Colin Firth Read online

  In later interviews, however, Colin claimed Reese was far more serious on set than the formidable Dame Judi. ‘It may be shocking to some people, but a lot of the American actors I’ve worked with are far more disciplined than Judi Dench,’ he said. ‘Judi has a terrible sense of mischief, and sometimes you’re lucky to get beyond three lines of dialogue without her cracking up with laughter. Of course, she’s very sure of her own discipline, which is why she’s free to have fun. But I found that American actors are intensely disciplined and extremely hard-working.’

  Reese did her best to fit in with the largely British cast but revealed that the leading men frequently turned their mischievous humour on their American co-star. ‘You have to hold your own around Rupert and Colin because they’ll give you a hard time,’ she told the Mirror. ‘They’ll run you into the ground if you let them, so I was constantly having to stick up for myself around. I was the youngest, so naturally they picked on me. They would tease me about my accent and going to Hollywood premieres. They would say they had read terrible things about me that morning in the newspapers. They had me going all day once. I was terribly upset and trying to track down the paper.’

  The rivalry works on screen in the stream of barbed banter as well as a playful tussle over a crumpet at afternoon tea. On one occasion the clashing actors even got carried away while picking bluebells in the woods. ‘We picked bluebells together and started to argue, and then it got physical,’ said Colin to the Hollywood Reporter. ‘I scrunched his bunch of bluebells, and then he pushed me over.’

  ‘They are like The Odd Couple, completely different guys but very comfortable with each other, and that comes across in the film,’ said producer Barnaby Thompson in the Sunday Express.

  Asked in interviews about their previous rift, Colin initially insisted that ‘This time everything was fine’.

  ‘Even though there was an eighteen-year gap, there was a bizarre familiarity immediately,’ he told the Express in 2002. ‘I do remember a strange look of recognition between us when we met again. We were a bit like an old married couple.’

  And although he admitted they hadn’t got together since, he said there were plans to do so and that the relationship now had ‘social potential’. In February 2003, during a press conference in his adopted city of Rome, he appeared to be saying the feud was still alive and well. However, as he conducted the interview, impressively, in Italian, a mix-up over tenses may have appeared in the translation.

  ‘Personally I’ve never been able to stand Rupert very much,’ he reportedly told the gathered European journalists. ‘But on set we managed to get on really very well. Rupert and I hate each other because we are basically very different. I find him a frightfully sophisticated person. He’s improved a little with age; he’s certainly not become more serious but more tolerant.’

  In another interview he expressed irritation that Rupert had revealed their earlier rows. ‘We didn’t take to each other, but this is a story that I would have never revealed to the public if he hadn’t done so during the promotion of the film in the States.’

  The two actors would bury the hatchet for good six years later, when Rupert asked Colin to star in his pet project, a remake of St Trinian’s.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hollywood Hope

  IN A 2002 interview set up by Vogue magazine, Colin and Earnest co-star Rupert Everett fired questions at each other. Colin joked that his midlife crisis meant he was ‘dreaming about Harley Davidsons, Botox and Britney Spears’.

  Asked whether he would like a knighthood, he replied, ‘While I think a knighthood is inevitable in the next year or so, I think I’m going to have to decline on grounds that it might make me seem a bit old and spoil my chances with Britney. Twenty years’ time would be fine.’

  He also revealed that life had changed since Bridget Jones’s Diary because ‘I’ve changed a lot more diapers since it was released, and I get a lot more upgrades’.

  Although he was merely joking, the last answer had a ring of truth. Colin was heading up the A-list yet again and the movie industry was sitting up and taking notice. The Importance of Being Earnest producer Barnaby Thompson noted, ‘In the same way that Four Weddings put Hugh Grant on the film map, Bridget Jones’s Diary has finally done it for Colin Firth.’ The man who often claimed, ‘Hollywood has resisted me’, was rendered irresistible by the runaway success of the movie. And this time Colin appeared to be warming to the idea.

  ‘I don’t consider Hollywood stardom to be the pinnacle of what one needs to aspire to in life,’ he insisted. ‘But I’m sure it’s very pleasant and if I’m forced to go that way, I’ll probably come quietly.’

  As Colin considered a whole raft of offers, he was forced to cancel a much-lauded return to the role of Hamlet, the dithering Dane who had helped launched his career back in drama school. The production, due to tour Oxford, Malvern and Cambridge before settling in the intimate setting of London’s Riverside Studios, was to be directed by his mentor Christopher Fettes and would run from January to March 2002. At the time of the announcement in December 2000, he declared it his last chance to tackle the role. ‘I was beginning to wonder if it had passed me by. Albert Finney said you should play it at twenty or forty, but I think Hamlet’s thirty. By my own theory, I’m ten years too old, but I’m itching to do it.’

  Colin reluctantly pulled out in July 2001 and explained, ‘My worst fears were fulfilled when my filming schedule for early next year changed, meaning I would have to withdraw from Concentric Circles’ production of Hamlet. We are now exploring other possibilities of working together in the future.’

  Such was the excitement surrounding Colin’s name that he was among the top three actors named in newspapers’ speculation about the next James Bond. He took the reports with a pinch of salt, saying only, ‘I love the idea. I’d go for it, absolutely. But it’s probably not coming my way.’

  Sadly, he was right. What did come his way was a romantic comedy, set in New England, and based on a book by Charles Webb, the man behind The Graduate. Although many billed Hope Springs as a Hollywood movie, it was actually the work of three British production companies, including Fragile Films, who owned the revived Ealing Studios, and Prominent Features, the team behind A Fish Called Wanda and Brassed Off. With Little Voice director Mark Herman at the helm, it was an American tale with a distinctly British feel.

  The leading character, who is actually called Colin, is a buttoned-up English artist who discovers he’s been dumped when his girlfriend sends him an invitation to her wedding. He escapes to a small town in New England to mend his broken heart where a local hotel owner introduces him to a local girl. Mandy (Heather Graham) is as wild as he is repressed and she, in turn, shows him how to loosen up and enjoy himself. The inevitable romance is complicated when the ghastly ex, played by Circle of Friends co-star Minnie Driver, shows up in the hope of a reunion.

  The book was first brought to Colin’s attention by Nick Hornby, who thought he would be perfect for a lead in the film. ‘The novel’s brilliant,’ said Colin in Vogue. ‘It’s about a guy, an Englishman, who shows up in a tiny town in New England called Hope, in a desperate state. A couple of friends of mine had spotted it and thought of me. I’m really thumbs-up about this one. The character’s even called Colin. It did sort of feel like it was waiting for me to step into somehow.’

  Playing his namesake for the first time, Colin reflected that his given moniker was actually rather dull and, frankly, a little silly. ‘Well it doesn’t exactly have a ring to it, does it?’ he said in Real magazine. ‘It’s more the sort of name you’d give your goldfish for a joke. In fact, I saw an episode of Blackadder the other day and there was a dachshund in it called Colin. It seems that his name alone was supposed to reduce you to fits of laughter. It has the double disadvantage of being considered commonplace, dreary and banal and, at the same time, not common at all. So I have this commonplace, dreary, banal name, but there is nobody else to share my fate. There are very few Colin
s around.’

  Still plagued by the shadow of his smouldering Austen hero, he added, ‘When the credits roll, I’m thinking of having it billed as “Colin was played by Mr Darcy” just so people will know who I really am.’

  Although set in New England, filming actually took place in British Columbia, where Colin had once lived with Meg Tilly, in November and December 2001. Meg still had her main home in the Canadian province and the couple had remained good friends. This happy coincidence meant that Colin got to spend more time with eleven-year-old Will during the two months he was there, and even celebrate Thanksgiving in November. The devoted father maintained that the two boys always came before work. ‘My life revolves around my two boys. Everything else matters less.’ And, with his extended family now dotted between America, England and Italy, the location of each shoot had now become a crucial part of his decision-making process.

  ‘I’m trying to make choices for home and stability,’ he said to The Times in 2002. ‘If I need to visit my elder son in California, I can afford it. I still don’t have a fixed pattern of when I can see him: I have to make that time, choose not to work then.’

  The trip brought back memories of his time in their wilderness retreat and he said he identified with the ‘confused, bewildered middle-class Englishman adrift in North America, which has definitely been me’.

  As it came from the same pen as the now classic Dustin Hoffman movie The Graduate, Colin said he would be delighted if it was even ‘half as good’.

  ‘It’s not entirely without parallel,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s a sophisticated, jaded woman who sabotages the guy’s chances with the fresh, innocent hope for the future. There’s even a scene where someone spontaneously takes their clothes off in front of me.’

  That very scene caused something of a headache for director Mark Herman, who found out, on the day, that Heather Graham was not prepared to go topless. At a press conference for the film, he told journalists that in her ‘last two or three films she didn’t seem to have any problems with that part of the contract but suddenly on ours she did. It actually caused a nightmare to shoot and she turned up on set with nipple plasters and so on.’

  However, Colin mused on the dilemma of the young actress when it comes to nudity.

  ‘Actresses spend half their lives with people lobbying to take their clothes off and then they finally do it and they get crap for it for years. I mean people still hit Glenda Jackson with it now, still. I do think that if you do it once, no one lets you forget it.’

  Ironically, the revised way of shooting the scene meant that the studio found it too sexy. As Mark revealed, the scene had to be reshot in England, ‘with a stand-in actress who basically had to sit in Colin’s lap with her clothes off the entire afternoon’.

  ‘I’m over it now,’ laughed Colin.

  Hope Springs began an assault on the US market that Colin would follow up with another Anglo-American production, What a Girl Wants. But as the year came to a close, the name Bridget Jones’s Diary was still on the lips of movie insiders. In December the box office figures showed it was the most successful British movie of 2001, beating Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with a taking of £42 million in the UK alone. The embarrassing reindeer sweater Colin made famous during a party scene in the film raised £1,900 for the National Film and TV School at Christie’s, and the sequel was already on the cards.

  But as negotiations opened for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the awkward question of how the film-maker would get round the heroine’s infamous interview with Colin was the subject of much speculation. ‘I wrote the part of Mark Darcy for Colin Firth and I do hope he will come back for a repeat of his lovely performance,’ Helen Fielding told Daily Variety. ‘If he does, he will simply have to don a large beard and handlebar moustache and play himself as well.’

  The dippy diarist also featured in Colin’s thoughts in January when he scooped a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA nomination for his Mark Darcy, one of four nods to the film which also included Best Actress for Renée Zellweger. And in February the sequel was officially announced, with plans to shoot in the autumn of 2002 providing the cast, who were yet to sign up, could be available. Andrew Davies was working on a new script and, as Helen Fielding revealed, they were upping Hugh Grant’s screentime as his character, Daniel Cleaver, barely appeared in book number two. ‘He only has about four pages in the second book,’ she told Empire magazine, ‘but you can’t confine Hugh to two scenes, so there definitely needs to be more. He was so fantastic in the first one.’ Having got the girl at the end of the first scene, however, Colin had nothing to fear. Mark Darcy, she confirmed, would still feature heavily.

  The announcement, as far as Colin was concerned, may have been a little premature. Four months later and no definite offer had appeared.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ he told the Sunday Express in June. ‘They’re talking about it, but not with great frequency. They talk about it then it goes quiet for a while - so I’ve no idea what’s going to happen.’

  In the meantime, he added, the flood of calls to his agent didn’t seem to be bearing the right kind of fruit. Although he had enough work, he bemoaned the lack of interesting material. ‘I’m just looking forward to the day when there’s a stack of good scripts,’ he said. ‘I’m not facing hunger and impoverishment, but I’m hoping I’ll find myself doing something good soon. And if I don’t get offered Darcy again I think I’ll just have to get into the costume and open supermarkets.’

  In fact, Colin was enjoying a seven-month break, concentrating on being a great father and maybe catching up on some sleep. ‘You never lie in again between filming and fatherhood,’ he admitted. ‘I do love being a dad though.’

  ‘I only ever wanted to be happy … Not even that, just a decent level of contentment,’ he told The Times. ‘The baby has been fantastic, the best thing and the main thing, nothing complicated.’

  The break was a wonderful opportunity for Colin to bond even further with Luca and he immersed himself in nappy-changing and spoon-feeding with a new-found joy. ‘There’s a great line by the writer Robert Towne about fatherhood which hit the nail on the head for me,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘He said he’d always associated fatherhood with age and the atrophy that goes with comfort – pipes and slippers and eventually death. But having a baby was rejuvenating and wild and wonderful.

  ‘Being a father is more like passionate love than I’d imagined. You have the same sense of being on the brink of being out of control, and of utter euphoria. It’s what makes life most worth living – no question.’

  He also used the time to look into Luca’s future education. Living in Islington presented the principled liberal with a huge dilemma. The majority in his privileged position move out of London before their child hits primary age or send them to expensive private schools but Colin is a lifelong believer in state education.

  ‘My mother gave me the greatest regard for state education,’ he had said to The Sun. ‘I don’t think, on teacher salaries, they could have afforded to put three kids through private schools. But if they could have afforded it, they would still not have done so.

  ‘If everyone sent their child to the local school, we would improve schools at a stroke. But with some parents, you’d have to get the troops out to force them to send their children to a state school. I think that if you respond to a good teacher, miracles can happen.’

  With Luca only a year old, Colin had already started searching the borough for a suitable school but admitted, if he failed, that ‘He might end up going to school in Rome, and we might move there with him’.

  • • •

  During his time away from filming, his wish for interesting work came true when two tantalizing scripts came his way. In July he signed up to Richard Curtis’s directorial debut Love Actually, starring Bridget Jones rival Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman and a whole host of other big British names. A month later he pledged his talent to Girl with a Pearl
Earring, the intriguing tale of Vermeer’s silent passion for the subject of his painting, based on the best-selling novel by Tracy Chevalier. His young co-star was to be the almost unknown eighteen-year-old Scarlett Johansson, who was on the verge of making it big in Hollywood.

  But first Colin’s own assault on the US market continued with the dubious comedy What a Girl Wants. Shot in London and Morocco in the summer of 2002, it starred American Nickelodeon star Amanda Bynes as the long-lost daughter of an upper-crust British politician.

  Having been brought up in the States by her hippy mum, played by Kelly Preston, she heads to England to find her real dad and bring chaos into his ordered existence in the run-up to his most important election. Amanda, who was a huge name among US teenagers, was about to turn the movie down until she found out Colin was attached.

  ‘I thought it was cute but I didn’t know if I wanted to do a movie. Then I heard Colin Firth was interested and I was like “What? He’s interested? Let me look at that again,”’ she gushed. ‘When I found out Colin was doing it I was shocked that he would be near me, let alone do a movie with me. He was amazing. Even better than I thought he would be. He’s down to earth and has such a good sense of humour and is so charming and such a lovely guy.’

  For the eager sixteen-year-old the experience was an acting masterclass. ‘There’s no exact “how to” but he’s so natural that when he does it, I don’t ever see him studying lines but he always brings something to it. He’s hard on himself and will do the take fifty times and make sure it’s right. Having that type of commitment and stamina is really impressive and is really a good role model and something good to see.’