Colin Firth (9 page)

‘There was one guy I met who was very obviously a victim of torture,’ he wrote. ‘If you portrayed him in a film, no one would believe it. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette and he hadn’t seen his son for years because he didn’t want him to see him like that.

‘It was jarring to come back from Argentina to a place where it was relatively unimaginable that something like that could happen. I thought if I was sitting in a cell by myself there would be so little hope. The words Amnesty International kept going around in my head as the only hope a lot of people would have in that situation.’

While Argentina was to have a profound effect on his political outlook, his next movie, filmed in the splendid chateaux of France, would change his personal life for ever.

W
HILE
TALENT
AND
hard work had made him stand out at college, Colin was characteristically embarrassed about his quick and seamless transition from drama school student to film star. His upbringing among missionaries and academics had instilled a work ethic and a Protestant guilt which made it difficult for him to accept his good fortune without question. ‘I didn’t pay my dues in the sense of struggling to get employed,’ he said. ‘I think that is soul-destroying, and I admire anyone who goes through it. Everything happened at once. I landed on my feet right from the beginning.’

But his easy fame brought with it a recurring desire to run away. Essentially a very private person, Colin was glad to be out of the country in France filming
Valmont
when the controversy over
Tumbledown
reached its peak. And the Miloš Forman costume drama would lead to a more reclusive retreat, into a Canadian backwater, with co-star Meg Tilly.

For
Valmont
,
an adaptation of the French novel
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
by Choderlos de Laclos, Colin would need to become a cruel-hearted philanderer with an unsurpassable ability to seduce women. Anyone who has since seen
Pride and Prejudice
would not imagine that a stretch, but at the time the ‘callow youth’ that Hollywood film-makers were accustomed to would need to work hard to convince them he could be the irresistible seducer of eighteenth-century French society. Ironically, for all those who later fell for his Mr Darcy, he chose not to ‘smoulder’ for the audition.

‘I knew I wasn’t going to be taken seriously if I went in there trying to act the part of a Latin lover,’ he said to
Premiere
magazine. ‘And Miloš was asking why everyone was so serious – why make seduction such a heavy business? It was a trap everyone had fallen into, that to play the philanderer, they should smoulder.’

Valmont
is the sexually charged tale of former lovers the Marquise de Merteuil, played by Annette Bening, and Colin’s amoral Viscount, in the years preceding the French Revolution. The handsome pair use their looks, and sexuality, as a weapon in decadent power games and spur each other on into increasingly reprehensible behaviour. While she asks him to seduce the innocent young fiancée of an ex-lover as a favour, he is also intent on bedding the stunning, virtuous and married Madame de Tourvel, played by Meg.

The film was shot over six months in various locations around Bordeaux, Calvados and Paris including the magnificent Château de Versailles on the outskirts of the capital. For the part Colin had to train in a variety of ‘courtly arts’ including fencing, dancing, music and, most importantly, riding. The skills were to come in very handy in his most romantic period role as Mr Darcy, some six years later.

Colin later wrote in
Harpers & Queen
, ‘For my part, the hours spent on a highly strung horse developed into a kind of metaphor for my relationship with the director. I can recall Forman saying “If I see the actor get nervous, then I get nervous” and it is difficult to overstate how nervous an actor can get if Forman gets nervous. When I relayed my analogy to him he was delighted, then after a moment’s hesitation, double checked – “you are my horse yes?”’

Miloš had been working on the movie for nearly two years but, even as filming began, he was aware that another version of the same story, starring Glenn Close as the scheming Marquise, John Malkovich as Valmont and Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel, was about to beat him to it. By the time
Valmont
wrapped, the Stephen Frears movie had earned seven Oscar nominations.

At the time, those involved with
Valmont
were unconcerned by the competition. ‘The characters are motivated differently, the plot concentrates on different storylines, it has a different ending,’ said Colin. ‘During the entire six-month shoot, nobody mentioned or even thought of the other film.’

Forman’s version of the story focused on Cecile, the pretty young virgin seduced by the manipulative and unfeeling Valmont. In an article in
Harpers & Queen
, Colin recounted being rather taken aback when one of the older actresses on set, Fabia Drake, studied him for some time over lunch before declaring, ‘You are Valmont, aren’t you! Miloš is very clever at casting; he can see right into a person’s heart.’

‘Valmont is known as one of the most cynical and destructive sexual manipulators in fiction,’ he wrote. ‘I, on the other hand, have always preferred to think of myself as a fairly decent sort of fellow.’ Having always assumed he had
been cast against type, the statement made him examine the role more thoroughly and helped him realize the subtlety that the director has been striving for.

‘As an actor in my first “Don Juan” role, I was overwhelmingly tempted to play the wickedness for all it was worth,’ he recalled. ‘I remember looking at seventeenth-century portraits and wondering how one identifies a philanderer … sexy eyebrows? A vulpine grin? I then looked in the mirror and realized that Forman evidently did not think so.’

A serial seducer he may not have been but, although he was now twenty-eight, he had never settled with a girlfriend for long. All that was about to change as the sexual tension between Colin and co-star Meg Tilly became an off-screen romance.

In an interview about the film, Meg agreed with her leading man and the director about the qualities of a good Lothario, and inadvertently revealed what had attracted her to Colin. ‘You know the guys who are the most dangerous?’ she asked in an interview with Australia’s
Woman’s Day.
‘The ones who make you feel the most comfortable. They make you laugh and they make you feel like the most fascinating person. Valmont LOVES women. And any man who’s a philandering womanizer has to really be able to get inside a woman’s head, don’t you think? Would you fall for some guy who’s just obnoxious? Maybe once in a while, if you feel real sorry for him.’

As his feelings for Meg grew, and became inevitably more public among the cast and crew of the movie, the passionate scenes together became more problematic for the intensely private actor.

‘I have found it very difficult to do a love scene with
an actress that I’m involved with,’ he confessed. ‘That was particularly the case with Meg; we found it very, very hard to make use of our relationship on the screen. You can feel invaded, you know, with half the crew around. The last thing you’re going to do is giggle and do the take so many times you get bruised lips.’

While Colin and Meg were falling in love things were also hotting up on the rival production amid reports of an affair between Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich, which ended his marriage to Glenne Headly in 1988. Meg, who was married to Tim Zinneman and had two children at the time, was quick to distance her new relationship from the
Dangerous Liaisons
affair.

Admitting the two were an item, she begged a journalist from
Woman’s Day
, ‘Just don’t say it was like Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer because it wasn’t at all like that. I’d been separated from my husband six months. It was after the movie was pretty much over that we decided to go out. Toward the end we started letting our characters go. We were so into them we could let them go. And that’s when I realized, hey, I like this guy.’

The feeling was mutual. Colin was seriously in love for the first time. Having been surrounded by self-absorbed actresses all his adult life, he found Meg to be caring, sweet and refreshingly honest. She was a good listener who didn’t talk about herself all the time and who put family at the centre of her life. Although she was the same age as Colin, her life as a single mum to Emily, four, and David, two,
meant she had grown up much faster and he admired her maturity.

But filming on a set for six months, far away from home, can crank up the intensity of any new relationship and Meg,
fresh out of a marriage, was keen to take things slowly. When not filming or working in LA, the celebrated actress kept her feet firmly on the ground by escaping to a woodland retreat in Canada with her children. After
Valmont
, she filmed
The Two Jakes
with Jack Nicholson, before deciding to take a year off because her daughter was starting school. For now, Colin was a welcome guest when he could get away from his burgeoning career. ‘He comes to visit and it’s wonderful,’ she revealed in December 1989. ‘He works out of London. I need breathing space. I’ve gotten out of a relationship that seems very recent, and I don’t want to leap too deeply into another. It’s nice. He’ll come back and visit.’

Although still based in London, the rising star was becoming a name in the States and went to LA to make the small independent movie
Femme Fatale.
His character was an artist in search of his missing wife, played by Lisa Zane, who discovers disturbing secrets about her life. So unimpressed was he that he warned audiences they would be ‘very unlucky’ to catch him in the movie.

He didn’t feel the same way about
Valmont
,
even though its release was completely overshadowed by the runaway success of its star-studded competitor. Colin, who ususally viewed his own work with a ‘gigantic sense of futility and disappointment’, says all his doubts ebbed away when he watched the completed two-hour film. ‘I emerged dazzled and emotional,’ he said, although he humbly pointed out
that his enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that he is on
the screen for a relatively short time.

The fact that
Dangerous Liaisons
had established itself as ‘the definitive version’ was a frustration and he was disappointed by the fact that Hollywood, and the cinema audience, seemed incapable of embracing two very different
interpretations of the same story. The French critics loved
Valmont
, with one calling it ‘a genuine masterpiece’, but many were critical of the fact that the philandering antihero was too likeable, which was precisely the effect that Miloš had been after. Malkovich’s Count had oozed animal sex and malevolent charm, but Colin stuck by his director’s theory that a successful womanizer would be likeable to women.

‘The part I play is no more the John Malkovich role than Hamlet is the Laurence Olivier role,’ insisted Colin. ‘Besides, when one is doing Hamlet, one is always using the same script.’ Colin was convinced that the film would stand the test of time and said to
Harpers & Queen
that it would have to ‘free itself from its various associations before it can be judged clearly’.

More immediately, however,
Valmont
should have been a calling card to Hollywood. Miloš Forman was a hugely respected director, with Oscars
for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest
and
Amadeus
already gracing his mantelpiece, and the names Annette Bening and Meg Tilly both held some sway in acting circles. If nothing else, Colin’s performance in the film could open doors to agents, producers and casting directors. But he was already displaying what he later termed as his ‘tendency to withdraw’ and was railing against his own success.

‘I’ve never thought of having a “career”,’ he told
Premiere
magazine in 1989. ‘For me it’s just one job and then another job.’ And he suggested that ‘In ten years’ time I’ll get over this nonsense,’ and give up acting.

In fact, it almost happened a lot sooner than that. Buoyed by his feelings for Meg, and their shared wariness of the Hollywood set, he was about to disappear for two years into the wilds of Canada. After three visits to LA for work, Colin
felt like a fish out of water there and decided to refuse all the meetings that he was offered with the movie bigwigs, telling himself that it was a matter of principle.

‘I told myself I was a purist, but actually I was shit-scared of it all,’ he told
The Times
in 2000. ‘Now, if it happened to me, fine. I’ve dropped that pose of shunning it. I’d still hate the intrusion, but I believe you can stay yourself. The ones who really whore out were whores at the beginning. If I were only good at it … If I could distinguish myself at those parties and chat shows, it might be easier.’

Meg regarded Tinseltown with similar mistrust, despising the superficiality of the beautiful people in the industry.

‘Everybody comes up and even if they’re friends or nice people, they say “So and so’s getting so much, you know what their quote is now? And so and so, everybody hates that one now. And, did you see her fat ass?” Everything can get a hold on you and you have to say, wait a moment, I’m really lucky in my life.’

Very much in love, the couple retreated to a log cabin, found by Meg, in the rolling hills of British Columbia three hours from Vancouver. The isolation appealed to Colin and to begin with he immersed himself in family life with Meg and her two young children. ‘It’s wilderness. Serious wilderness. It’s not a trip to Wimbledon Common,’ he said to
The Observer
in 2000. ‘And I rather fancied the quaint idea of the wilderness. It’s really the middle of nowhere.’