Colin Firth (2 page)

Shirley’s father, who went by the rather grand name of Montague John Rolles, was the son of a Bournemouth butcher named Montague Rolles Rolles and descended from farming stock. Montague Jr and wife Helen were Congregationalist ministers when they arrived in India, during the rule of the British Raj, and they soon became involved in the Church of South India, of which Cyril was a founding member. Shirley and David met through the organization when they were three and five respectively. However, after a disagreement with the Church, Montague decided to divert his energy
from religion to medicine and become an osteopath. To qualify, he moved his family to Iowa in the United States, where he would study for seven years before returning to India to set up a practice there.

Although Colin’s four grandparents were missionaries, and his paternal grandfather an ordained minister, he insists that ‘they weren’t the sort of missionaries who went around converting the natives and bashing people over the head with Christianity’.

For their part, Colin’s parents chose academic careers, with David joining the RAF as a student teacher, with the rank of flight officer, before becoming a history lecturer and Shirley, perhaps as a result of her devout background, choosing the specialist field of alternative comparative religions. They wed in 1958 at the Congregational Church in Battersea, where
Shirley was living while studying for her degree. She went on to become a university lecturer but continued to study, publishing a PhD on death and bereavement in the Gujarati community in Southampton, for which she learned Hindi, in 1997.

Colin was the eldest of three, born in 1960 in Grayshott, Hampshire. Within two weeks his transient lifestyle began with a long journey to Africa. David had taken a teaching post in Nigeria and the family were to move there for four years. Colin’s younger sister Kate was born in the West African country two years later.

Being a very young boy when the family returned to England, Colin has sketchy memories of his time in Nigeria, but he can recall feeling miffed as he watched his dad travelling to the local high school to work. ‘I remember very clearly my father driving to work in a Beetle,’ he told
The Guardian
in 2001. ‘There was a dirt road that went perpendicular to the house and I would watch him go. I could still see him when he parked the car outside the school – it wasn’t far, but an unpleasant walk in the African sun. He was a little dot. And I remember thinking: “What’s he got to do there that’s better than hanging around with me?”’

He was not without his friends, however, and spent much of his time playing with an African boy called Godfrey. To his embarrassment, Colin later recalled ‘him trying to persuade me to come round to his place, and me being scared to go’.

While memories of those African years are few, the time spent there laid an important foundation stone in the building of Colin’s character. It taught him awareness of other cultures and sympathy for less affluent lifestyles which spilled over into his adult life when he became a passionate advocate of human rights and champion of asylum seekers.

‘It did make an impression on me, not least because people we’d known there continued to be in our lives as visitors,’ he said. ‘And there were constantly people from India so there was an immense cultural diversity under my own roof throughout my entire upbringing, and I consider that to be absolutely nothing but a privilege.’

On their return to England, the family moved to Chelmsford in Essex, and four-year-old Colin was sent to the local primary school. After the freedom he had learned to love in Africa, the rules and regulations of an English state school seemed stifling and somewhat baffling to the new pupil. ‘I didn’t take kindly to being sent to school, to this rather cold place where you’re given lots of instructions and nobody loves you,’ he said on
Desert Island Discs
. ‘You’re sort of on your own. I couldn’t believe I had to go back again the next day, I remember that. I thought, “My first day of a school is over, thank God for that. Now I can get on with my childhood.” And day two was a horrible shock.’

Colin’s dislike of school would dog him throughout his education, but it didn’t take him long to discover the one activity into which he could put his heart and soul. The revelation came when he was cast as Jack Frost in the school pantomime, at the age of five. The acting bug had bitten and the future Mr Darcy was getting a taste of great things to come. ‘I was in a pair of silver satin pants, a blue satin sash and, portentously, a billowing white shirt,’ he recalls. ‘I was a hit. I don’t know that I’ve been as much of a hit since, and I thought, “That is where the love and attention lies.” There was nothing else that gave me that level of praise and approval.’

As a mediocre student, the lure of the lights, the potential to impress and the need to relieve the boredom of everyday lessons appealed to the young Colin. He eagerly auditioned
for any production open to him and would take any role, no matter how small. ‘I had tiny parts in all the stuff I did, but I loved it,’ he says. ‘That’s what made me apply to drama school and want to become an actor.’

The new-found love of acting also helped him settle into school and get along better with his peers. Having spent his first four years in Africa, learning his precise English accent from his parents and their friends, he was a stranger to the more common elements of Essex dialect and found it shocking. His first real job as an aspiring actor was to emulate his classmates.

‘Accents were an issue,’ he told
The Times
in 2007. ‘It was a shock to hear aitches being dropped. I felt like a freak speaking with the accent I had. So I changed it and only started to speak like this when I was in the sixth form.’

The birth of second sibling Jonathan, in April 1967, completed the family. Although the brothers are the best of pals today, an age gap of over six years meant that Colin was closer to sister Kate as they grew up. ‘Colin left home when I was eleven, so it was a big gap,’ says Jonathan. ‘It’s only as we’ve got older that we’ve become closer.’

As the oldest sibling, he was a protective big brother who looked after the little ones and loved to amuse them. ‘We were competitive but also protective of one another,’ remembers Kate. ‘At infant school he gave me instructions not to leave until he collected me from the classroom. At break he always made sure I had enough money to buy a Thunderbirds chocolate bar.’

Although they both held good academic posts, David and Shirley were thrifty and instilled in Colin a sense of frugality that would see him shun the trappings of obvious or ostentatious wealth in later years. He is still, he reveals,
‘conditioned to save silver foil because it used to be expensive’. But he admits their prudence was often irritating to him as a child. ‘It annoyed me sometimes that they weren’t more avaricious. I would like to have had more gadgets in the house, more expensive toys.’

They encouraged their children to think and read and they were rarely allowed to watch television at home. Instead, Colin spent his Saturday mornings learning to play the piano and would entertain Jonathan and Kate with jokes, shows and impressions. ‘He loved acting out from the time he was at school,’ says mum Shirley. ‘The big thing then was Batman, so Colin was Batman all the time and I had to make him a costume.’

Kate would join in the dressing-up games and make up little stories with her brother. ‘I was the princess in jumble-sale ballgowns, he was the prince in cloak and breeches.’

A rare treat would be permission to watch
Top of the Pops
, and one particular performance by Marc Bolan, singing ‘Hot Love’, left a lasting impression on the wide-eyed ten-year-old. ‘I loved all the glitter and corkscrew hair,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be rock and roll and not to grow up and wear a suit.’

After moving around Essex for four years the Firths returned to Hampshire, the county of Colin’s birth, when he was eight. His father took a job as a lecturer at King Alfred’s College in Winchester and the family settled in Alresford, a picturesque Georgian town on the banks of the River Arle, just outside the city, which was voted
Country Life
’s favourite market town in 2007. Shy Colin had another first day at school to get through, at the local Dean Primary School, and this time he would be going into an established class. Yet again, Colin would turn chameleon to fit in.

‘It had been astonishing to me in my first ever school in Essex that the kids didn’t talk as my parents did, in BBC “received pronunciation”,’ he said later. ‘Just when I thought I’d mastered the Essex accent, I was in a Hampshire school. And later America. So, strangely enough, I became an actor.’

Still a reluctant student, he did find inspiration at school in the form of teacher Chris Pines, who went on to become the mayor of Winchester. Taking on the ‘generally disgruntled pupil’ at the age of ten, the young form tutor, only in his twenties himself, managed to engage Colin in a way none of his predecessors had.

‘He’s the most wonderful teacher I ever had,’ Colin told the
Hampshire Chronicle
. ‘He loved the kids. He loved teaching. He inspired my interest in education. He made teaching and learning exciting and I remained friends with him for many years afterwards.’

While other teachers in the school used threats and punishments, including the cane, Chris used encouragement and humour. ‘He was incredibly approachable,’ said Colin in the
Times Educational Supplement
. ‘He maintained discipline through wit rather than any sort of rod or threat of detention. I was quite porous to new ideas at that age. He taught, and I soaked up, everything to do with grammar, writing, dinosaurs and the prehistoric age.

‘We had corporal punishment at the school: usually a whack on the hand with a ruler or cane. I remember in one art class Chris was cutting paper at the front and he called me up because I talked too much. He told me to hold out my hand and I thought, “This isn’t like him.” I was really quite scared for a moment. I held out my hand and he told me to hold out the other one as well. He then put a bin bag in my hands and poured his rubbish in.’

Chris, who was reunited with his former pupil in 2007 when Colin was presented with an honorary degree from the University of Winchester, remembers an animated and sociable lad.

‘He was an exuberant, lively, interested child,’ he says.
‘He wanted to know everything that was going on around him and he was keen, but not necessarily academically minded. He enjoyed his social life.’

One thing Colin didn’t enjoy was the school dinners. The stodgy meals of the sixties put him off meat and he objected to the dinner ladies making him sit at the table until he had eaten every last morsel. ‘We were always being reminded of “the starving people in Africa”,’ he told
The Observer
. ‘I remember thinking at the time that even they wouldn’t eat this. I’d leave the dining hall with a pocketful of sausages and tinned peas. I preferred it being there than in my stomach.’

In spite of Mr Pine’s best efforts, and his academic background, Colin failed his eleven-plus, meaning a grammar school place was out of the question. And before he could settle into a secondary school the Firths were on the move again. In 1972, when Colin was eleven, David accepted an exchange year, teaching at a college in St. Louis, Missouri. The family packed up their things and flew to America, along with a large group of fellow teachers embarking on a similar adventure. For Colin, the year in Missouri was to prove the best and worst of times. At the local high school he was moved up a year because the education system in the UK began a year earlier than the US. However, the leap meant he was the least mature in the year group and he felt awkward around the older boys. In a class of boys with long hair and earrings who would bring drugs to school on a regular basis, Colin was an outsider, seen as an English geek. ‘I was still
into train sets,’ says Colin. He struggled once more to fit in but he is the first to admit that his tendency to get lippy didn’t help matters.

‘American kids were a hell of a lot more sophisticated,’ he told
The Observer
. ‘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. They 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.”’

The ‘subtle isolating behaviour’ of two or three members of his class had a surprising effect on his grades. Despite his unhappiness, the struggling student was suddenly A-grade material thanks to some fantastic teachers and a lot of time spent on his own. Colin’s former teacher Carol Welstahoff remembered him as a studious child who always had his head in a book.

‘The others kids didn’t take to him because he was different. To them, he was your stereotypical English schoolboy. I think it was a lonely time, but he spent a lot of it reading. He was a very conscientious, top-of-the-class student.’

Away from school, however, things were more interesting for the curious lad. In the extended school holidays, David and Shirley took the children on long trips around the United States in an old Volkswagen camper van. On their first trip, over the Christmas break, they travelled south, through Mississippi and Tennessee, stopping at Memphis, and then on to Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Another journey saw them heading east to Arizona, through Kansas and New Mexico. Colin adored the trips and marvelled at the many different landscapes the old bus trundled through.