Colin Firth Read online

  The tiny role marks Colin’s first collaboration with writer Richard Curtis, who would later put words in the mouth of his character in Love Actually and be instrumental in his next big movie role, in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

  The busy year of 1999 wrapped up with the Boxing Day screening of The Turn of the Screw on ITV. The spooky ghost story, adapted from a classic Henry James novel, is set in a country house where the charismatic master, played by Colin, employs a governess to look after his two children. The new arrival (Jodhi May) soon begins to see two mysterious figures, which the housekeeper informs her are spectres of a former governess and valet, who are both dead.

  ‘I love the mystery of it,’ Colin told the News of the World. ‘When ghost stories are told well, they are brilliant. But they are incredibly rare. It is a perpetually misjudged form of storytelling. I also like the mood of a ghost story. It is perfect for a cold wintry night, sitting by the fire. In fact, perfect for Christmas.’

  The down-to-earth actor revealed he didn’t believe in the supernatural but admitted to some ‘uncanny and inexplicable’ experiences in his past. ‘When I was a teenager I dreamed up all sorts of things, but as I got older I’ve found explanations for them all.’

  The one ghost that Colin was haunted by was Mr Darcy, and he was aware that taking another period drama role always risked stirring it up once more. ‘Let’s just say I’m not a fan of this kind of production,’ he stated. ‘Despite my reputation for it, I am not drawn towards watching period drama on television. But on the other hand, I won’t steer away from it just because Darcy was so successful.’

  His role as the romantic hero’s namesake, Mark Darcy, in Bridget Jones’s Diary was to be Colin’s final attempt to lay that ghost to rest.

  CHAPTER 12

  Darcy Revisited

  EVER SINCE THE iconic pond scene in Pride and Prejudice, London’s most famous fictional singleton, Bridget Jones, had been lusting after Colin in print. When her best-selling book looked set to make it to the big screen, author Helen Fielding had only one man in mind to play Bridget’s real love interest, the starchy but sensitive lawyer she had named after the Jane Austen hero.

  ‘I had just finished watching the miniseries Pride and Prejudice, and, like most of London, I fell in love with his Mr Darcy,’ she explained. ‘As a wink, I named Bridget’s “Mr Right” Mark Darcy. I described him to look like Colin Firth. In fact, part of me was worried that the actor would feel my descriptions were too close to him.

  ‘In my wildest dreams, I never thought he would actually play Darcy in the movie. But a girl can dream.’

  Colin had taken a fair amount of ribbing from his friends and family over Bridget’s lustful diary entries and at first he had refused to read them. Curiosity got the better of him, however, when the mention of his name got more frequent and he began to read regularly. ‘It was a hall-of-mirrors thing for me. Very bizarre.’

  Before he was asked to star in the celluloid version of Bridget Jones’s Diary the search was on for the perfect Chardonnay-swilling, weight-obsessed thirty-something to take the lead role. Titanic star Kate Winslet was favourite for the role but turned it down when the production took too long to get off the ground, leading to clashing schedules. Producer Eric Fellner voiced his disappointment in February 2000, saying, ‘We were in negotiations for the deal. I am absolutely amazed that it didn’t work with Kate.’

  Helen Fielding was keen to cast an unknown in the role, believing an ordinary girl would be more believable as Bridget than a glamorous star. ‘I keep seeing girls who I think would be perfect for the role,’ she revealed. ‘My favourite was a girl in the gym who was sitting on a machine reading a magazine and not exercising at all. I nearly walked up and offered her the part.’

  The final casting was a surprise to everyone. Renée Zellweger was a super-slim thirty-year-old Hollywood star with a Texan drawl – a far cry from the chain-smoking, calorie-counting Sloane. But she was a big fan of Helen Fielding’s original book. ‘The diary is an amazing evocation of the life of a single girl. It reads like Jane Austen, with comic and ironic twists and turns,’ she said.

  Before perfecting her accent, Renée had to wean herself off her habitual lifestyle of low-fat healthy food and regular exercise. The Jerry Maguire star tucked into pizza, peanut butter sandwiches and fast food in a bid to gain weight. ‘I’ve put on more than 15 lb and I’m very proud,’ she said, just before filming started in the summer. ‘I’m down to three pairs of sweatpants and four T-shirts that still fit. Everything else is in boxes ready to be shipped home.’

  In order to immerse herself in British culture, she also rented a flat in Kensington, listened to the Spice Girls, and went to work in a London magazine office. ‘British women are less hard on each other and less judgemental than Americans,’ she told the Sunday Express. ‘I suppose it’s because they’re not judged as harshly themselves. When it was somebody’s birthday, everybody had a piece of cake. In LA, nobody would have eaten it.’

  With Renée on board, the producers were free to approach their first choice for Mark Darcy. Colin had been expecting the call and had already mulled it over in his head. This, he thought, would bring his association with Darcy full circle and prove that he could poke fun at his own image. ‘There’s a certain inevitability about it,’ he said. ‘I think it’s healthy for me to do it.’

  Hugh Grant was cast as Mark’s love rival, the dashing cad Daniel Cleaver, and Jim Broadbent was on board as Bridget’s long-suffering dad. In another bizarre life-imitating-art twist, the film was to be directed by Sharon Maguire, the model for Bridget’s best pal Shazza in the column and Helen’s real-life best friend. And Andrew Davies, the man who had Colin making a splash in Pride and Prejudice, was one of the writers called in to tweak the script.

  Colin had become an avid reader of the column but took issue with Bridget’s division of friends into either singletons or smug-marrieds. ‘I’m married and extremely content. Extremely happy. But I don’t see the world in terms of married and single people. I would never walk into a dinner and be horrified that they were all couples except me.’

  He told the column’s home paper, The Independent, ‘There are certain things that I didn’t identify with – weight and boyfriends – but I did think it was very funny and I think the script’s very funny as well. I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t. And it’s got a very good cast. I wouldn’t have done it just to be symmetrical about the Darcy thing.’

  While embracing the connection between the two Darcys, he still sought to distance himself from the BBC series that had propelled him to heart-throb status. ‘I don’t have anything to do with anything I did six years ago,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you remember how you spent your summer of ’94, but that’s how I spent my summer of ’94, and that’s about it.’

  However, as he prepared for the role of ‘v. eligible bachelor’ Mark, he did watch some of the scenes again partly, he said, to inform his performance. ‘I’m not playing Mr Darcy but I am aware there’s a reference involved and I was just curious again to see if I could understand what the fuss was about.’

  He admitted that the series told ‘an intoxicating story’, told with beautiful language and that the actors ‘did a good job’. But he insisted that the focus should have been on Jennifer Ehle’s performance as Elizabeth Bennet, pointing out that she was the one who walked away with the BAFTA. ‘Darcy is the romantic destiny. She’s the one you’re meant to identify with.’

  Although the two Darcys are from different eras, Helen Fielding and screenwriters Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis had given Mark many of his namesake’s character traits and had even recreated scenes from the 1995 hit drama.

  In both productions the hero is at a social gathering and ‘standing there looking down his nose at everyone’, Colin pointed out. ‘And it reminds me of high-school parties where you’d stand there, feeling all hung up and repressed. And the only way you can deal with that is to pretend it’s because you’re superior
and enigmatic. So that’s what you hide behind to deal with the paralysing situations.’

  The fact that the social paralyses are misinterpreted as smouldering superiority is what appealed to Colin. He finds it hard to be consciously sexy, ‘But if a director says, “Be really revolting and a bit dull”, you think, “Yes, I can do that, I manage that every day.”’

  Although playing with his image of the taciturn, brooding love interest, Colin remained uncomfortable with his sex symbol status and modestly claimed he wasn’t even sure he was attractive.

  ‘I am considered attractive by some people and I’ve been completely ignored by others, so I know that I am somewhere in the middle,’ he told one journalist.

  Asked by yet another whether he considers himself attractive, he answered, ‘Does anyone? I have good days and bad days. I don’t recall ever looking in the mirror and having a fully fledged erotic experience. I’ve tended to try and put it down to a combination of things; playing a role, having the right make-up, and the cameraman being very generous.’

  But he also claimed the reaction to his most famous role stripped him of his identity. ‘I felt as if I’d lost my whole personality,’ he told The Observer. ‘It’s been very strange, this idea of Mr Darcy appealing so much to women. Because obviously, as you can see, I don’t carry that around with me. I’m not Mr Darcy every day of my life. If people expect to see a saturnine, dark, smouldering tall aristocrat, they are going to be disappointed.’

  Having been constantly reminded of his wet-shirted hero and the effect he had on the opposite sex, Colin decided, ‘I might as well have some fun with it and join in the process.’ But he confessed that the two productions had taught him nothing about the opposite sex, saying that back in 1994 ‘I knew nothing at all about women. And I still know nothing about them.’

  Unlike the famous Mr Darcy, Mark was required to shed his shirt in Bridget Jones’s Diary so, while Renée was fattening up, Colin was vowing to get in shape. ‘I was threatened with the prospect of having to take my shirt off, which was a chilling thought,’ he recalled. ‘So I decided that, rather than change profession, I’d get a trainer and try to do something about it.’

  The trainer in question was Cornel Chin, whose previous claim to fame had been getting Leonardo DiCaprio fit for his swimwear in The Beach. Called in two weeks before filming, Cornel had Colin on a strict diet of pasta, poultry, fish, cereal and rice, with no alcohol or fried foods.

  ‘Colin wanted to meet a target in a short time so we had to work incredibly hard,’ he said. ‘We blitzed his whole body. He is one of the most hard-working clients I’ve had.’ The star’s daily workout was ninety minutes long, beginning with a fifteen-minute warm-up jog and a series of aerobic exercises plus 400 sit-ups. Colin lost a stone and gained an impressive six-pack.

  ‘Colin has done exceptionally well,’ Cornel marvelled. ‘There’s a distinct difference and I don’t think his female fans are going to be disappointed. Now he is in really good shape. He is a lot leaner than he was as Mr Darcy, when he was fairly podgy. He has lost a lot of weight and it shows. He has made a complete lifestyle change.’

  Delighted with his new buff look, Colin vowed to keep up the good work. ‘I definitely needed to get in shape for the film. In this day and age you need to be in trim if you are going to be a top actor,’ he confirmed. ‘But I wanted to get in shape regardless of the film, and this is going to be a lifelong commitment. To get fit for the role was a bonus, but I intend to stay in shape for life now.’

  Five years later he was still sticking to his promise, and going for regular runs. On Desert Island Discs in 2005, Sue Lawley asked him if he felt there was ‘a fat person inside trying to get out’.

  ‘There certainly is, and he’s doing ever better as time goes on,’ replied Colin. ‘Until I was thirty I was one of those people that stayed slim. In fact I was so thin I wouldn’t even go to a swimming pool when I was twenty, and it seems impossible to get fat. But these days I have to go for a run if I want to stay this shape.’

  Part of the reason for his fitness regime was a fight scene with Hugh Grant. Bridget Jones’s Diary was the first time that Colin had worked with Hugh, who at the time was Britain’s biggest box office draw. Both articulate and quick-witted, the pair entered into a playful rivalry on set that became a running banter away from the shoot.

  ‘Hugh’s been telling everyone that I fight like a girl,’ joked Colin after shooting the scene. ‘All I can say in response is that it takes one to know one! He was the first one to pull my hair – I’d never have dreamed of doing that. And he scratches as well, so that should give you an idea of his character.’

  In truth, Colin has a great admiration for his intensely funny co-star. ‘He is the best actor of light comedy that we have, the best actor of light comedy anywhere,’ Colin told The Times. ‘Light comedy implies something less substantial than drama but that’s quite untrue. What Hugh has is an extremely inaccessible ability. I can think of very few actors at all since Cary Grant who have had it but there are millions of talented dramatic actors.’

  As a true gentleman, Colin defended the casting of his American co-star Renée by telling everyone that she had the British accent spot on. And he revealed that she didn’t drop the London twang once, even when the cameras stopped rolling. She is, he told journalists, ‘a gem to work with. She’s generous, friendly, professional and sounds like she comes from north London.

  ‘I’ve never heard a peep of the Texan accent out of her yet, so I’ve got to know her as this person who comes from down the road. And it’s actually a little bit confusing sometimes because there’s a great incongruity when she tells you something about her childhood in Texas. She says something like “Dad lassoing mustangs and taking me to the rodeo”. And you think, “What, in Croydon?”’

  Some time after the movie wrapped, Colin bumped into Renée in an LA hotel and stopped for a chat. ‘She’s now wandering around using what I think is a rather unconvincing Texas accent,’ he cheekily reported.

  Remembering his own experiences on an American movie set, Colin felt protective of Renée. ‘I’ve been in that situation too, in A Thousand Acres, where I had to be an American in front of American actors. It is mortifying.’

  With the role of Mark Darcy being taken by Colin, the question arose of the sequel, should there be one. As the second book, The Edge of Reason, contained the now famous interview between Bridget and Colin Firth, who would play Colin?

  ‘You might have to change the character of the actor,’ he suggested when the matter was broached. ‘Someone the Americans believe is a credible sex symbol!’

  As filming wrapped at the end of the summer, Colin was contemplating his upcoming fortieth birthday. ‘I feel like a bizarre genetic experiment that’s gone wrong,’ he joked. ‘It’s all happened far too quickly.’

  While he was keen to leave behind the more obvious romantic leads and seek out character parts, he was aware that he would soon be ruled out of some desirable projects on the grounds of age alone. He related a telling anecdote about an actor friend who shared his agent going up for a role that Colin would have liked in the previous year. His agent informed him that he wasn’t in the running because the character was in his twenties. When he protested that his pal was thirty-five, his agent agreed but pointed out, bluntly, that Colin was thirty-eight. ‘Suddenly I realized that it wasn’t a lot between us, but I was on the other side of a fairly important barrier as far as casting is concerned,’ he told The Times. To make matters worse, he revealed, the agent then rang him back to tell him the part had been offered to his brother Jonathan, who was six years younger.

  With three years of marriage under his belt, and his fortieth looming, Colin was also thinking about starting a family with Livia. Again, he was feeling the passing of time and, having felt too young to fully embrace the huge responsibility of children when Will had been born, he was determined not to feel too old when any subsequent children arrived.

  ‘It’ll
happen,’ he said and, on the subject of leaving it too late, he added, ‘There does seem to be very little in between. You finally reach adulthood and you go through a time of being too young for everything – I’m not thinking about acting here. “Oh, you’ve got plenty of time, it’s all in front of you, you’ll find out that later in life,” and then suddenly on a dime you’re past it, you’re not young any more. There does seem to be a missing middle bit.’

  By the time his fortieth arrived, on 10 September 2000, the couple had made a start on their next big production. Livia was three months pregnant.

  CHAPTER 13

  Pride and Parentage

  AFTER THE PURE fun of Bridget Jones, Colin moved on to his darkest role to date. Conspiracy was a truly chilling dramatization of a meeting which sealed the fate of six million Jews.

  On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior Nazis met in a villa at the lakeside village of Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin. Over a buffet lunch, followed by coffee and brandy, they coolly discussed the ‘Jewish problem’ and after ninety minutes of talk came up with the infamous ‘Final Solution’.

  After the meeting Adolf Eichmann produced thirty copies of a transcript, only one of which survived the war. The terrifying dialogue based on this document has the Nazis casually discussing the extermination, sterilization and forced emigration of the Jewish population of all the European regions under German control and those they intend to conquer.

  Colin’s character, Doctor Wilhelm Stuckart, was the legal mind behind the Nuremberg laws. At the gathering, he made a particularly disturbing speech which begins with his sounding as if he abhors the mistreatment of Jews, because he argues that the SS view that they are subhuman is wrong. But he finishes by proposing a solution that is almost as inhumane as the gas chambers. Urging his colleagues to face ‘the reality of the Jews’, he tells them, ‘To kill them casually without regard to the law martyrs them and it’s their victory. Sterilization recognizes them as part of our species but prevents them becoming part of our race.’