Colin Firth (3 page)

‘There are so many versions of the planet on one continent,’ he says. ‘Everything from the landscape to the vegetation to the people blew me away. Americans are bursting with warmth and friendliness. When our old Volkswagen broke down – which it did frequently – people fixed our car and offered us hospitality with no expectations. It’s something Europeans don’t realize unless they’ve travelled the real small-town America.’

Shirley remembered the seven years she had spent growing up in Iowa, so felt at home in the States. Being firm believers that travel broadened the mind, she and David were determined to show their children as much of the country as they could squeeze into a year’s visit.

‘They were extremely keen to expose us to those sorts of experiences and to open up the world to us, and not just be focused on one’s own postal district,’ remembers Colin.

They were happy family times, sharing the wide-open spaces of the American countryside and sleeping at night in the cramped interior of the VW camper. But Shirley remembers one hairy moment when Colin’s adventurous streak left her panic-stricken. ‘I have a memory of Colin walking along the edge of a wall, obviously testing us out, because the amount of adrenalin I used up in that moment was colossal. We were all petrified because it was a mile down if he had fallen, but this was somebody who was very daring.’

Colin’s time in America was, he says, a ‘decisive year’ but much of it, especially the school days, remains a ‘hideous memory’. Twenty years on, he would return to his old high school in St. Louis where he was somewhat relieved to
find it was ‘pretty nasty. The place was horrible and had the atmosphere of a reform school. It made me realize that it wasn’t all me.’

By the age of thirteen, when the Firth family finally settled in Hampshire for good, Colin was a well-travelled boy. But from the perspective of a teenager, desperate to fit in somewhere, that didn’t always feel like an advantage. ‘People always feel alone at some point in their lives, definitely,’ he told the
Daily Express
.

‘Childhood can be pretty grim in that way. We travelled a lot and though I consider the travelling to be the single most enriching feature of my childhood, the down side is that there is an element of loneliness.’

But Colin had picked up more than a slightly cocky attitude during his time in the States, and his return to his homeland was not going to be easy.

A
FTER
THEIR
A
MERICAN
adventure, Colin’s family arrived back in Winchester in 1973, the year of glam rock. David Bowie was the biggest-selling artist since the Beatles, Mick Jagger was voted Best Dressed Man and Slade were rocking the charts. Colin’s first rock heroes, T-Rex, were enjoying hits with ‘20th Century Boy’ and ‘The Groover’ and stars were wearing more make-up than their female fans. On the fashion scene, platforms and flares were everywhere and big hair was bang on trend.

At the difficult age of thirteen, with so many other distractions, the last thing Colin wanted to be doing was joining yet another new school. And his attempts to blend in at St. Louis had left an unwelcomed legacy. His new classmates at Montgomery of Alamein school in Winchester immediately dubbed him ‘the Yank’ because of his Missouri twang and Colin chastised himself for being ‘feeble minded’ enough to have picked up an accent in the year away.

The image of Colin as a posh pupil at a top public school, which many in the past have inferred from the cut-glass accent he now uses, is miles from the truth. Montgomery of Alamein may have been a boys’ school but it was also a secondary modern state school with some fairly rough inhabitants. The accents were rural Hampshire and the language far from the world of Jane Austen. ‘It was “Firthy, come and get a smack in the mouth” and “Who you fucking looking at?” he told
The Times.
‘I wouldn’t have survived sounding as I do now.’

The isolation was not helped by Colin’s ignorance of popular culture. His parents refused to let him watch commercial television, allowing only BBC programmes into the home. As a result he was excluded from playground conversations on the most popular shows, such as
Crossroads
,
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
, and even
Magpie.
As well as a difficult time with the pupils, the actor maintains that most of the teachers at the school despised him and were convinced he would amount to nothing. His form tutor once informed him he would be lucky if he ended up working in a shoe shop.

On another occasion he scored three per cent in a chemistry test, being awarded two points for writing his name and two points for the teacher’s name – then losing one for spelling Sir’s name incorrectly!

Added to the mix was the fact that Colin was going through puberty in a boys’ school, something that had not escaped him at the time. ‘I was not crazy about being at an all boys’ school,’ he told the
Daily Express
in 2007. ‘Girls, to me, looked fantastic but out of reach. So I think that added to the general mood of being an awkward adolescent.’

While intelligent, he found school didn’t teach the subjects he was interested in. For example, while they were
studying Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, he was more interested in Existentialist writers such as Albert Camus. When he asked if he could learn guitar at school, he was told that wasn’t a ‘serious instrument’ and offered the baritone euphonium instead.

‘My education was deeply stifling,’ he says. ‘Nothing that I had experienced in the classroom has had anything to do with life. At that age your entire being is invaded by your sexual consciousness, and all you’re getting is algebra and French. I’m delightfully happy as an adult, but I was not very happy as a child. I’m very suspicious of people who romanticize their childhood.’

Dad David recalls, ‘He would have found it difficult fitting in at any school – partly because of moving and partly because he wanted to go off and follow his own interests.’

School pal Arron Reilly remembers Colin was much happier out of school, experiencing the outdoors: ‘We used to go camping together, get a tent and go walking,’ he revealed. ‘We would talk about girls but we weren’t brilliantly successful with them. I think we were both a bit scared of them.’

Colin’s reaction to the rigid education he so despised was a quiet rebellion, starting with the occasional day bunking off with Arron. ‘We would sneak off to the fields and have a fag,’ says his old friend. ‘Colin didn’t like school. He didn’t get into a lot of trouble, although he did bunk off.’

Colin admits he was ‘quietly resistant’, choosing to opt out and pay little attention rather than openly challenge authority. He was, he says, ‘neither an identifiable wild rebel nor someone who toed the line in a meaningful way. I didn’t really like the system, I didn’t like the education. I didn’t fight it very courageously. I just didn’t go along with it very much. ‘My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn’t smash windows or get into fights: if I did I was strictly on the receiving end.’

The late headmaster, Dennis Beacham, ran a tight ship at the school and told the pupils, ‘Don’t whinge, don’t moan, don’t tell me you’re tired. I’m tired too.’ Colin’s passive protest made little impression on Dennis, who pointed out, a tad spikily. ‘He was a somewhat quiet, withdrawn boy, academically moderate,’ he said. ‘By and large, he passed through school without any colour at all. He made no impact on the school.’

As in primary school, however, Colin remembers one special teacher who did manage to spark his interest in a subject, and had faith in his ability to make something of his life. Angela Kirby, who has since passed away, taught English language and used humour and drama to grab her pupils’ attention.

‘She was a creature of the theatre,’ recalled Colin in the
Times Educational Supplement
. ‘She had quite a camp, wicked wit, with a shock of bright white hair and flowing velvet dresses. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and would use humour and gentle teasing on us pupils.’

In a class full of sexually maturing boys in a single-sex school, the flamboyant teacher caused quite a stir, despite her advanced age. ‘It was strange to fancy her – she must have been at least fifty and she was no beauty – but we all did,’ says Colin. ‘I think it was her friskiness and sophistication we liked.’

Most importantly, however, she ignited a spark of interest in the disgruntled pupil and, when other teachers wrote him off, she was convinced he was university material. She would nurture the young enthusiastic reader to an A at O level.

Despite his lack of academic prowess in other departments, young Colin harboured ambitions to become a doctor. All
that changed when a bout of illness in his early teens fired up Colin’s thirst for literature. While no doubt revelling in the opportunity to skip school, he was also devouring all the books in the house, including Homer’s notoriously difficult tomes
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
a precis of which he had first come across in
Look and Learn
magazine. ‘I felt it was something that should be capitalized on and he did one of his O levels in English literature early,’ says mum Shirley. ‘He was reading everything that we had. He got very interested in Greek mythology.’ With the help of another passionate teacher, Stanley Payne, he took the early exam and passed with flying colours.

While his new-found passion for reading was a genuine escape for the budding actor, he also had a less angelic motive and later admitted, ‘I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky.’

Throughout his schooling, Colin maintained his love of acting but even that left him in a dilemma within the confines of the school. While he loved performing in school plays he felt foolish in front of his peers and explains that ‘it wasn’t exactly the cool thing to do’. He threw his energies, instead, into extracurricular drama and swapped his Saturday morning piano lessons for acting classes. Writer and actress Freda Kelsall, a friend of Shirley’s, was in the process of setting up a weekend acting school in the local community centre and encouraged all three Firth children to join.

‘We had no idea that for each of them it was to help decide their future careers,’ says Freda. ‘Colin was fourteen then, energetic, committed and inventive. As the eldest, he needed to decide sooner what he wanted to do with his life, and I began coaching him for drama school external exams. I always believed he’d do well.’

Freda, who still writes and performs in Hebden Bridge,
Yorkshire, was to coach the lad throughout his teens and has remained friends with him. The loyal star is quick to credit her contribution to his success and remains grateful for her tutelage. ‘He doesn’t court celebrity, but tries to use it to the advantage of others,’ she comments in the
Hebden Times
. ‘He’s good company, honest and generous, an acute observer, very funny, yet deeply thoughtful, as he was as a teenager.

‘He often credits his Saturday morning classes and early coaching in interviews, and surprises me sometimes. He says I taught him “the reality of the inner world”, and when I saw
The King’s Speech
I understood what he may have meant by it.’

Best pal Arron Reilly also shared his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics and together they appeared regularly in plays in the village hall at Ropley, near Alresford.

‘Colin had bigger roles than me but he didn’t give me any idea he wanted to be an actor,’ says his childhood friend in
The Sun
. ‘He was interested in the arts, and we would mimic things like Monty Python.’

Again, the reason for throwing himself into am-dram was in part motivated by a desire to mingle with the opposite sex.

‘I have a feeling that part of the reason for me doing amateur dramatics was to meet girls,’ admits Colin. ‘The girls were good-looking and it was a way, quite frankly, to get laid. I joined a band, I acted and I read books with fancy names.’

Despite his ulterior motives, Colin was beginning to think of acting as a future career. And one particular actor, the late, great Paul Scofield, was to cement his decision. Colin watched his Oscar-winning performance as Thomas More in
A Man For All Seasons
at the age of fourteen and was blown away.

‘It made me reassess what acting was,’ he told Sue Lawley on
Desert Island Discs.
‘It was nothing to do with demonstration, it was nothing to do with anything I was conscious of in body language; it was just an expression of integrity and there was a such a paradox in that because acting by its very nature is false. So how can this man, through doing very little, exude truth and humanity and intelligence? I was so fascinated by that and that’s basically what I’ve tried to pursue ever since.’

In a blinding moment of clarity, aged fourteen, Colin Firth knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He made ‘an announcement to himself’ that he was going to be an actor, no matter how much the odds were stacked against him. ‘That was a slightly euphoric moment, really and I felt very liberated from the drudgeries,’ he revealed to the
Irish Times
. ‘It made me feel very grand.’

Having let the delicious idea sink in, Colin delighted in telling his school friends his new ambition and admits that it allowed him an excuse to shirk his detested schoolwork. But the more he repeated his goal, the more serious he got about it and finally he steeled himself to break the news to his parents. As two academics who placed high value on the importance of education, he was prepared for some resistance and knew they would be disappointed that he wasn’t following a more traditional university route.