Colin Firth (21 page)

However, Colin mused on the dilemma of the young actress when it comes to nudity.

‘Actresses spend half their lives with people lobbying to take their clothes off and then they finally do it and they get crap for it for years. I mean people still hit Glenda Jackson with it now, still. I do think that if you do it once, no one lets you forget it.’

Ironically, the revised way of shooting the scene meant that the studio found it too sexy. As Mark revealed, the scene had to be reshot in England, ‘with a stand-in actress who basically had to sit in Colin’s lap with her clothes off the entire afternoon’.

‘I’m over it now,’ laughed Colin.

Hope Springs
began an assault on the US market that Colin would follow up with another Anglo-American production,
What a Girl Wants
. But as the year came to a close, the name
Bridget Jones’s Diary
was still on the lips of movie insiders. In December the box office figures showed it was the most successful British movie of 2001, beating
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
, with a taking of £42 million in the UK alone. The embarrassing reindeer sweater Colin made famous during a party scene in the film raised £1,900 for the National Film and TV School at Christie’s, and the sequel was already on the cards.

But as negotiations opened for
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
, the awkward question of how the film-maker would get round the heroine’s infamous interview with Colin was the subject of much speculation. ‘I wrote the part of Mark Darcy for Colin Firth and I do hope he will come back for a repeat of his lovely performance,’ Helen Fielding told
Daily Variety.
‘If he does, he will simply have to don a large beard and handlebar moustache and play himself as well.’

The dippy diarist also featured in Colin’s thoughts in January when he scooped a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA nomination for his Mark Darcy, one of four nods to the film which also included Best Actress for Renée Zellweger. And in February the sequel was officially announced, with plans to shoot in the autumn of 2002 providing the cast, who were yet to sign up, could be available. Andrew Davies was working on a new script and, as Helen Fielding revealed, they were upping Hugh Grant’s screentime as his character, Daniel Cleaver, barely appeared in book number two. ‘He only has about four pages in the second book,’ she told
Empire
magazine, ‘but you can’t confine Hugh to two scenes, so there definitely needs to be more. He was so fantastic in the first
one.’ Having got the girl at the end of the first scene, however, Colin had nothing to fear. Mark Darcy, she confirmed, would still feature heavily.

The announcement, as far as Colin was concerned, may have been a little premature. Four months later and no definite offer had appeared.

‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ he told the
Sunday Express
in June
.
‘They’re talking about it, but not with great frequency. They talk about it then it goes quiet for a while - so I’ve no idea what’s going to happen.’

In the meantime, he added, the flood of calls to his agent didn’t seem to be bearing the right kind of fruit. Although he had enough work, he bemoaned the lack of interesting material. ‘I’m just looking forward to the day when there’s a stack of good scripts,’ he said. ‘I’m not facing hunger and impoverishment, but I’m hoping I’ll find myself doing something good soon. And if I don’t get offered Darcy again I think I’ll just have to get into the costume and open supermarkets.’

In fact, Colin was enjoying a seven-month break, concentrating on being a great father and maybe catching up on some sleep. ‘You never lie in again between filming and fatherhood,’ he admitted. ‘I do love being a dad though.’

‘I only ever wanted to be happy … Not even that, just a decent level of contentment,’ he told
The Times.
‘The baby has been fantastic, the best thing and the main thing, nothing complicated.’

The break was a wonderful opportunity for Colin to bond even further with Luca and he immersed himself in nappy-changing and spoon-feeding with a new-found joy. ‘There’s a great line by the writer Robert Towne about fatherhood which hit the nail on the head for me,’ he told the
Daily
Mail
. ‘He said he’d always associated fatherhood with age and the atrophy that goes with comfort – pipes and slippers and eventually death. But having a baby was rejuvenating and wild and wonderful.

‘Being a father is more like passionate love than I’d imagined. You have the same sense of being on the brink of being out of control, and of utter euphoria. It’s what makes life most worth living – no question.’

He also used the time to look into Luca’s future education. Living in Islington presented the principled liberal with a huge dilemma. The majority in his privileged position move out of London before their child hits primary age or send them to expensive private schools but Colin is a lifelong believer in state education.

‘My mother gave me the greatest regard for state education,’ he had said to
The Sun.
‘I don’t think, on teacher salaries, they could have afforded to put three kids through private schools. But if they could have afforded it, they would still not have done so.

‘If everyone sent their child to the local school, we would improve schools at a stroke. But with some parents, you’d have to get the troops out to force them to send their children to a state school. I think that if you respond to a good teacher, miracles can happen.’

With Luca only a year old, Colin had already started searching the borough for a suitable school but admitted, if he failed, that ‘He might end up going to school in Rome, and we might move there with him’.

•  •  •  

During his time away from filming, his wish for interesting
work came true when two tantalizing scripts came his way. In July he signed up to Richard Curtis’s directorial debut
Love Actually
, starring
Bridget Jones
rival Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman and a whole host of other big British names. A month later he pledged his talent to
Girl with a Pearl Earring
, the intriguing tale of Vermeer’s silent passion for the subject of his painting, based on the best-selling novel by Tracy Chevalier. His young co-star was to be the almost unknown eighteen-year-old Scarlett Johansson, who was on the verge of making it big in Hollywood.

But first Colin’s own assault on the US market continued with the dubious comedy
What a Girl Wants.
Shot in London and Morocco in the summer of 2002, it starred American Nickelodeon star Amanda Bynes as the long-lost daughter of an upper-crust British politician.

Having been brought up in the States by her hippy mum, played by Kelly Preston, she heads to England to find her real dad and bring chaos into his ordered existence in the run-up to his most important election. Amanda, who was a huge name among US teenagers, was about to turn the movie down until she found out Colin was attached.

‘I thought it was cute but I didn’t know if I wanted to do a movie. Then I heard Colin Firth was interested and I was like “What? He’s interested? Let me look at that again,”’ she gushed. ‘When I found out Colin was doing it I was shocked that he would be near me, let alone do a movie with me. He was amazing. Even better than I thought he would be. He’s down to earth and has such a good sense of humour and is so charming and such a lovely guy.’

For the eager sixteen-year-old the experience was an acting masterclass. ‘There’s no exact “how to” but he’s so natural that when he does it, I don’t ever see him studying
lines but he always brings something to it. He’s hard on himself and will do the take fifty times and make sure it’s right. Having that type of commitment and stamina is really impressive and is really a good role model and something good to see.’

On set, one of the American technicians noted that, unlike some Hollywood stars he had worked with before, Colin was as friendly and considerate to the lowliest crew member as he was to the director and the visiting press. He even made time for a quick greeting to the obsessive fans who devoted their time to following him around.

‘We had stalkers on the set,’ recalled director Dennie Gordon. ‘One woman shows up everywhere he goes. She’s very proper in her little red suit. He sees her and says, “My stalker’s here,” and goes over and says, “Hello, how are you?”’

Unfortunately both
Hope Springs
and
What a Girl Wants
failed to cause an impact at the box office on their release the following year, even though Colin was roundly praised.

Premiere
magazine said Colin’s starchy politician in the latter ‘picks up where his splendid portrayal in
Bridget Jones’s Diary
left off. Once again, he expertly presents a dry exterior that hides a tender, searching heart.’

‘Designed as the ideal confection to attract a young girl or teen,
What a Girl Wants
will more likely hook their mothers. Ostensibly, the movie stars Nickelodeon luminary Amanda Bynes, but it truly belongs to Colin Firth, the thinking woman’s Hugh Grant,’ said the
Philadelphia Enquirer.

Hope Springs
fared rather worse in the reviews. The
Daily Mail
’s Christopher Tookey stuck the boot in with, ‘Crawl through a cage of rats with waffles on your head rather than see this.’ And writing in the
Daily Express
Allan Hunter described the former as ‘a picture in which hope doesn’t
spring, it sinks,’ and added, ‘Colin Firth fares best as the bumbling, emotionally repressed Englishman abroad. He has a deft comic timing and a dog-eared charm but there seems a real danger that he has become the actor people hire when they can’t afford or obtain Hugh Grant.’

That last comment was particularly hurtful as Colin was becoming increasingly irritated by the constant comparisons to his
Bridget Jones
co-star. In his
Vogue
interview, Rupert Everett asked if he was jealous of Hugh and Colin joked, ‘I admire his talent and envy his hair options. I also look forward to the day when my fee equals his per diem, but I can live with not being him.’ But he tellingly added, ‘No further comment. Any honest answers to this question would be far too revealing.’

‘People always bracket Colin with Hugh Grant, because they’ve both been cast in roles as bungling Englishmen,’ says Mark Herman. ‘That’s unfair to both of them. I think Colin is quite different. Just how different is only now beginning to dawn on people.’

And Colin admitted he was disappointed that he had lost out to Hugh on a coveted role in Nick Hornby’s next project,
About a Boy.

‘I even went as far as calling Nick a few years ago and telling him his story would make a great film,’ he recalled to
Belfast News Letter
. ‘He told me it had already been picked up for a film. It turned out the whole movie world had already fallen over themselves to get it, and, of course, they needed someone far more bankable than me. I don’t command anything like the astronomical box office that Hugh does.’

Their next joint project,
Love Actually
, was to send box office figures soaring sky high – even though they didn’t share a scene.

T
HE
FINAL
CAST
reading for
Love Actually
was possibly the biggest gathering of British talent outside of an award ceremony. The power of Richard Curtis’s comedy cachet had brought together the likes of Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Kiera Knightley, Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy, Liam Neeson and Laura Linney as well as Colin. Despite their lofty status, each one was just as terrified as the next.

Hugh Grant compared it to the parish council meetings in Richard’s award-winning sitcom
The Vicar of Dibley.
Liam Neeson was reminded of a UN summit: ‘All those chairs with bottles of water. Everybody was nervous; I know I was. It was, “Christ, who’s going to walk in next?”’

EastEnders
star Martine McCutcheon, about to make her feature film debut, admitted she ‘kicked Alan Rickman’s foot under the table and said, “I’m so scared!” He just said, ‘Don’t worry, everybody is …”’ Emma Thompson, who was
no stranger to a star-studded film set, recalled that she giggled throughout and told
The Times
,
‘We all felt Bill Nighy was so funny, we’d be crap. The other thing I remember is thinking, “Bloody hell, how is Richard going to make a film out of all this material?”’

For Colin, it felt like a bizarre showbiz event. ‘It was rather like arriving at a film premiere. You couldn’t look up without seeing some extremely famous person.’ There were, he said, ‘Limos outside, people on mobile phones, I kept expecting to see bodyguards with earpieces.’

As a writer, Richard Curtis had scored huge successes with
Four Weddings and A Funeral
and
Notting Hill,
as well as
Bridget Jones’s Diary.
But as a director he had presented himself with a difficult task – ten interweaving plots, featuring twenty-two main roles and a set full of A-list stars. ‘I was very unlucky as a first-time director in that the writer had produced such a complicated film,’ he joked. ‘But another way to look at it is that the actors didn’t have time to see through me.’

Although convinced Richard could pull it off, Colin was in awe. ‘I thought, “He has all these different stories to tell, to pull together, all these big stars, how on earth is he going to do it?”’