Colin Firth (5 page)

One tutor, Yat Malmgren, had himself been a student
of Rudolf Laban, who had revolutionized dance teaching by formalizing its notation. Yat translated his teachings into acting, using it to explain movement. ‘We studied movement psychology and its notation,’ Colin told actors’ mag
Backstage West
. ‘We didn’t use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world.

‘It all sounds terribly alienating and full of shit, really, to people who don’t subscribe to it. I found that after a couple of years of it, it started to make an enormous amount of sense; it came as close as anything anybody really can to teaching acting. I think it’s very hard to teach acting. You certainly can’t teach talent. It made sense to me, and I still use it.’

And Colin certainly had talent. Unlike many of his schoolteachers, his tutors recognized his abilities and gave him leading roles in many of the centre’s productions, including Molière’s
Tartuffe
and Shakespeare’s
King Lear.

‘As a boy and a young man, Colin was a person of conspicuous intelligence. Real intelligence,’ said Christopher Fettes in a statement that might have surprised Colin’s old headmaster. ‘It is very rare to have the privilege of training people for the theatre who are by nature poets. And Colin is.’ None the less, the exacting tutor wasn’t going to give the golden boy an easy ride. ‘It was an incredibly vigorous process, where you’d get rather pleased with yourself about what you were doing, and he would challenge you. He would give you cowardice,’ recalls Colin. ‘He would tell you to throw it all away.’ On one occasion, after weeks of rehearsal, the student actor was convinced the dark spin he had put on the lead in
Tartuffe
was going to blow his audience away. Christopher instructed him to start all over again and come back the following Monday with a completely different approach. ‘It
was a torturous weekend. I just risked a completely different physicality. He was a healthy dose of a mixture of fear and respect that he engendered. He still has it over people even now.’

Away from classes, Colin was living the typical student lifestyle, hanging out in friends’ flats and drinking cheap booze. But even now he found his middle-class background was getting in the way of his fitting in with some of his trendier peers. ‘The inverted snobbery was very aspirant, the alternative culture was riding high and I wanted to be a part of that. But my street cred certainly wasn’t going to be competing with the kids in that class: I wasn’t a smack addict and didn’t develop a criminal record.’

He still flirted with the idea of a rock star lifestyle and, like many creative teenagers, fantasized about a hedonistic way of life and a downward spiral into self-destruction. His own sanity and stable middle-class upbringing, coupled with the dedication to his future career, kept him from going off the rails.

‘I romanticized the idea of artistically deranging oneself, whether it was a rock star fucking himself up with drugs or Rimbaud’s conscious disordering of the senses,’ he says. ‘Being sane was a tedious, suburban thing to be. Unfortunately it’s not the brilliance, but rather the screwing up, that’s easy to achieve.’

His parents’ habitual frugality had also stood him in good stead for student life. The meagre grant, he was finding, didn’t stretch far in central London and he struggled to find enough money for food and lodgings.

‘I’ve slept in railway stations,’ he recalls. ‘As a student, there was little pride and some grim places, grimy squats. It was just the sort of thing that students do.’

Choosing Nick Cave’s ‘Heart Attack Line’ on
Desert Island Discs
in 2005, he said the track was reminiscent of his years in a student squat in Chalk Farm ‘when one was quite happy to live in squalor.

‘This was a period when I was homeless, not on the street but on other people’s floors. You’d come home starving and try to find something in the fridge, and it wouldn’t be there, so you check behind the sofa!’

Former acting coach Freda Kelsall was still in touch with Colin and remembers a visit to one grotty north London bedsit. ‘I went to see him and he didn’t have much money,’ she said. ‘He had holes in his shoes and was going to walk two miles to a play. But he was determined. I thought: “This boy is going somewhere.”’

But it was a means to an end, and another turning point in the star’s life. ‘This is when I got my act together,’ he says. ‘To the immense relief of everyone around me, I suddenly wanted to do what was expected of me.’

Impressed with his good-looking protégé, who had cut his hair and adopted a less hippy look, Christopher Fettes paid Colin the ultimate compliment. If he could avoid being cast for his movie star looks, he said, he could become the next Paul Scofield. The comparison to his ultimate hero spurred Colin to work even harder. After years of teaching aspiring actors, Christopher had found his Hamlet
and in Colin’s final year he was cast in the lead role of his mentor’s professional production. Colin disputes the general perception that the play was put on as a vehicle for him, although the college had never staged it before or since. ‘He was engaged in a professional production of
Hamlet
and he had to teach us as well and it was more than he could do,’ Colin concludes modestly.

Whatever the truth, Colin’s troubled Dane was a sensation, described by one member of the audience as ‘incredibly dark and glamorous’. And casting directors sat up and took notice. In early 1983 Colin was drafted in to play public school boy Guy Bennett in the West End production of Julian Mitchell’s
Another Country
and he had some pretty big shoes to fill. Rupert Everett had made the role famous in its out-of-town run at Greenwich Theatre and had transferred to the West End with Kenneth Branagh playing the opposite role of Tommy Judd. When Colin was asked to audition, he was competing to replace Daniel Day-Lewis, but he wasn’t the only one. The advert had been in
The Stage
, thousands had turned up and competition was stiff.

‘There were guys dressed up,’ he says. ‘They tried to put the costume on, which doesn’t sell, I don’t think. And it’s a really superbly bad idea; it’s far too keen-looking. If you were to sit before the director and were a bit sceptical about your own chances for the role, they tended to like that. Anyway, I got past first base. It was a classic thing. I don’t know if it happens any more, but it was the darkened auditorium and the light on the stage.’

Typically modest, however, he claims it was his looks that clinched the audition. ‘Others were far better than me,’ he says. ‘But they weren’t looking for a short fat guy with a slight Scandinavian accent. They wanted someone who walked and talked and looked like me.’

The play, loosely based on the life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, centres on the friendship of two public schoolboys. Guy is openly gay and Tommy is a Marxist. Both are shunned and despised by their peers and their masters. While public school was far from his own childhood environment, Colin immediately identified with both characters because of his
experiences as an outsider. He accepted a salary of £150 a week and dropped out of drama school early. Even so, he was surprised that casting directors were already seeing him as one of the English upper-class set. ‘To my astonishment I was identified immediately as silver-spooned, plummy.’

Lifelong friend Kenneth Branagh remembers the buzz around the play and the succession of brilliant actors who made their name in it, including Colin.

‘When I was just about to leave
Another Country
, which was the first play I’d done when I was twenty-one, I remember coming in at the end of the run and downstairs rehearsing were Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth, who was getting ready to take over,’ he says. ‘Also we used to go for a drink after the show with Gary Oldman, who was in a play next door, and Tim Roth, who was across the street in a play. It was one of those moments when you aware of a whole group of actors who were all starting at the same time and really going places so it’s pretty nice when you bump into them these days, and we’re still here, as it were.’

The play won Colin rave reviews and resulted in a moody poster of his young, good-looking face being plastered all over London. ‘To me, it felt like megastardom,’ he said. ‘I made no distinction between that and a Hollywood role. I’d only been in London three years.’

Another Country
launched the careers of Branagh, Everett and Day-Lewis as well as future Merchant Ivory star James Wilby. Colin couldn’t believe his luck. With his first West End role came an agent and an Equity card, crucial for an acting career but incredibly hard to obtain. There also came the feeling that he had taken the right path, after all, and the happy knowledge that he had already shown his family that he could follow it through. ‘That fairy godmother never appears
again. It dwarfs what
Pride and Prejudice
felt like. I went from nobody knowing who I was and everyone doubting me to my dad taking photos of the poster on Finsbury Avenue.’

Indeed David couldn’t have been more proud and was, no doubt, a little relieved. ‘We never dreamt he would be straight on to the West End stage. It was about rebels against the system, so it was quite appropriate. Seeing him on stage was amazing, but the thing that made the biggest impact was going down the road past the Shaftesbury Theatre and seeing his portrait, huge, outside.’

As he was heading straight to the West End stage, in a leading role, without finishing his course, his peers naturally assumed he would soon be getting too big for his boots. But, as he has demonstrated to great effect ever since, Colin is resolutely down to earth. ‘In the end I bought the drinks for a long time,’ he says. ‘I had to be humble.’

Others’ perception of him did concern him, however. ‘For a while I felt I had to be excessively modest so people didn’t think I was above them,’ he admitted to
The Guardian
in 1996
.
‘I forgot to return a phone call and now it was because I was thought arrogant, not because I was scatty and always had been. Then I realized nothing had changed. I was working, that’s all there was to it.’

Two months into the run, Colin had another extraordinary stroke of luck. Director Marek Kanievska was planning a movie based on the Mitchell play and had cast Rupert Everett, the original Guy Bennett, in the lead role. The obvious choice for Tommy Judd might have been Kenneth Branagh, whose West End performance in the play had won prestigious awards, but his career had taken off and he was busy in Australia filming
Boy in the Bush.
Legend has it that Colin was asked to do a screen test in his place and that Marek was suitably impressed. Kenneth has a different recollection. ‘The issue may have been that I wasn’t available but I couldn’t tell you whether they didn’t just want Colin anyway,’ he insists. ‘I was in Australia doing the television series and to be honest I don’t know the truth of that but he did a fantastic job in the film. Of course, I’d have been thrilled to do it but he was great.’

Whatever the truth behind the casting choice, Colin considered himself lucky to be landing his first film role so early in his career. ‘I never even expected to work,’ he recalls. ‘When I left, I’d have been euphoric to get a spear-carrier in repertory. Films seemed like another world.’

With only his second acting job, Colin was about to become a film star. While he had cause for celebration, he sometimes seemed less euphoric than confused. ‘I don’t know what to expect next because I’ve lost my bearings,’ he said during the filming of the movie. ‘My sense of ambition has been numbed completely. When I got the part in the film, I already had a job and I didn’t know how to react. On stage, you function on adrenalin, but the medium of film is very bizarre. The energy is different because the work is so detailed, so subtle. All I know is that I have to cope with what comes next in a very sober way and give myself a breathing space to sort things out.’

Some six years later he reflected that this wonderful opportunity had terrified him at the time. ‘I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the change of roles as the change in medium,’ he said. ‘It was not knowing if there was anything specific I should be doing that was so frightening.’

And co-star Rupert wasn’t about to make the experience any easier.

I
N
J
ULY
1983 filming began on the film version of
Another Country
at Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire and various locations
in and around Oxfordshire. Some scenes were also filmed at Earl Spencer’s family seat of Althorp House, whose sumptuous rooms provided many of the interior shots. Although uncredited, Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, can be spotted briefly by eagle-eyed moviegoers in a scene where the schoolboys sing the patriotic hymn ‘I vow to thee my country’, a line of which provides the film’s title.

Moving the action to the big screen meant the glamour of the garden parties and stately homes could be better contrasted with harsher interiors of the boarding school’s locker rooms, and the whole story gained a glossier, more photogenic look. It also moved the love story between Bennett and fellow pupil Harcourt, played by Cary Elwes, from off stage to centre stage.

While surrounded by genuine public schoolboys, such as Rupert and his old Etonian pal Piers Flint-Shipman, credited in the film under the name Frederick Alexander, Colin held his own on screen, with his clipped upper-class tones and boyish good looks making a real impact. Off camera, however, he wasn’t fitting in quite so well.