Colin Firth (27 page)

Colin remembered watching the original films as a child and being frightened of the miniskirted temptresses
of the girls’ school. ‘I can’t remember how old I was but I was probably under ten when I saw these films and I was very attracted to then, and very frightened of them, which is quite an explosive combination,’ he said in an interview with the author. And he admitted the outrageous outfits worn by the young actresses in the movie were far from politically correct. ‘We dress our children up in this bizarre way, which has a quasi-adult feeling about it so it endows them with a precocious kind of adulthood,’ he said. ‘Then we complain when people fetishize them. We’re not in a safe PC area, definitely, but it’s something that has been a central part of English culture for decades. So yes, there is a slightly pervy element to the whole thing.’

Colin went from the anarchic romp of
St Trinian’s
to some fun in the sun in
Mamma Mia!
Filming in Greece coincided with the low-budget
Genova,
which, being shot entirely in Italy, persuaded Colin to break his own rule on avoiding work during the boys’ summer holidays. The two films could not have been more different in tone. The first is a joyous star-studded love story set on a Greek island, punctuated with Abba songs, and the second the tragic tale of a grieving dad who moves his family to an Italian city in an attempt to get over the death of his wife.

In
Mamma Mia!
Colin played one of three potential fathers to Meryl Streep’s daughter, played by Amanda Seyfried. In the run-up to her wedding, she invites mum Donna’s past lovers to their Aegean hideaway in an attempt to discover which one is her real dad, so that he can give her away on the day. Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgård were cast as the other two possible parents while Julie Walters and Christine Baranski jumped on board as Donna’s best pals.

For the part of ‘Headbanger Harry’ Colin would have
to sing, dance and even play his beloved guitar, and he joked that his singing voice is ‘somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem’.

He admitted he hadn’t been required to sing seriously since he led the ‘ropey schoolboy band’ of his youth but he had no fear of being judged for his dulcet tones.

‘If they’d wanted Broadway-level dancers and singers they would’ve cast people like John Travolta,’ he argued. ‘They didn’t: it’s myself, Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgård.’

The most mortifying thing, he quipped, was the Spandex suit he had to wear for the final payoff on the film. ‘There are bulges where there should not be bulges and no bulges where you wish there were.’ While filming the musical on the picturesque Greek island of Skopelos, co-star Pierce hinted at a little competition between himself and Colin.

‘I do a lot of singing and dancing and, yes, I’m good at it, even at my age,’ said the Bond star. ‘The knees are still good, the back is still good and the ego is fine. Colin is a lot more nimble than I am. It’s going to be a tough battle.’

As a glam rock fan in the seventies, Colin had not been a huge fan of Abba and claimed, ‘Few straight males of my generation would have put their hands up and claimed to have been an Abba fan. If I’d had a crystal ball in 1976 and seen this is the sort of thing I’d end up doing, I would have ended it all at that moment.’

In an appearance on US TV, he revealed that the movie was so camp ‘it will make
Sex and the City
look like
Iron Man
. It’s going to be huge.’ His prediction was spot on.

The movie was to become his biggest box office success to date, even outstripping
Bridget Jones
, with a massive £365 million ($600 million) worldwide.

Although it meant fitting in scenes around his
Mamma Mia!
work,
Genova
ticked all the right boxes. As well as shooting in Italy, Colin got to play an academic, a role that would come easily to someone who grew up around academia, and he was playing a father. It was also a small independent film using a small crew and directed by Michael Winterbottom, whom he was keen to work with.

‘It’s a different area emotionally from anything else Michael’s done,’ he said. ‘It’s a different tone, and he seems to be endlessly curious. He’s got no snobbery. He would do exactly what fascinated him. He’s one of the few people I can honestly say that I was dying to work with, and that’s not just the usual spiel. I think everybody would be interested in working with Michael.’

Flitting between the big-budget Hollywood set on the beaches of Greece and the low-budget art-house film in the beautiful city of Genoa provided an interesting couple of months for the busy actor, and he felt the
Genova
set brought him firmly back down to earth. ‘It couldn’t be more contrasting,’ he said. ‘There were moments when I got a chill, partly because you are filming in such real circumstances. You’re in real rooms, you have a whole run of scenes and you’re staring at what you’re supposed to be staring at. So if it’s 3 a.m., dark and you’re playing a scene where you hear something, it’s sort of real …’

While
Mamma Mia!
was set to be the hottest hit of the year in 2008,
Genova
suffered the opposite fate, with lukewarm reviews and little box office traffic. Colin, as always, had moved on by then. He was about to return to both Coward and Wilde and, as soon as he returned to London, he and Livia had a new green business venture to keep them busy.

A
S
C
OLIN
WAS
beavering away on the films in Italy and Greece in August 2007, Livia and her brother Nicola were drawing up the last details of their plans to launch an environmentally friendly store of their own, with the help of Colin and entrepreneur Ivo Coulson. Eco, which opened in Chiswick High Road in September 2007, is a stylish four-storey department store specializing in green, fair-trade products and described as Britain’s first ‘ecological destination store’.

Colin modestly described himself as ‘a handy communications device’ while Livia called him ‘an essential part of the project’. And she revealed the passion behind all the projects he threw himself into, and the great meeting of minds that made their marriage work.

Livia had also been busy working as executive producer on a movie highlighting the plight of a man who’d been on death row, after a flawed trial, for twenty-five years. Colin
invested in the project,
In Prison My Whole Life
,
which highlights flaws in the trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the murder of a Philadelphia policeman in 1981.

‘We are a political family,’ she said. ‘Colin’s one of those people who researches everything properly. He’ll get obsessed with something like the Iraq war and then wake up in the middle of the night wanting to talk about it. We’re a great match because I’m the ballbreaker and he’s the brains.’

Livia’s little brother Nicola, who has a PhD in alternative energy, was happy to join his sister in taking charge of the project. And he remembered his childhood as being organic and eco-friendly long before it was on the political agenda. ‘Even fifteen years ago, our parents used energy-saving bulbs that took half an hour to emit light,’ he recalled. ‘We ate local, organic food. Nothing was thrown away. But that’s just how it was in Italy.’

The store, powered by solar panels, displayed everything from environmentally friendly cleaning products to £3,000 designer chairs made from sustainable wood. In the basement, Nicola ran a consultancy service, where customers could see samples of eco-friendly flooring, tiles, pipes and radiators and get advice on building with sustainable products. ‘We want this to be a good place to meet, and enjoy, as well as learn how to improve the planet,’ said Nicola. ‘And to do that it has to be fashionable, to have things for all generations. It can’t be an eco-nutter place or it won’t work.’

Colin, who admitted he was no ‘eco hero’, backed the family’s idea to launch the shop because he felt that, as a consumer, he was complicit in the damage that Western buying habits had on the environment and the developing countries. ‘The thing is, if you have been given the privileges we have, if you have this many perks, surely you can help
out,’ he told
The Times
. ‘Rather than being a luvvie with a lofty opinion preaching to people, I prefer to do things, to get involved, put my money where my mouth is and learn along the way.’

But while he was happy to help out with the publicity, the ‘unlikely shopkeeper’ was not going to be caught behind the till, having learned his limitations during stints at the coffee shop. ‘I worked in the cafe when it opened and the coffees I made were probably the worst we ever served,’ he said. And he joked that he would appear in a Darcy-like wet shirt only if it were ‘eco cotton and recyclable water. Depends how badly we need the customers. At the moment, I’ve got three films out and all anyone wants to talk about is the shop. So, hopefully, another drenching won’t be necessary.’

The couple celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in the summer before the opening, and Colin’s admiration for his intelligent and beautiful wife was still evident. She was the one he sought out for career advice because, he said, ‘she’s the smartest woman on the planet’. And he revealed the secret of their happy marriage.

‘We’re very committed on a daily basis to how we deal with our family lives. But the real secret is time – we have to make sure that we spend enough time together. Every relationship in life you’re going to have to take care of, there’s a marathon factor to it.’

Colin’s next two projects were the classic Noël Coward comedy
Easy Virtue
, and
Dorian Gray
, based on the Oscar Wilde novel
A Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Both were based in England and both starred up-and-coming English star Ben Barnes. For the first Ben played a young aristocratic man who brings his glamorous American bride home to the disapproval of his upper-class parents, played by Colin and
his
English Patient
spouse Kristen Scott Thomas. Filmed at Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire, Colin was, as a review in
The Times
put it, ‘curiously absent as the jaded Mr Whittaker. Firth is shabbily charming in a role that requires him to slope around in the background looking unkempt for most of the movie, only to steam into the foreground in the final fifteen minutes.’

In June filming began on
Dorian Gray
, which saw Colin as the hedonistic, debauched Sir Henry Wotton who derives his pleasure from corrupting the beautiful and innocent hero, played by Ben Barnes. ‘He wants to see this phenomenon of beauty tarnished in some way,’ explained Colin.

Colin was impressed with his handsome young co-star. ‘Ben is by far the best Dorian that there’s ever been,’ he insisted. ‘He has got much more complexity, partly in what he has been given in the script, but he also has a very interesting quality. He is clearly very beautiful and he has also got these very, very dark eyes. The pupils are about as black as anyone’s I have ever seen.’

Sadly the critics didn’t agree. While Colin’s cunning corrupter was roundly praised, Ben’s performance came in for a lot of knocks. ‘A truly handsome supporting turn from Colin Firth,’ wrote Kevin Maher in
The Times.
But, he added, ‘this story demands a more versatile and charismatic central player than the powerfully blank Ben Barnes’.

While the Gothic tale of debauchery was fun to make, it almost lost Colin one of the most seminal roles of his career. Fashion designer Tom Ford was casting for his directorial debut,
A Single Man,
and Colin was his first choice to play the central character, a gay professor grieving over the loss of life partner. But the filming schedule for
Dorian
meant Colin was unavailable. ‘I remember talking to him at the
Mamma Mia!
premiere,’ Tom recalled. ‘It was so frustrating, because I’d had to cast another actor, and here I was, talking to my first choice. I got in the car afterwards with Richard (Buckley), my partner of twenty-three years, and I just said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Goddammit.” Then our shoot got pushed back, Colin became available and things magically came together. If you swear enough, you often get what you want!’

During a joint interview with the director, Colin said he had been curious about the longing looks from Tom during the star-studded event in June 2008. ‘I think you thought I was flirting,’ joked Tom.

‘It wasn’t that kind of stare,’ laughed Colin. ‘It was much more enigmatic. What was great was that Tom had this personal and complex story he wanted told, and to have him put that whole thing in my hands was a chastening responsibility. It’s the sort of thing that makes you think, “OK, I’m going to have to raise my game for this.”’

Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood,
A Single Man
is set in the sixties in LA, shortly after the tragic death of George’s partner, played by Matthew Goode. As he struggles to deal with his isolation he befriends a handsome student, played by Nicholas Hoult, and rejects advances from his best friend, Julianne Moore.

The script called for Colin to strip off once again. At forty-eight, he was becoming increasingly reluctant to show off his body. ‘I picked up the script and it said, “Naked man lies on bed” and then a few pages later it was, “Naked man jumps in ocean”,’ he told the
Sunday Express.
“Well,” I thought, “it’s time to get in shape.” One more push against gravity before I turn fifty and it’s all downhill.’