Colin Firth (10 page)

Not far from the Arctic Circle, the area was so cold that snowdrifts were common and often they couldn’t open the door to leave home. There was no television and Colin spent much of his time making furniture and chopping logs. On 20 September 1990 Meg gave birth to their son, William Joseph Firth. Colin had proved a great stepdad to Emily and
David, whom he loved dearly, and he was delighted with his first child. But work was scarce and he was beginning to worry about the future. His successful career to date seemed to count for nothing, even in the most provincial of theatres.

‘I wrote to local Vancouver theatres saying what I’d done, without blowing my own trumpet, and that I’d be happy to do kids’ workshops, but not one of them replied,’ he recalled ‘When I read a piece in a British tabloid saying that I’d been sniffing round Hollywood, trying to get a Jeremy Irons-type break, when all I’d been doing was changing nappies, I felt that all that mattered was that I’d gone. It felt dangerous.’

He began to wonder if he was cut out for life in the wilderness and whether he would ever work again. After two years he had gone from the brink of a Hollywood break-through to almost total obscurity. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it as a career move,’ he later joked.

As his doubts about his retreat mounted, the relationship began to develop cracks and even the vast landscape itself began to crush his spirits. Having grown up in Hampshire, Essex and Missouri, he was not prepared for the isolation in this frozen backwater and for that he blamed himself.

‘I’m too much of a lightweight for it,’ he said to
The Times
in 2000.
‘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 twenty minutes you can get lost by going round in circles.’

Becoming a father for the first time, while thrilling, had also come as a shock. Looking back, Colin feels he wasn’t
mature enough to embrace the huge changes in his life. ‘I was thirty and I still felt far too young for anything like that. I hadn’t quite got over not being eighteen any more, and having a child changed my life dramatically.’

Colin began to fly home for the occasional role. In the summer of 1991 he starred in a run of Harold Pinter’s
The Caretaker
at London’s Comedy Theatre, winning rave reviews for his portrayal of the disturbed and unhappy brother, Aston. Charles Spencer of
The Daily Telegraph
called him ‘hypnotic’ and said his account of his character’s treatment in a mental hospital sent ‘shivers coursing down the spine’. He took an uncredited role in Martin Donovan’s
Mad at the Moon
, opposite his
Apartment Zero
co-star Hart Bochner, and signed up for a docu-drama about the capture and release of the Beirut hostages, in which he played John McCarthy. But in order to reboot his career, he knew he had to face reality and base himself somewhere more accessible.

In 1992, with heavy heart, Colin sat Meg down and quietly told her the relationship was over and that he was going back to London for good. Will, whom he adored, was just two and the heart-wrenching decision had taken much soul-searching. In the long tearful discussions to follow, Colin vowed to be a good dad to Will and to see as much of him as possible. Though heartbroken, Meg accepted that the couple wanted different things and staying in Canada would finish Colin’s career.

‘We were together for four years in a log cabin in the forests of Canada, where she grew up,’ said Colin. ‘But I missed London. For two years I didn’t act; I just did odd jobs as a carpenter and being so cut off from the world began to get to me. So I went back to England.’

After long heart-to-hearts, the pair parted on good
terms, determined to stay that way for the sake of their son.

‘He’s one of my best friends,’ Meg revealed two years later. ‘We just couldn’t make it work with him having to live in England for his career, and me here. There was too much separation.’

Colin returned to London, bruised and battered from the painful break-up and devastated at leaving his toddler son behind, nearly 5,000 miles from England. The need to see Will as often as possible would shape the rest of his career, meaning long stints in the theatre were impossible, the long American summer holidays had to be kept clear and, occasionally, a less than perfect part would be accepted purely because it brought him closer to his son.

In 1994 Colin admitted to taking the role of a twisted drama coach who trains his female student through a series of mental tortures in
The Playmaker
purely so he could travel to LA. ‘My son happened to be in LA at the time,’ he told
The Sun
. ‘It was a three-week job and it paid extremely well. I knew it would be complete rubbish and I sincerely hope no one ever sees it.’

He rarely returned to the log cabin and would either spend time in LA, where Meg had another home, or fly Will to London to stay with him. It was on one such trip that Will saw his father on screen for the first time. Both his parents had felt it was better not to confuse the boy by allowing him to see his mum and dad in fictional situations that he didn’t understand and Meg had never allowed her children to have a TV in the cabin. ‘It’s not everybody that sees his or her father on a screen, or on the television,’ explained Colin. ‘And I wanted him to feel relatively normal.’ At the age of three, however, Will was on an aeroplane and the inflight movie happened to be one of his father’s. The surprised toddler pointed to the screen, stood up and shouted, ‘That’s my daddy!’

Despite their distance, Colin remained, as Meg put it, an ‘involved father’ and shares a great relationship with his son to this day.

I
N
THE
SPRING
of 1992 Colin returned to England to play John McCarthy in the Granada drama
Hostages.
John had been released in Lebanon in August 1991, after five years as a prisoner of Islamic extremists. His fellow captor, Brian Keenan, had already been free for a year, Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland were released in November, and the final US prisoner, Terry Anderson, in December. Throughout his incarceration John’s girlfriend, Jill Morrell, had devoted her life to the campaign to free the hostages and the docudrama focused on both the plight of the men in Beirut and the struggle of their friends and family at home.

Colin studied all the footage that he could find about John’s bravery and composure to betray the emotional and physical reaction the young journalist would have been through in captivity But filming brought some gruelling scenes which gave a taste of the ordeal, even if it was only
for a brief time. The hardest scene, he revealed, was recreating
the transportation of the hostages, wrapped up ‘like
mummies in grey parcel tape from ankles to nose’ and made to lie in shallow coffin-like drawers while they were driven in a lorry for eight to ten hours. One French hostage, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, was trussed up this way for ten hours and was so distressed he begged his captors to kill him.

‘It wasn’t until the tape was wrapped above my hands, which were by my side, that I realized how trapped I was beginning to feel, and it wasn’t till it got past my neck
and chin that I realized it was going to get even worse,’ he told
Elle
magazine. ‘It robs you of your physical sense of yourself …’

Aware that his own experience was nothing compared to that of the real hostages, he added, ‘I know it always sounds terribly precious when an actor talks like this. Someone has been through this for five years and an actor does it for the cameras and says, “Absolutely horrific, I must go into therapy.” But it gave me a clue. And you apply your imagination, so you are not thinking about going off and having a shower back at the hotel. You are thinking: what would I be feeling now if it was for real?’

Like
Tumbledown,
the production hit controversy before it hit the screen. John McCarthy objected to the idea of his life being retold as a TV drama and pleaded with Granada to pull the programme. The account must be fictionalized, he insisted, because he didn’t want to be seen as ‘a character dreamt up by a scriptwriter’.

He added: ‘I don’t understand how Granada can present a realistic account of what I went through when I haven’t told Granada or indeed anyone else what it was like. I do hope the viewers aren’t given the impression that they are watching a true account of my experience. I have made my opposition clear to Granada and I am saddened that they are still going ahead.’

Granada’s Director of Programmes Steve Morrison argued that Brian Keenan’s sisters and Terry Anderson’s sister Peggy Say, played by Kathy Bates in the programme, had all had some input into the script. Jill Morrell, played by Colin’s
A Month in the Country
co-star Natasha Richardson, had also been co-operating until John was released.

‘When the hostages see this film they’ll agree that the story should be told. They’ll like the film,’ he said. ‘It is not our object to sensationalize these stories, it is our object to tell what really happened. We think the public needs to know. The hostages are all very strong, courageous men and they have been through all sorts of counselling and have all talked at length about it when they came out.’

Granada also asserted that the screenwriter Bernard MacLaverty had based much of his script on facts gleaned by Alasdair Palmer, a former
World In Action
investigator who spent eighteen months researching
Hostages
. He spoke to all the hostages except Terry Anderson and Terry Waite, including Keenan and McCarthy, and his major sources were Frank Reed and Tom Sutherland.

In the week of its release a letter from four of the hostages – John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite and Terry Anderson – was published in
The Guardian
, stating that this was not the ‘true story’ of the kidnaps it was purporting to be. They wrote: ‘We are all writing personal accounts of our experiences and do not understand how Granada and HBO can think they have a right to produce a story, reporting to be true, before those at the centre of it have come to terms with it themselves.’

For Colin, who lived by his heightened sense of
fair play, John McCarthy’s rejection of the project was a disappointment but he remained philosophical about it and was vocal in backing the programme.

‘I was very, very concerned when I found out that McCarthy wasn’t endorsing it,’ Colin revealed. ‘I was very concerned they were making something so soon after the event and if I hadn’t found myself reconciled to it all in the end I wouldn’t have done it. I think the script is honest and the only things that have irritated the shit out of me so far have been the aspersions on the integrity of the people involved.’

Even so, he was not surprised by John McCarthy’s reaction because, as a journalist and professional storyteller, John was bound to resent someone else telling the story of his personal experiences.

‘I’d say “hands off” too,’ Colin said to
Elle
magazine. ‘I’d be amazed if he said anything else, quite frankly. But people have got to be able to tell stories. The professional storytellers of this world, be they journalists, novelists, singers or actors, are always going to tell stories about events which are provocative, inspiring, uncomfortable or capture the imagination in some way – as this certainly does.’

The controversy surrounding the programme meant that, after a two-year absence, Colin was once again making column inches in newspapers and magazines. But his work hiatus meant that he would have to put in a little more legwork to get back to the top of casting directors’ wish lists.

For now, he was back to France and back in period costume for the BBC-backed film
The Hour of the Pig.
Still smarting from the painful split with Meg, returning to the country where they first fell in love brought back haunting memories for the now single actor. The film was shot in Pérouges,
a medieval walled village on the Ain River, and Colin played a fifteenth-century lawyer in a provincial town, who takes on the defence of a pig accused of the murder of a young boy. ‘Most film scripts are crap,’ he declared in a west London newspaper. ‘But the last thing I did had a wonderful script, a once in a lifetime, it’s the best since
Tumbledown
– a masterpiece which read brilliantly.’

Although it is based on the cases of Bartholemew Chassenee, a real lawyer who defended animals against criminal charges on numerous occasions, the plot involving the accused boar originally seemed a little far-fetched, if well written. That was until Colin came face to face with his swine co-star, which was actually a female half-breed called Gwinny.

‘It was a half-wild boar, dark and bristly with huge teeth, and when I met it for the first time the idea did not seem so silly,’ recalled Colin.

Her owner, Joe Henson, says that, although Gwinny had the potential to terrorize her fellow stars, Colin’s legendary charm even won this lady over.

‘Gwinny had tusks,’ says her owner. ‘She had already bitten another actor twice.’ And when Colin met his highly strung co-star, Henson was on hand in case he got into trouble. He walked into the dank London dungeon where they were to film the first scene, sat next to Gwinny and began talking to her. ‘Then he started scratching behind her ear, and she literally rubbed up against him and laid down with her head in his lap. The pig fell in love with him.’ After that, whenever the pair were on set together, the besotted sow would sleep at his feet between scenes.