on lip reading performance for different words and pronunciations, necessitating adaptive enhancement or suppression of the features for robust lip reading. Based on these two observations, we propose to take advantage of the speaker's own characteristics to automatically learn separable hidden unit contributions with different targets for shallow layers and deep layers respectively. For shallow layers where features related to the speaker's characteristics are stronger than the speech content related features, we introduce speaker-adaptive features to learn for enhancing the speech content features. For deep layers where both the speaker's features and the speech content features are all expressed well, we introduce the speaker-adaptive features to learn for suppressing the speech content irrelevant noise for robust lip reading. Our approach consistently outperforms existing methods, as confirmed by comprehensive analysis and comparison across different settings. Besides the evaluation on the popular LRW-ID and GRID datasets, we also release a new dataset for evaluation, CAS-VSR-S68h, to further assess the performance in an extreme setting where just a few speakers are available but the speech content covers a large and diversified range.