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Interview with Colin Firth in The Observer, Sunday April 9, 2000
Colin Firth! Mr Darcy! You cannot mention one of these names without the other following immediately. Both have been changed immeasurably, in the public eye, by their relationship with the other. Before the Firth treatment, Mr Darcy was seen as a dour, mildly unpleasant, if misunderstood character in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice . Before he was Darcy, Colin Firth was a tall, well-built English actor with an expressive face and a string of smouldering, half-forgotten characters behind him. He'd been Robert Lawrence, the wounded Falklands veteran; he'd been Valmont in the Milos Forman film of the same name; he'd been a nutcase in a Ruth Rendell crime drama. And then, in 1994, he was cast as Mr Darcy. What was so special about Mr Darcy? Women loved him. For a great part of the BBC's version in the story, he hung around in the background, not saying much. Firth did a lot of his acting with his eyes. Other characters talked a great deal about him while he was absent. Unlike a lot of male heroes, he was a mystery. He was in no way a feminised wimp. Late in the day, burning with passion and unfulfilled sexual desire, he jumped off his horse into a pond and emerged, his shirt dripping. What people remember is those mutton-chop sideburns flying through the air. For the entire Bridget Jones generation, this was a superb antidote to the dull, whining, noncommittal New Man of the 90s - and he didn't drink lager and go on about football all the time. Since then, Firth has become part of the zeitgeist. He has entered the language. After Darcy, of course, he was playing a 90s football fan - the Nick Hornby character in Fever Pitch. Next, rumour has it, he will play Mark Darcy in the film version of Bridget Jones's Diary. The official status of the rumour, according to a spokesperson from Working Title, the film's production company, is 'unconfirmed'. Still, it's pretty exciting. Bridget has already interviewed a fictional version of Firth himself in the second Bridget Jones book, The Edge of Reason. In the world of Colin Firth, art is beginning to copy art. At the moment of Darcy, Firth, who was 34, was wondering how much time he had left as a romantic lead. Having accepted the part, he said, 'I don't know how much longer that sort of character will be available to me.' Afterwards, he was stunned at the way people identified him with the character. 'I felt as if I'd lost my whole personality,' he says. He tells me: 'It's been very strange, this idea of Mr Darcy appealing so much to women. Because obviously, as you can see, I don't carry that around with me. I'm not so Mr Darcy every day of my life. If people expect to see a saturnine, dark, smouldering tall aristocrat, they are going to be disappointed.' At rest, Firth's face is set in a sort of handsome grimace, he looks easily haunted. The mouth turns slightly down; the bones of the face cast shadows. But his expressions change with almost no effort; as an acting tool, this is a highly strung face. One slight touch on the happy pedal and he beams; an iota of misery and he glowers. 'I never saw myself as Mr Ugly, but I'm not that handsome,' he told me. 'I can sort of be made to look quite a lot better or quite a lot worse.' I first meet Colin Firth, now 39, on the set of Donovan Quick, a forthcoming BBC television film in which, as usual, he plays an intense, edgy fellow who hides behind a mask of English reticence. He is genial and welcoming, and speaks in that unusual, slightly old-fashioned voice which is perfect for costume drama. That's his actual voice. In person, Firth is not at all like Darcy. There is no sense of menace. Firth's character, obsessed with the tyranny of a national bus company, starts his own. Firth spends the day patiently approaching the bus, and entering the bus, and entering the bus, over and over. He takes instructions from the director, David Blair, with absolute humility. Before we meet again, I catch him several times on TV. He's prolific, having made more than 30 films, and you can often get a glimpse of him late at night, in a youthful guise. Sometimes he has a caddish moustache. Early Firth looked jittery and worried. The mature, smouldering Firth came later. Firth is very English; he plays people who hide their emotions. He often appears melancholic. Firth himself had an unhappy childhood. He once said: 'I'm very suspicious of people who romanticise their childhood.' Firth is married to Livia Guiggioli, an Italian documentary maker. Nick Hornby describes her as 'joke-perfect: PhD, beautiful in that sultry Italian way, funny and vivacious'. She is also, he says, 'very good for Firth, because she's absolutely not in any thrall to him'. She 'affects to be completely mystified' by the Mr Darcy situation. For three years in the 90s, Firth lived with the actress Meg Tilly, whom he fell in love with on the set of Milos Forman's Valmont. They have a son, Will, who is now nine. We met again, recently, in a film production office in London's West End. Again, Firth is impeccably warm and charming. He wears neutral clothes; his hair is on the short side of bouffant. Firth's hair is either quite short or quite long, never very short or very long. His characters are always outwardly respectable. He tells me he is about to go to Los Angeles to spend time with his son. He says, 'Los Angeles can actually be quite a relaxing place, but the minute you try to invest anything in it, it grabs you and starts to play games with you.' He already sounds like a character in a film. Another reason he is going to California, Firth says, is for 'my own personal relaxation, which is doing very little indeed'. He lived in Canada with Tilly, three hours inland from Vancouver. 'I'm too much of a lightweight for it,' he says. 'It's wilderness. Serious wilderness. It's not a trip to Wimbledon Common. And I rather fancied the quaint idea of the wilderness. It's really the middle of nowhere.' The move, he says, had been Tilly's decision. 'She found the place. I had a kind of reclusive impulse at the time, but not that reclusive. It was too wild. If you go north from where we were, there'd be nothing but woods and grizzly bears, until you get to the Arctic Circle. I found that oppressive. You couldn't even go for walks. There were instructions about going for walks. You take a flare and a map and a blanket and a bell, because within 20 minutes you can get lost by going round in circles.' Firth is gentlemanly, affable. With his deep, old-fashioned voice, he talks as if he were in a smoking room, holding a brandy bubble. We were quickly on to the subject of his childhood. Having been born in Africa, where his parents were teachers, he came to England at the age of four. Then, after stints in Billericay and Brentwood, the family moved to St Louis, Missouri, for a year. Firth was 12. When they came back to England, it was to another town, just outside Winchester. The young Firth felt unsettled. The year in America, he says, 'didn't feel like a very good thing at the time. It was probably a very good thing. I had a very bad time there.' The year abroad had done something to him. 'American kids,' he says, 'were a hell of a lot more sophisticated. I was barely out of grey shorts. I'd come out of primary school, where my classmates had grass-stained knees and collected football cards.' The American kids, on the other hand, 'were more like something out of Woodstock. I was like something out of Just William. They had slogans on their backs that were to do with the Vietnam war. I felt like a geek. I made up for it with a false cockiness. Before I got rejected, I would tell someone to fuck off. Someone would say, "What's your name?" and I'd say, "Mind your own business."' |
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Fame has come full circle for Colin Firth. He won the heart of every woman in the country as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Now he's set to play Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary. A case of art imitating art - but without the sideburns