Colin Firth (19 page)

Firth, last seen parodying his doppelgänger Mr Darcy in
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, immersed himself in Holocaust literature for the part and found himself haunted by the experience. Yet the first month of filming was marked by fits of the giggles.

‘That could be quite hard for people to understand, and possibly offensive,’ he told
The Sunday Times
. ‘When you put fifteen boys together and introduce something that makes them all a bit nervous, it’s a recipe for slightly hilarious ribaldry, although we weren’t joking about the subject matter.’

In the initial read-through, the actors were torn between their horror and the need to lighten the mood, meaning they laughed at the chilling gags in the script and then covered their mouths in disgust. ‘It was when they were discussing
how to sterilize people without them knowing. Someone said you could have an X-ray machine hidden under a desk. At which, another character says, “I’m not coming into your office.”’

The true evil behind the meeting hit home when the cast travelled to Berlin to shoot scenes at the actual villa in Wannsee where the meeting took place. The building is now a Holocaust museum and Colin, who had read numerous books on the genocide, was moved by the exhibits on show.

‘I was born in 1960, and for those of us not directly affected, the Holocaust had seemed like ancient history,’ he said. ‘It had been difficult for me to maintain my outrage. But there were photographs in that museum – medical experiments, some involving children – which are some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I was haunted for months afterwards.’

On its release the TV movie was widely acclaimed, winning a Best Actor Emmy for Kenneth Branagh and Best Supporting Actor nod for Colin. It also won Best Single Drama at the 2002 BAFTAs and Stanley Tucci took the Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes.

•  •  •  

Before filming the hard-hitting drama, Colin embarked on a new venture for pal Nick Hornby, in agreeing to write a short story for publication.
Speaking with the Angel
was a collection of tales by various writers, including Irvine Welsh, Helen Fielding and Robert Harris, in a fund-raising tome for the Treehouse Trust, a charity which runs schools for autistic children, one of which Nick’s son Danny attended. Colin, who had always harboured a secret desire to write, was
honoured to be included among the talented authors, but he confessed he found submitting ‘The Department of Nothing’ harder than taking on a film role. ‘Writing has not been a deadly serious secret pursuit before launching myself on the world. It’s a hobby I enjoy – something I might do in Biro on an aeroplane,’ he revealed. ‘But it is a lot more exposing than I imagined.’

His first-hand tale of a prepubescent lad who lives a fantasy life through his bedridden grandmother’s daily storytelling session was well written and moving. The lad’s isolation at school echoed Colin’s own schooldays, and his temporary popularity, brought about by his repetition of Gran’s episodic adventures, mirrored a status he would have wished for in secondary school but only truly achieved after finding his acting talent.

‘When I agreed, I thought, “I’m an actor, I’ll just ramble on until I find a voice,” but it just kept coming out awful,’ he told
The Sunday Times.
But he admitted he was ‘chuffed’ with the finished story.

At home, as Livia’s pregnancy progressed, Colin was being more attentive than ever. With the March due date looming, she decided to leave London for Rome in order to be closer to her parents when the time came and because, he later joked, ‘My wife preferred to suffer in Italian.’ Her husband happily agreed, knowing that it would mean she was safe in the bosom of her family, should the baby arrive when he was away for work or promotion for the soon-to-be-released
Bridget Jones’s Diary.
It also meant that the press failed to get wind of the impending birth until the very last minute.

‘I’m absolutely over the moon. It’s about to pop, and no one has sussed it,’ he told
The Guardian
in March. ‘Ever since
I met Livy, people have been speculating that she’s pregnant and it’s never been true. Now she’s enormous and she’s been in public but, weirdly, people stopped pursuing it.’

When the stars turned out to London’s Leicester Square for the glitzy premiere of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
on 4 April 2001, Colin, minus his wife, walked down the carpet wearing the biggest grin of them all. Just days before, on 29 March, Livia had given birth to Luca. Colin had been at the birth and had cut the umbilical cord, which he described to
Vogue
as ‘an unbelievable experience. Friends of mine who had been through the birth of a child warned me that there could be relationship problems afterward, because in your mind you have a picture of your wife in pain. However, I found the whole process from conception, pregnancy and birth to be an erotic experience. For me it was an erotic cycle that culminated with the birth of a child.’

Despite the fact he was ‘walking on air’ at the premiere, it proved a wrench to leave Livia so soon after the birth to attend the event in London and then, a week later, another in LA. But at least his language skills were benefiting.

‘My Italian is pretty good but I’m adding words like “burp” and “wipe” to my vocabulary,’ he admitted at the US junket. ‘I spoke to him on the phone this morning and he burped. I was in tears.’

In an afterthought, which may well have come back to haunt him later, he compared his new son to a root vegetable. ‘He looks a little like a turnip,’ he joked. ‘But a beautiful turnip.’

Having had plenty of practice on his oldest son, Will, in the wilds of Canada, changing nappies came naturally and he is a very hands-on dad. Being older the second time around was also a great help because, he revealed, ‘this time,
I feel a little more equipped for it’. Unlike Will’s infancy, when he had been on a self-imposed career break, the success of
Bridget
had made him hot property once again and the offers were flooding in. Having always limited his work to maximize time with his eldest, Colin now had to factor in his second family when it came to picking projects. He was careful to strike a balance between work and home, stating that ‘I am at the point where my family and spare time are more important’.

‘I’ll be a dad who goes to work,’ he told
The Guardian
. ‘I do intend to be a dad. If I do do something in the summer, it’ll have to be something where I can have my kids around me.’ The continuing adulation over Darcy, he said, ‘pales into insignificance next to the things you really care about in your life’.

Thankfully, young Luca was a cooperative baby so Colin could turn up on set in the morning without the usual baggy-eyed look of the new dad. ‘He must have Chianti in his blood,’ he told Italian
Vogue
. ‘We’re lucky; he’s slept through the night from the beginning. Everything gets taken care of for him except eating and sleeping.’ And he joked that, as soon as he got to work, the roles were reversed. ‘It’s the same with actors. The actor finds himself in a childlike position. Someone tells you when to get up, you could actually turn up naked because someone at work will dress you anyway, they blow-dry your hair. Your face gets made up. Actually, it’s miserable. Someone even tells you when you should eat. Then you are shown where to stand, what to say and how. Then in the evening, it’s reversed.’

Warming to his theme, he continued, ‘Why doesn’t my wife appreciate it when I throw my dirty laundry on the floor? When I call my agent, he drops everything. I’m not a
person with airs, but those are the rules of the industry. They dance around you like the Golden Calf.

‘When you come home and you have a hungry baby that is crying, then you are the one that must let everything else go. You can’t call your agent and say, “My children are behaving obnoxiously, do something to make them stop!”’

Bridget Jones’s Diary
opened on 15 April 2001 to rave reviews and a huge box office bonanza. With an opening weekend of £5 million in the UK and over $10 million in the States the movie had made most of its £16 million budget back within a few days and the final gross came in at £175 million ($280 million).

The critics on both sides of the Atlantic loved the film, and the new Mr Darcy, as much as the public did.

Stephen Hunter of the
Washington Post
wrote, ‘Grant is casually fabulous and very amusing, but all power to Firth the actor. He’s the compleat Darcy, and he never wavers …You can see him simmering with rage – at Bridget for being so attractive, at himself for never quite knowing what to say, at both of them for being prey to such childishness, at his libido for wanting and at his ego for fearing. Especially poignant are his long looks at her. You see in his eyes his yearning hunger and his fury at his own ineloquence and inability to find the will to move ahead, from across the unbridgeable distance of a large room filled with happy people.’

In the
Daily Mail
Christopher Tookey commented, in mock
Bridget Jones’s Diary
style, ‘Firth excellent at little eye-flickers that give away hidden sensitivity beneath,’ and added, ‘Also makes change to see articulate Englishman in movies who is not complete swine or twit.’ And
Independent
critic Laura Tennant gushed, ‘Firth might as well have “good husband material” tattooed across his forehead, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, he makes a devastatingly sexy Darcy. And ladies, I mean devastating.’

No sooner had Colin returned from the worldwide promotion of the movie, however, than he was on set for his next one. Fortunately,
The Importance of Being Earnest
was to be filmed in London’s Ealing Studios and at West Wycombe Park, the home of the infamous upper-class miscreants The Hellfire Club, and for Colin a forty-five-minute drive from home. Costume fittings, conveniently, took place in Rome so the busy actor could spent plenty of time with Livia and Luca during the eight-week shoot. According to the producer, Barnaby Thompson, he and co-star Rupert Everett came away with seventeen outfits each, although Colin insisted, ‘I never demanded them, I was provided with them!’

Although it had now been eighteen years since they fell out on the set of
Another Country
, the two leads had managed to avoid each other since. Having recently completed
An Ideal Husband
with
Earnest
director Oliver Parker, Rupert was the natural choice for this next Oscar Wilde classic. But he wasn’t exactly chuffed when he learned who his co-star would be.

‘I certainly had some trepidation,’ he admitted. ‘Later Colin asked me what my reaction was when I’d been told that he’d been offered the part of Jack. And quite honestly I said, “Oh God, not him again!”’ Rupert added that he had been pleasantly surprised when Colin turned up at the read-through without his ‘awful guitar’ and told him he was glad he had ‘lost that red-brick “Robin-Hoody” thing that you were working in the old days’.

Colin was less worried. The characters of Algernon and Jack are best friends and bitter rivals who spend the entire play throwing clever insults at the other. Oliver assured them that any ‘frisson’ would work in their favour.

‘I was fascinated after all these years,’ Colin told
The Times
in August 2002. ‘I mean, even if we still couldn’t stand each other, I thought, “That’s got to be interesting, to see what happens this time.” And I suppose in some ways I wondered if we were born to be a couple really. The dynamic is not that different now; it’s become slightly more grotesque, and then it was slightly more elegant and we were younger and it had to do with political idealism.

‘And it worked in
Another Country
because you had one character who is extremely intense and idealistic and another one who basically wants all the privileges of life and is flamboyant. And that reproduces itself, to some extent, in
The Importance of Being Earnest.
’

Colin still had one issue with Rupert. Standing at six foot two, Colin was used to being the taller one on set but his old adversary was six foot four and it made him feel unusually small.

‘It’s not often I’m looking up to someone and feeling like the little guy. But I swear Rupert’s grown in eighteen years,’ he continued. ‘I feel like I’m Ernie to his Eric or something. Actually, it’s even worse, I feel like Peter Glaze to his Leslie Crowther. You know, the little round angry man constantly frothing with the indignity of it all, that’s me, and he’s the tall, funny, languid fellow.’

Director Oliver was aware of the pair’s past antipathy and was keen to make sure that it didn’t make for an unhappy set when shooting began. He insisted on taking them both out for a pre-shoot dinner and he revealed he was pleased with the resulting truce.

‘Actually, they are like brothers now,’ he said to
The Times.
‘They are fantastic at bantering and bickering, it’s really funny. Rupert is so sharp and Colin comes up and matches him. And they were like that all the way through filming. I actually think they are extremely fond of each other.’

Wilde’s most famous comedy has the young Jack Worthing living a double life, facilitated by the invention of a brother, Ernest. The imagined existence of the wayward sibling allows him to live the wild life in London without fear his misdeeds will be reported back to his seat in the country and, more importantly, to his innocent young niece, Cecily Cardew. Algernon uses a similar subterfuge to escape to the country. This tangled web of lies begins to unravel when Jack falls for Gwendolen, who believes he is Ernest, and Algernon attempts to woo Cecily, who believes the same of him.