Colin Firth Read online

  Filming began in March 1998 in London, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Oxfordshire, and at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. It was released to universal acclaim in December 1998 in the US, again in time to be considered for the Oscars, and a month later in the UK.

  ‘In New York last weekend, a huddle of typically hard-boiled American film critics gathered for a private screening of a new release, Shakespeare in Love,’ wrote Garth Pearce in The Times. ‘It’s Oscar-dash time, with films squeezing in to meet the end-of-year deadline. Here was another contender, a little period-costume film that cost its producers, Miramax, a measly $25 million. But then, these are the guys who pulled off triumphs such as Mrs Brown and The English Patient against the odds. By the time our bunch of jaded viewers left the screening room, they were convinced they had seen a masterpiece, the most finely written and acted romantic comedy of the year: an Oscar cert.’

  They were right. Nominated for twelve Academy Awards, the low-budget British movie waltzed off with seven, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. The male actors missed out, with Joseph Fiennes not even receiving a nomination, but the ladies triumphed. Gwyneth Paltrow’s tearful acceptance speech, as she picked up the Best Actress gong, made headlines around the world and Judi Dench bagged the Best Supporting Actress statuette – despite only spending eight minutes on screen.

  For his part, Colin may not have been in the front line for plaudits for his minor role but he did receive an unusual tribute the following June when Prince Edward married his fiancée Sophie Rhys-Jones. Inspired by a private screening of the film, the royal groom chose to adopt the Earl of Wessex as his official title after the wedding. ‘The Queen was initially somewhat taken aback by Edward’s suggestion,’ said a Buckingham Palace source at the time. ‘But Edward made an effective case for taking the title.’

  A spokesman for American producer Harvey Weinstein commented, ‘He will be thrilled to learn he may have influenced the course of British history.’

  Shakespeare in Love was the third time Colin had worked with Miramax producer Harvey, after The Hour of the Pig and The English Patient. Their next project together would lead to Colin thanking the influential film-maker from the podium after picking up his own Best Actor gong at the 2011 Academy Awards.

  Chapter 11

  Stage Fright

  SETTLED INTO HIS new Islington home, Colin began 1999 with his first theatre project for six years. Three Days of Rain, an American drama which centres on a classic love triangle, was to run for a short period at the Donmar, with David Morrissey and Elizabeth McGovern. Kicking off in March for two weeks only, it was set to return for another ten-week run from November. Crucially, it didn’t interfere with the long summer holiday that Colin liked to spend with Will, now eight.

  ‘I can’t do long runs, because my son is in LA and I’m committed to regular visits,’ he said. ‘Besides I could hardly run my commuting lifestyle on a regular Donmar salary.’

  The first act of the Richard Greenberg play centres around Walker and Nan, a grieving brother and sister, and their childhood friend Pip, the son of their late father’s business partner, who is having a relationship with Nan. For the second half the three actors switch to playing the characters’ parents and reveal the power struggle and secrets of the past.

  Colin welcomed a return to ‘the thrilling unpredictability of the rehearsal rooms’ and David Morrissey was fascinated by his talented co-star. ‘I used to watch him from the wings all the time,’ he said later. ‘What he has is an innate goodness about him. He tends to play conflicted people but at their heart they are always good men and that is what I think draws us to him. We feel safe with him and also he has this great comedy, he has great comic timing. I think any actor, even if they are in heavy drama, they need good timing and that’s one of the things he’s always had.

  ‘He’s never been typecast in my opinion. There’s nothing he can’t do really. He’s got a great sensitivity about him.’

  In fact, Colin was feeling conflicted himself. While welcoming the chance to tread the boards again, he was hiding an inner terror which he had never experienced before. It came to a head one terrible night when he was struck down with a crippling stage fright.

  ‘I locked myself in the toilet about fifteen minutes before the curtain went up and could not even think of the first line,’ he recalled. ‘I then went out of one of the fire doors for air and locked myself out of the theatre. It was a car crash moment!’

  If Colin was quaking inside, it didn’t show in his performance. The critics raved about the play.

  ‘Firth is superb as both the screwed-up, bullying Walker, brilliantly suggesting the egomania of unhappiness, and as Walker’s humble, painfully stammering father, a performance that goes straight to the viewer’s heart,’ wrote Telegraph scribe Charles Spencer.

  ‘The force of Colin Firth’s remarkable acting transcends the mere erotic appeal that on television made him the fantasy play-thing of so many women. He portrays two men who loiter on the fringes of life, brooding over how to find the key to happiness. Firth’s valiantly worn dejection always rings true,’ said the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh.

  Despite the triumphant reception, the battle with stage fright meant that Colin would be loath to try again and has not taken a theatre role, apart from a one-night-only tribute to Harold Pinter, since. While on stage, he admitted a year later, he imagines he feels ‘waves of loathing’ washing in from the audience.

  Having started out in the West End, he has always fiercely rejected the widely held belief that theatre is ‘what acting is really about’ as stage snobbery.

  ‘It requires immense talent to do it brilliantly, and I haven’t always done it brilliantly, so I could easily get caught out here, but I resist the idea that theatre is what it’s all really about in terms of acting. I don’t see why that is the case. On stage, you are in control of your territory and you are going to do it in the sequence that the writer intended it to be done and it’s up to you to take command of that and shape it as it goes. Films are shot out of sequence to the point where it mangles what you are trying to do – you shoot your wife at nine o’clock and marry her at eleven o’clock, you may or may not be looking at the other actor, who may or may not be in full costume – in tiny little pieces. I think that it is a far greater test of the ability to go back to that childish place where you can just believe than standing on a stage and looking into the lights.’

  As soon as the run was over, Colin and Livia took a break in LA, where they spent time with Will. Anyone more mercenary about their career would have used the frequent visits to further their standing in Hollywood, but Colin still eschewed those often-offered meetings with movie bigwigs.

  ‘I rent a place and make a life for myself there,’ he told The Times. ‘We have friends, we have places we like to go, we treat it as our home for a while. It is quite far out of town, mercifully. I don’t detest LA, I just don’t have a romantic attachment to it. I can like LA a lot more if I don’t have much invested in it. It can make people very neurotic. It’s very hard to be above that if you are trying to play the town.

  ‘There is so much fear and insecurity running rampant there. I’ve seen perfectly intelligent and otherwise balanced people coming over to your place and breaking into a sweat because there is some billing argument or they think they haven’t been seen in the right order by a director who is in town. You’re just better out of it really. You can have a perfectly nice life in this business without subscribing to all that. I really don’t know that if I made it important to me that I would be able to do it peacefully, with my self-esteem intact.’

  Instead, after some time with his only child, he returned to Scotland to film the BBC drama Donovan Quick in Glasgow. The film is loosely based on the classic story of Don Quixote, with Colin as the boss of a small transport firm fighting the big corporations.

  He followed the BBC Scotland drama with a bed-hopping comedy shot entirely in London. Fourplay, originally call
ed Londinium, was a love letter to the capital city written and directed by its American star, Mike Binder. It reunited Colin with French actress Irène Jacob, who had been the object of his desire in My Life So Far, and this time he got the girl. In the meantime, his screen wife was off with the TV producer character played by Mike. It included cameos from British comedians Stephen Fry and Jack Dee – Dee, incidentally, had been a year below Colin in Montgomery of Alamein secondary school. Sadly, the movie was to make little impact on its release two years later.

  More disappointment came with his role in The Secret Laughter of Women. Colin’s fond connection to Nigeria may explain why he chose the role in the romantic comedy, set among the Nigerian community in the south of France, but it was a decision he may have lived to regret. Nia Long starred as single mum Nimi, considered a disgrace in the moralistic society in which she lives. Her mother is keen to marry her off to the respectable Reverend Fola (Ariyon Bakare) but Nimi’s son, Sammy (Fissy Roberts), has other ideas. He is determined to set up a match between his mother and Matthew, the creator of his favourite comic strip, played by Colin. Shot in 1998, and funded by £3.3 million of lottery money, The Secret Laughter of Women ignited a heated debate about Arts Council funding when it hadn’t been released a year later.

  When it finally saw the light of day, The Guardian called it ‘a release from the Bernard Matthews Film School, a catastrophic, garbled romantic comedy set in an expatriate Nigerian community’. Not all the reviews were terrible, however, with The Times declaring, ‘Rambling and slight it may be. But it’s also surprisingly endearing.’

  Another delayed release came in the guise of My Life So Far. Although shot in the summer of 1997, the film was only released in the US in July 1999 and didn’t see the light of day in the UK until May 2000. In the meantime, the film was cut and recut, to Colin’s disappointment. By the time it came out, he had lost interest.

  ‘It can be hard to remain attached to something by the time it has come out,’ he explained. ‘It really is old work. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen My Life So Far in any of its forms. I was attached to it because I enjoyed making it so much and I don’t understand why people felt it had to be repeatedly corrected. I don’t mind saying that it wasn’t broke in the first place. Partly what it suffers from is the randomness of a true story, because that’s what it is.’

  Despite 1999 proving to be an incredibly busy year, Colin found time to take on the plight of asylum seekers in the UK. Already a keen supporter of Amnesty, Colin was moved when he heard the story of a Nigerian asylum seeker abused by immigration officers and began to fight for the rights of immigrants to the country. As a high-profile actor, Colin felt he could bring this issue to the public’s attention but he was far more than a mouthpiece for the cause. He spent time visiting asylum seekers and hearing their stories first hand.

  ‘I can’t say why his story touched me so deeply, but I’m the one who has been the beneficiary,’ he told The Guardian. ‘I have met so many people who are unbelievably talented, brilliant, special, a teacher from Ivory Coast, a ballet dancer from Albania, a poet from Iran. I’d like them to be my friends.’

  In January 1999 he arranged a fund-raising event at his old college in Winchester. He was the master of ceremonies, reading poetry and introducing acts by refugees from Somalia, Iran and Bosnia in an evening of song, dance and verse.

  In June he joined forces with Tony Booth, Tony Blair’s father-in-law, and comedian Mark Thomas to test out the voucher scheme proposed in Jack Straw’s Immigration and Asylum Bill and concluded that the cashless benefit would serious curtail the freedom of refugees. Five months later, Colin led a number of campaigners and MPs in a protest march to Westminster, where they made a paper chain from 800 messages of support. Speaking outside the Houses of Parliament, Colin hit out at the government over the number of asylum seekers in detention for months without judicial review. ‘It is shameful that a country calling itself civilized detains hundreds of people a year coming here in search of liberty.’

  While his conscience wouldn’t allow him to stay silent on issues that he cared deeply about, Colin was aware that some would reject his right to a political voice precisely because of the celebrity status which enabled it. ‘We’re somehow disqualified from having an opinion, but when I look at Bono and the debt issue, or Bob Geldof and the African famine, I’m so admiring that they take on the responsibility,’ he told The Guardian. And he was determined not to speak out from a position of ignorance. ‘Give me a year or two more working on this and I’ll really have my facts. Now I just know how painful it is to have to leave home, no one comes here unless they’re desperate, and it’s complete rubbish that we are somehow going to be overwhelmed by a tide of refugees.’

  As well as campaigning for the asylum seekers in the UK, Colin had become an active supporter of Survival International, which aims to help tribal communities maintain traditional lifestyles. The charity’s media director Jonathan Mazower revealed that the actor didn’t need to be asked to help them out – he contacted them. ‘One day we got a message that a supporter called Colin Firth had contacted us because he was asking for brochures,’ he said. ‘We spotted the name and wrote to him and said, “We don’t know if you are the famous actor Colin Firth or not but if you are, it would be very good to talk to you. If you’re not, thank you anyway” and he got in touch with us and said he was the actor Colin Firth. So when we spoke to him for the first time we realized he had been quite an active supporter for quite a few years, quietly, and we didn’t have to persuade him at all of the benefit of our work or the value of indigenous cultures. This was all coming from him.’

  Colin’s mother Shirley, who had been helping refugees in Hampshire for years and wrote her PhD on the immigrant community in Southampton, was pleased her celebrated son had followed suit. ‘I think it’s a bit difficult to be the grandchild of four missionaries without it rubbing off in some way,’ she said. ‘In my own life, I’ve worked for Oxfam and been involved with charity, working with refugees so there’s a lot of this stuff going on in the family.’

  Before heading back to the Donmar for his second stint in Three Days of Rain from November, Colin picked the plum part of Peter in Noël Coward’s Relative Values. Filmed in The Nunnery, an imposing mansion on the Isle of Man which had been a real convent in the eleventh century, it is a comedy about upper-class sensibilities and snobbery in post-war Britain.

  The Earl of Marshwood, played by Edward Atterton, returns from a trip to America with a blousy Hollywood starlet on his arm, to the horror of his stuck-up family and, particularly, the dowager Countess played by Julie Andrews. Miranda (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is pursued to the family estate by her drunken ex-boyfriend (William Baldwin). As the family struggle with the uncouth American in their midst, loyal maid Moxie reveals that Miranda is, in fact, her long-lost sister. Watching from the sidelines, providing witty commentary and cutting snipes, is Peter, the Countess’s urbane nephew. Colin was perfect for the role, which he actively pursued.

  ‘I wanted to occupy that position, as a kind of impish commentator and schemer,’ he told The Independent. ‘I was instantly attracted to the role because of Noël Coward’s wonderful writing. You simply cannot get better dialogue; his lines are airy, witty and beautifully constructed. I had never performed Coward before so it was slightly like going into uncharted water which was exciting.’

  As the observer, the character of Peter is based on Coward himself but Colin chose not to imitate the distinctive lofty tones of the playwright. ‘Peter basically spends his time hanging around the place,’ he said. ‘He’s a harmless mischief-maker who enjoys the crisis that’s unfolding and he treats it all as a bit of a game. I haven’t modelled my character upon Noël Coward because it is very important to appropriate a role and make it your own. After all, the delivery of a line now is certainly not going to be the same as it was forty years ago.’

  Filming took place on the island from August to September, wrapping on
the tenth, Colin’s thirty-ninth birthday. Grand dame Julie Andrews made sure he had a treat waiting for him at the end of the shoot.

  ‘She was fantastic,’ he revealed. ‘She was a company leader in the traditional sense. She wanted people to be comfortable. If there was a birthday, she would celebrate it in style. There was this sense that we were working with a legend.’

  The wry commentator was a role that suited the articulate actor. His close friend Nick Hornby commented that Colin ‘laughs a lot, and likes to make people laugh’ and his choice of Relative Values gave him the opportunity to do just that. On release of the film the following June, The Times critic James Christopher remarked that ‘Colin Firth … has a way with one-liners that’s almost indecent’.

  As the millennium celebrations approached, he seized the opportunity to make the nation giggle once more by accepting a brilliantly funny cameo in Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder: Back and Forth. While he missed out on the lead in Shakespeare in Love, he got to play the Bard in the time-travelling comedy, which was filmed as a one-off special for screening at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich.

  Running into William Shakespeare in a corridor, Blackadder makes him drop a sheaf of papers which the viewer can see is a draft of Macbeth. After asking for an autograph, Blackadder sends him sprawling with a punch in the face before telling him, ‘That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years!’ He then berates him for condemning future generations to ‘hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Years wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like “What ho, my lord” and “Oh, look, here comes Othello, talking total crap as usual.”’

  He then kicks Shakespeare and adds, ‘… that is for Ken Branagh’s endless uncut four-hour version of Hamlet’.