Colin Firth Read online

  As Colin basked in award glory, Livia was making headlines with her ethical dress sense. Rather than splashing out on designer dresses worth thousands, the stunning Italian stole the show at the Golden Globes in LA in a second-hand dress. ‘No one here seems to get ethical fashion,’ she said. ‘But everyone was crazy about this dress. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many compliments for a dress in one night.’ She wasn’t adverse to kissing rival nominees either. ‘I kissed George Clooney, which made my night frankly,’ she said.

  Unfortunately for Colin, he lost out at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars to Jeff Bridges, who scooped Best Actor for his role as an alcoholic singer in Crazy Heart. But, in the run-up to the award season, Colin had been working on the very film that would turn the tables at the following year’s glitzy ceremonies, The King’s Speech.

  Between the two Oscar contenders, Colin made a second St Trinian’s film with Rupert Everett, starred with Orlando Bloom in the drama Main Street, and voiced the character of Fred in the 3D Disney production of A Christmas Carol. But while it looked like he was keeping busy, he confessed that they took up very little of his time.

  ‘St Trinian’s was about a week’s work and A Christmas Carol was four hours,’ he told journalists at a press conference in January 2009. ‘I’m not working my fingers to the bone. It’s not as much time as it looks. Since A Single Man wrapped, two Decembers ago, I didn’t do anything until May. That’s not exactly the treadmill. I did a film called Main Street, which was four weeks’ work, then I had the summer off and did seven days on St Trinian’s. Then The King’s Speech – that was work, and that felt like work. I think I get more days off a year than you do. I get my downtime.’

  The King’s Speech, which began shooting in October 2009, charted the efforts of King George VI to overcome a crippling stammer in the weeks leading up to a crucial radio broadcast. Geoffrey Rush was to play speech therapist Lionel Logue and Helena Bonham Carter George’s loyal wife, Queen Elizabeth.

  As Colin contemplated his forthcoming fiftieth birthday, it was exactly the kind of character role he was looking for.

  ‘Fifty does feel like a big number if you haven’t been there before,’ he said during a press conference. ‘I don’t relish the idea of losing my faculties, but I do relish the idea of roles getting more interesting – which for the moment at least is what seems to be happening. I think bad moments can leap out at you just as much as good moments – more often, probably. As a young actor, I remembered thinking I could do with a wrinkle or two, just to get something interesting on to this face. I longed for a bit of texture, a bit of character. I just thought I looked terribly boring. A few lines work quite well, really, as long as you don’t fall apart completely.’

  Philosophizing about reaching half a century, Colin said life is marked by huge events throughout. ‘I think there are a series of crises through life, as you pass certain experiences that mark change and sometimes it is just an age milestone,’ he told The Independent. ‘Having children’s a big one. And not having children can be a big one. I think you see the rest of your generation going through things; there are moments when you look at your life and go what did or didn’t I achieve.’

  Joking about having a midlife crisis, he added, ‘I’m in a fully fledged one right now. It’s in full swing. It’s been going on since I was about twenty-eight. I’ve resisted getting a motorbike by the skin of my teeth. I’d be dead by now probably because I’d be rubbish driving it. I mean, life is full of crises and I don’t think they are just to do with the ageing process, but there are certain physical changes that happen. A lot of people talk about their eyesight after the age of forty. I had 20-20 vision one minute and then suddenly needed glasses the next. And then you reflect – what else is going to go? My memory is not as good as it was. Your hair changes colour, falls out, all those sorts of things. You find you put on weight more easily, but then there are all these other variables – whether you’re married or divorced, whether there’s a war on, or natural disaster.’

  If his eyesight was failing, at least his career was improving with age. After the triumph of A Single Man, his royal role was about to fill his mantelpiece with the long-awaited gongs – and finally rid him of the ‘monkey on my back’ that was Mr Darcy.

  CHAPTER 20

  A King Among Men

  IN 2008 AUSTRALIAN author Meredith Hooper went along to a fringe theatre reading of a play called The King’s Speech in London. The chance invitation was to set off a chain of events that resulted in the biggest British movie of all time. So taken was Meredith with David Seidler’s drama about George VI’s battle against his speech impediment that she immediately sent it to her son, the film director Tom Hooper.

  ‘I had about thirty unread scripts on my desk,’ recalled Tom. ‘She nagged away at me for about three months until I finally read it. And I was blown away by it.’

  Together with producers Iain Canning and Gareth Unwin, he set about looking for funding and casting the lead roles. First on their list to play Australian voice coach Lionel Logue was Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush. Happily Gareth knew someone who lived two doors away from Rush in Melbourne so he cheekily mailed it to his friend, who duly posted it through Geoffrey’s door. The actor was initially furious. ‘I got a very angry email back from Geoffrey’s manager,’ Gareth told The Mail on Sunday. ‘He ripped me to shreds, then ended with “but he likes it. Let’s talk”.’

  The team then drew up a wish list of actors to play the King and his wife, Queen Elizabeth. Colin was top of the list along with Helena Bonham Carter, and both loved the script. The actor knew the basic facts about the abdication of Edward VIII, George’s brother, but was fascinated by the King’s personal struggle.

  ‘You always hear about Prince Charming who gave up the crown for love, but you don’t hear about the uncharismatic guy who had to step up in his place,’ he explained. ‘And poor George had his work cut out for him – he’s crowned during a massive constitutional crisis when monarchs all over Europe are being assassinated or going into exile. Worse, he was horribly shy and had a terrible stutter. These were the years when radio was coming in, and the King was expected to make public radio addresses live. There was no recording and editing.’

  George, who was christened Albert and known to family and friends as Bertie, was terrified of speaking in public due to the debilitating stammer. Scolded by his father and mocked by his brother, he had tried numerous therapies to cure the impediment but none had worked. His devoted wife Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, employed the service of controversial therapist Logue, who improved the situation. But when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, Bertie became the reluctant monarch and called in Logue once more to help with the long radio broadcasts he would be required to make.

  ‘Bertie had to do something which you could almost describe as heroic in order to get a sentence out,’ said Colin. ‘He wasn’t afraid of action in World War I but the idea of speaking, and speaking in public, terrified him.’

  Scriptwriter David Seidler had waited nearly thirty years to tell the story, respecting the wishes of the Queen Mother not to dramatize it during her lifetime. In the 1970s he wrote asking permission and she wrote back saying that ‘The memory of these events are still too painful’ and that she wouldn’t accede in her lifetime. ‘I thought, “How long am I going to have to wait? One or two years?” She wasn’t that young,’ he recalled. The Queen Mother lived until she was 101, so he had to wait twenty-eight years for his moment of glory.

  As always, Colin went into extensive research for the role and was touched by the character and predicament of the King. ‘I think he had a very, very vulnerable quality. He was a frightened man who had, I think, suffered abuse in his life in all sorts of ways and was not groomed for this job and was not expecting it,’ he said during a Canadian press conference. ‘His only job was to speak for the nation, on live radio – I mean, how cruel was that? There is no recording yet, there is no editing for
radio – this is live to the Empire. You’ve got a war coming as well. You’re the guy who has to reinforce us all and lead us into war. Your adversaries are the best in the business – Hitler, Mussolini.

  ‘So that’s what he was facing and the stakes were very high. And because he was senior royalty he didn’t have any friends.’

  George was also a loving family man, devoted to his two daughters, Elizabeth, the present queen, and Margaret. This, reflected Colin, was unusual in the royal household at the time.

  ‘This is a film about them as human beings,’ he said. ‘There was a tremendous amount of love between that father and those girls. His parents had been rather distant, to put it mildly, but he adored those children. When you look at pictures of the royal family operating, you see his parents standing there very rigid. He’s always looking at the girls. He’s holding them, he’s smiling, he’s taking pleasure in them.’

  Colin had perfected a stammer for two previous roles, including Three Days of Rain, and practised day and night to get it right for The King’s Speech. He also spoke to his sister, Kate, a speech therapist, about Logue’s unorthodox methods and she helped him understand the psychology behind them.

  ‘He has an incredible brain, he’s a very clever man, so his command of the subject and Bertie’s story was formidable by the time we started shooting,’ said Tom. ‘He studied the way Bertie stammered very carefully and I think Colin is by nature a minimalist actor and it’s very interesting when you confront a minimalist actor with a role like this because you can’t be minimalist about stammering, you have to take it on. It’s been great to get Colin to go for capturing something which you can’t do by half measures and I think it’s a truly great performance.’

  Tom remembers that his star faltered over his speeches while accepting awards for A Single Man. ‘Colin went to an awards thing in the midst of production, and he completely stammered. He couldn’t speak,’ he revealed. ‘And I said, “That’s fantastic news.”’

  This time it had a very real physical effect and took months to lose after filming was over. ‘It had an effect on my body – headaches,’ Colin explained to The Guardian. ‘I had to learn to stammer and then play someone trying desperately not to. It put my left arm to sleep – it was very peculiar. I must have been locking something, pinching a nerve. It was a semi-paralysis that would last for three or four days.’ Co-star Derek Jacobi, who had taken on a speech impediment for I, Claudius, dished out some welcome advice. He told Colin, ‘You could find it affecting your speech patterns for some time afterwards. When the job’s over, don’t worry, it will go away.’

  The stammer was so convincing by the end that during filming of a crowd scene replicating Bertie’s disastrous address at the Empire Exhibition in 1925, he almost caused a revolt among the extras. ‘It was a cold, wet, drizzly day and we had reports coming back from the set that some of the extras were saying that they couldn’t believe an actor as great as Colin Firth couldn’t get his lines right!’ laughed Gareth.

  Geoffrey Rush and Colin worked well together and became great friends on set. Shirley Firth remembered being at the Firth family home when the pair were busy rehearsing, which gave her an insight into her son’s methods. ‘We’d been in his house once when he and Geoffrey were going over a bit of it. We were in another room and the doors were shut, but we could hear everything. And they were saying “Would the King have said that? Would the therapist have said that?” and they were really working on how it would really have been. I was really impressed by this process. I was fascinated because it showed how two good actors can work together to explore the personalities concerned.’

  The intensive research and physical effort paid off on the film’s release, which went worldwide in January 2011, after the initial festival Oscar-qualifying screenings in the US and the UK.

  The Telegraph called The King’s Speech ‘Colin Firth’s crowning glory’ and added, ‘Firth’s vocal performance is wholly believable, and he is absorbing throughout, out-plumbing the depths of isolation he achieved in A Single Man.’ The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote ‘The King’s Speech proves there’s fizzing life in old-school British period dramas – it’s acted and directed with such sweep, verve, darting lightness. George VI’s talking cure is gripping.’ Universally praised, there was instant talk of Oscars and, as the award season warmed up with the Screen Actors’ Guild awards, the Golden Globe nominations and the BAFTA list, the gold statuette looked ever closer to Colin’s grasp.

  On 17 January he beat the previous year’s winner Jeff Bridges to a Best Actor Golden Globe and joked about the ‘robust triangle of man love’ between himself, Geoffrey and Tom, and called his Australian co-star his ‘friend and Geisha girl’.

  Avoiding the usual gushing acceptance speeches, he told the star-studded audience, ‘Getting through the mid stage of your life with your dignity and judgement intact can be somewhat precarious. Sometimes all you need is a bit of gentle reassurance to keep on track. I’m not sure this could be described as gentle, but right now this is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson.’

  A week later The King’s Speech achieved a massive twelve Oscar nominations and Colin was pitted against Jeff Bridges for True Grit, Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network, Javier Bardem for Biutiful, and 127 Hours star James Franco.

  At the BAFTAs in February, the film scooped seven awards, including Best Supporting Actor and Actress for Geoffrey and Helena and Best Director for Tom. Colin, picking up his Leading Actor gong for the second year in a row, quipped ‘Thank you. I like coming here.’ And referring to the ‘fridge repairman’ speech of the year before, he continued, ‘Consistent with the fact that almost every important turning point in my life has hinged on the banal and the arbitrary, such things as broken kitchen appliances and unsent emails, the day on which I had to make my first meeting with Tom Hooper, I had to postpone a routine but possibly somewhat uncomfortable medical examination, and I am pleased to report that the meeting with Tom was a lot more edifying than the encounter that I had been anticipating.

  ‘But as the work went on, it became apparent that Tom’s working methods were every bit as thorough, as surprising and as effective as those of my doctor. So perhaps one never truly escapes one’s fate.’

  By the time Colin walked down the red carpet at the Academy Awards, on 27 February, he had already added twenty-two new ornaments to his trophy cabinet. He was having trouble taking all the adulation in. At the pre-Oscar lunch he commented, ‘Obviously it’s elating but I have a feeling however this is going to percolate throughout the next year so I’ll probably punch the air in May and crack open a bottle of champagne in September.’

  Mum Shirley was convinced her son would be a magnanimous loser if he didn’t come home with the award. If he won, she said, ‘He would be very pleased, but very philosophical if he didn’t get it. He would recognize that it had been given to someone who had been acknowledged as having great talent. Taking parts like this shows that he can be very daring – it was a big challenge to take on.’

  On the night, both Colin and Tom were victorious. After nearly thirty years in the business, Colin finally had his hands on the coveted golden statuette. And the man used to playing emotionally repressed Englishman was getting emotional. Despite the tear in his eye, however, he managed to give a masterclass in succinct funny speeches.

  ‘I have a feeling my career’s just peaked,’ he said as he took to the stage. Then he joked, ‘I’m afraid I have to warn you that I’m experiencing stirrings somewhere in the upper abdominals which are threatening to form themselves into dance moves. Joyous as they may be for me, it would be extremely problematic if they make it to my legs before I get off stage.’ He thanked his co-stars and Tom Hooper before paying tribute to Livia for standing by him.

  Back at home, friends and family watched with delight as the universally liked star received the honour. Kenneth Branagh, who couldn’t make the ceremony, revealed that Colin texted him minutes after the win.r />
  ‘We were jumping up and down for Colin, who is an old mate,’ he revealed. ‘The texts were ringing after that. It’s amazing, I don’t know how he did it but there were messages back almost instantly, and I’m sure there was to all his friends as well. It was really a thrilling night, his speech was really smashing and really clever.

  ‘I’m so fond of Colin. He’s a great guy so I’m thrilled. What’s nice is that he’s been recognized and he’s had a tremendous career as an actor, but it’s just nice when things come together. And that was a great enterprise. The whole film was a great piece of work. The Oscar would have come his way sometime and in the meantime he’s done lots of work which we all love.’

  Gary Oldman, who was working with Colin on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was equally delighted. ‘He’s a fantastic actor and a fantastic bloke,’ he said. ‘He really deserves the recognition he’s getting now. He’s great to work with – incredibly funny. He throws out these witty one-liners and has everyone on set laughing.’

  It is testament to how well he and Will’s mum had maintained a relationship that Meg Tilly, the day after the Oscar ceremony, took to her blog to state, simply, ‘Bravo! Happy, doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are those times in life when mere words just aren’t sufficient. This is one of those times.’

  Colin was overwhelmed by the support and warmth his series of awards was greeted with. ‘It’s been amazing. The reaction of everybody, from the people who have supported me for thirty years, like my family and friends, to the general public, has been overwhelming. I can’t get over how wonderful everyone has been.’

  And he revealed that the British public had helped him on the night. ‘It meant a lot to me, that feeling of people rooting for me at home. I actually wrote a speech and forgot it. And that was when it came to me, that support at home. I felt it – it was very important to me.’