Colin Firth (14 page)

The screenplay touched a raw nerve in Colin’s soul and took him back to his teenage years, when his attempts at gaining some sort of street cred were scuppered by his middle-class background in a respectable suburban family. ‘I’m
a secondary-modern-educated white suburban male,’ he told
Intelligent Life
magazine. ‘Nick was the same generation and grew up in Maidenhead, which is exactly like where I grew up, and what really resonated was this idea that boys from the suburbs don’t have any roots. You step out of school and into a cultural void. There’s no music from your part of the world that makes you want to weep into your beer. There’s been no artistic revolution or sacrifice. One ends up casting around for credentials of some kind, claiming some sort of Celtic blood, yearning to be a Delta bluesman – or in Nick’s case, Charlie George. I may be English, but my sensibilities reside in Rome. I may be middle class, but my granny comes from Brum. Anything just to give yourself a bit of substance.’

Colin was in Rome with Livia when he first read
Fever Pitch
and, once again, the thought of settling down crossed his mind. ‘It gave me a yearning for England and the sort of rootedness that Nick Hornby talks about – the kind of rootedness you have to find, because it is not something you grew up with … I felt he wrote about Englishness now – my generation – in an extremely unsentimental and yet not hostile or bitter way. And I found that quite unusual.’

Contemplating the transient nature of film-making, he sounded more and more wistful about putting down roots. ‘Making a film is so self-contained that very little else enters your consciousness,’ he told
The Times
. ‘Then it’s over, and the chances are that you will never again see people who have become your entire existence. A certain amount of consistency is essential to anyone, and I have found it difficult being without that as time goes on.’

While Colin was running from the Darcy image, co-star Ruth Gemmell could hardly get the famous wet breeches out her mind. When signing up as Paul’s girlfriend Sarah in the movie, she had no idea who would take the lead role.

‘When I found out that was nerve-wracking enough. But then when I had to kiss him before I’d barely knew him, I was terrified,’ she told the
Sunday Mirror
. ‘But he’s so lovely that he immediately put me at ease.

‘Like everyone else I’d seen him in
Pride and Prejudice
and was pretty impressed. So the prospect of working with him was scary. But I decided right at the start that if I felt nervous about the love scenes I would just tell him because he’s not the kind of man who would think that was funny.’

In order to get to know each other a little better, Ruth and Colin met in a London pub and shared a few drinks. The nervous actress found her co-star easy to chat to and was soon put at ease.

‘We had a few pints, swapped a few stories and by the end of it we knew how we were going to play the characters,’ she remembered. ‘By the time the love scenes came around he wasn’t the elusive Mr Darcy any more. He wasn’t even Colin the heart-throb. He was just Colin.’

She even confessed to falling asleep on the UK’s biggest heart-throb – while they were in bed together.

‘He was explaining the difference between the Premier League and the Nationwide League, and I’m afraid I got a bit bored and dropped off,’ she explained. ‘I know it was a bit rude and the truth was I had actually asked him. But when he started to tell me my eyes just glazed over.’

Although not as passionate about the beautiful game as Nick, Colin is a fan but says he is more a ‘watcher of the World Cup’ than a denizen of the terraces. ‘I envy his passion,’ he explained. ‘It must be great to have something to identify with in that way, to feel obsessive about. I feel very rootless, from my upbringing out in the sticks.’ Even so, the
smaller, balding author Nick Hornby was delighted to have his fictional self played by one of the most fancied men in England. ‘Casting Colin was a unanimous choice,’ he said, adding, in jest. ‘It would have been even nicer to have had Tom Cruise.’

In another interview he joked, ‘Colin’s got a bit more hair than me, but otherwise we’re indistinguishable.’

But living and breathing the history of the Gunners on set meant Colin had soon become almost as obsessed as the author. ‘Arsenal has begun to have a disturbing influence on me,’ he admitted. ‘I was watching a documentary recently and thought: “Oh, they’re wearing Arsenal colours,” only to realize it was filmed at Christmas and they were Santa Claus outfits! And I’ve woken up with football chants in my head.’

‘He got really into it,’ Ruth confirms. ‘He’s the kind of actor who totally throws himself into a part. I know he went to lots of games with Mark Strong who plays his best friend in the film and he immersed himself in football memorabilia for the whole time we were working. But football gets you like that. I think it gives people a common bond, a sense of belonging. But Colin is not as serious as people think. He’s also a very sweet man.’

Although
Fever Pitch
centres on the Gunners’ championship-winning season of 1988–9, everyone involved was keen to point out that it was not a ‘football movie’ in the traditional sense. Rather, it turns a spotlight on Paul’s relationship with Sarah at a time when his obsession is reaching a peak, and Colin claimed it was actually a very romantic movie.

‘The film will appeal very strongly to people who aren’t die-hard soccer fans, or not fans at all,’ he insisted. ‘They’re not its target audience – it’s not something you can go and
chant to. This is a romantic comedy with a capital R but there’s not a lot of sweet stuff, Paul and Sarah aren’t throwing petals over each other’s heads. They mostly argue – it’s about the problems in their relationship. It’s truthful and moving.’

While the film was being shot in London, Colin’s most famous fictional fan, Bridget Jones, was filling column inches in
The Independent
with her adoration for Mr Darcy. Nick invited Helen Fielding, the journalist behind the ditsy, blonde singleton on to the set and she wrote a hilarious account of their meeting in the second book. But the actor later revealed he felt uncomfortable with the visit.

‘I felt a little bit shy and clumsy and embarrassed,’ he recalled to
The Times.
‘I felt I was the one making the faux pas and saying the wrong things.’ Her hilarious write-up, he claimed, ‘didn’t echo my recollection, although Nick said it was very close to what had happened. She wrote a thing about having followed me inadvertently everywhere around the set until eventually I said, “I am going to have to go on alone from here because it’s the men’s toilet.” I don’t remember that. Nick says it’s true.’

The lovestruck Bridget would have been horrified to encounter another of Colin’s set visitors. During visits to London, Livia joined her famous man and also hung out with Nick, who was by now a close friend of Colin’s. The author was very taken with the lively Italian, calling her ‘joke-perfect: PhD, beautiful in that sultry Italian way, funny and vivacious. She’s very good for Firth, because she’s absolutely not in any thrall to him.’ And, he added, she ‘affects to be completely mystified by the Mr Darcy situation’.

As a younger, more carefree bachelor, Colin had dismissed the idea of love and marriage with the oft-repeated quote, ‘Falling in love stops you from caring for so many other things. I don’t enjoy being overwhelmed by someone. I don’t often fall hopelessly for someone. I don’t need a woman around.’

Now, at thirty-six, he was warming to the idea of settling down and admitted that a stable home life was beginning to sound attractive. ‘It’s been growing on me for a while,’ he told
The Observer
. ‘I used to romanticize the itinerant, artistic life, full of heartache and new experiences, and I’ve probably courted that, cultivated it in myself, made it seem rather bohemian and fascinating. I don’t know if I can take it much more. I really feel a bit too old. I would like to feel I had a more consistent base for myself.’

Jennifer Ehle had been, he revealed, the first younger woman he had dated and he insisted that Livia, nine years his junior, was more mature than him.

‘I don’t really feel very conscious of Livia being younger. In terms of maturity, it is like being with an older woman and she is not so much. She is twenty-seven. It is only nine years, so it is not a huge age gap. She is so much more mature than I am. She is settled and rooted. And she is not an actress for a start, so she is not nearly so fucked-up as I am.’

Colin was madly in love with Livia, and madly in love with Italy which, he said, had ‘inundated me with gifts’. The next step was, inevitably, a romantic wedding in the Italian hillside. Colin proposed and Livia happily accepted. The romantic hero had found his perfect heroine.

H
IS
BRIDE-TO-BE
MAY
have been happily immune to his celebrity status but Colin was finding the swell of attention difficult to deal with. After
Pride and Prejudice
aired, the press staked out Colin’s Hackney flat and the engagement only made them hungrier for news on his love life. Pictures of him emptying his bins and even unloading a vacuum cleaner at his home were suddenly saleable goods. For the intensely private actor, it came as a shock to be at the centre of so much speculation. And it got worse when the British press followed the couple to Rome. ‘It was very, very unnerving in a way that it’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t had it happen. I was someone who wouldn’t have taken it seriously as a threat until it actually happened.’

Coping with the public reaction to the now infamous series was not a problem for the star, who claimed that most of his fans sent him edifying books rather than sexy underwear.
‘I feel a bit of an imposter,’ he joked. ‘I certainly don’t get mobbed in the street and nobody’s sent me their knickers yet. There is a “Fans of Firth” website now, or so I’ve been told.’
But the press intrusion was becoming a serious worry. ‘It became extremely important to me that my wedding day was not invaded by paparazzi,’ he told
The Times
. ‘We had the Diana experience in Rome of being chased through underpasses on motorbikes at the time leading up to the wedding. That night was the first night I’d decided it was a game, that this could be fun. I felt like I was in a Bond film. But you do get a bit paranoid. I got very skittish about
being invaded, and also some of the trickery was unnerving. People phoning up pretending to be British Telecom, trying to get information, and you get this horrible feeling afterwards when you realize it wasn’t British Telecom and you’ve just told them things.’

The thirty-six-year-old actor was blissfully happy with Livia and had listened with some scepticism to actors complaining about the ‘price of fame’ in the past. But, as the couple attempted to arrange their wedding in privacy, they were finding that
Pride and Prejudice
had changed Colin’s life for ever.

‘I think I kept trying to characterize it as something that didn’t make any difference,’ Colin revealed. ‘It’s very hard to analyse it. It might have made me a little bit self-conscious about things … I don’t know whether it taps into some instinctive fear of being pursued or being spied on, but when you wake up in the morning and you see the house staked out, you see there’s somebody out there, waiting for you, or they’re standing by a car, even if there’s only two people, a photographer and a journalist, the impulse is to draw the curtains and keep peeking, and wondering if they’ve
got the telephone number. It makes you paranoid, basically. They are things which in the scheme of things seem very harmless to most people and a small price to pay for all the perks, and that’s fair, but if I’m asked directly what it did to make my life any different, that’s probably the only thing.’

In the meantime
The English Patient
hit cinema screens with maximum impact. Released in November 1996 in the United States in order to qualify for the following year’s Oscar nominations, it hit the UK in March, shortly after scooping thirteen Oscar nominations. It went on to win nine, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Juliette Binoche and Best Director for Anthony Minghella. Kristen Scott Thomas lost out to
Fargo
’s
Frances McDormand while Ralph Fiennes, nominated as Best Actor, was pipped at the post by Colin’s future
King’s Speech
co-star and friend, Geoffrey Rush, for his role in
Shine.

The film took the world by storm, lauded as loudly in the States as it was at home. Tom Shone, of
The Sunday Times
, wrote, ‘
The English Patient
is both a stirring epic and a great love story –
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Brief Encounter
rolled into one. You will not forget it.’ And he added, ‘That the cuckolded husband is played by no less than Mr Darcy gives you some idea of the array of good looks on offer in this movie.’

For
Time
magazine, ‘Poignant, ravishing, sharply felt, Minghella’s rich, magnificent
English Patient
is one of those rare films that transcends demographics. Its wit, sophistication and artistry never are at odds with the fundamental pull of a powerful love story that out-Zhivagos
Doctor Zhivago
because it respects love’s mysteries, admits it doesn’t know the heart’s boundaries.’

For Colin to be starring in such a prestigious and well-received
British movie, without receiving all the attention that he would have done in the Ralph Fiennes role, was a relief to him in the post-Darcy wave. But Ralph’s star was rising in Hollywood and Colin, who had deliberately avoided the lure of the LA lights, calling it ‘boring’ and stating, ‘You have to be very fond of palm trees’, was losing out on the lead roles. Preferring to pick projects on the basis of merit alone, he was happy with his choices.