Colin Firth Page 3

  Again, the reason for throwing himself into am-dram was in part motivated by a desire to mingle with the opposite sex.

  ‘I have a feeling that part of the reason for me doing amateur dramatics was to meet girls,’ admits Colin. ‘The girls were good-looking and it was a way, quite frankly, to get laid. I joined a band, I acted and I read books with fancy names.’

  Despite his ulterior motives, Colin was beginning to think of acting as a future career. And one particular actor, the late, great Paul Scofield, was to cement his decision. Colin watched his Oscar-winning performance as Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons at the age of fourteen and was blown away.

  ‘It made me reassess what acting was,’ he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs. ‘It was nothing to do with demonstration, it was nothing to do with anything I was conscious of in body language; it was just an expression of integrity and there was a such a paradox in that because acting by its very nature is false. So how can this man, through doing very little, exude truth and humanity and intelligence? I was so fascinated by that and that’s basically what I’ve tried to pursue ever since.’

  In a blinding moment of clarity, aged fourteen, Colin Firth knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He made ‘an announcement to himself’ that he was going to be an actor, no matter how much the odds were stacked against him. ‘That was a slightly euphoric moment, really and I felt very liberated from the drudgeries,’ he revealed to the Irish Times. ‘It made me feel very grand.’

  Having let the delicious idea sink in, Colin delighted in telling his school friends his new ambition and admits that it allowed him an excuse to shirk his detested schoolwork. But the more he repeated his goal, the more serious he got about it and finally he steeled himself to break the news to his parents. As two academics who placed high value on the importance of education, he was prepared for some resistance and knew they would be disappointed that he wasn’t following a more traditional university route.

  ‘They were frightened because that was the only route they knew,’ he said, talking on Desert Island Discs ‘They weren’t being snobbish about my desire to be an actor, I really believe that. They were just concerned about the first member of the family ever going on that completely unknown route.’

  But Colin’s obvious enthusiasm for treading the boards swayed his parents and they were soon backing his ambition. ‘I think my feeling was, well, if this is what he wants to do, and he’s got some enthusiasm, then thank God he’s found something he’s interested in,’ remembers David.

  Shirley agrees. ‘We both felt that it really was important that children should follow their dream,’ she says. ‘This was his dream – and he was very committed right from the start.’

  Because of his hatred of formal education, as he knew it, Colin was keen to distance himself from the academic world of his mum and dad. Like every teenager, he was finding his own identity and eager to make his own mark. He grew his hair long, pierced his ears, bought himself some flared jeans and joined the last throes of the hippy movement.

  Past guitar lessons, which had proved a disappointment because the teacher chose folk and classic tunes rather than the latest Jimi Hendrix track, still proved useful when Colin decided to form a band with his mates, playing and singing on covers from rock groups such as The Doors. He and pal Arron listened to prog rock groups in Colin’s bedroom and were big fans of King Crimson, Yes and Pink Floyd. Used to being an outsider, Colin stuck to his guns when the punk movement began to engulf the youth of Britain in the mid-seventies although he does admit that, having grown his hair and become a latter-day hippy, he felt ‘slightly stranded’ by the irreverent new trend.

  ‘Progressive rock had become so pompous, and that pompousness suited me, because I had become so well acquainted with it,’ he told The Observer. ‘There was so much snobbery. It was my sanctuary from the laddishness that I didn’t fit in with.’

  At home, things were often fiery between the difficult youth and his parents, but his behaviour was hardly off the scale of teenage rebellion. He tried drinking and smoking and hung out at music festivals with his pals. He got into one or two fights, usually with friends or classmates, rather than strangers. However the family rows were the usual small frictions between a sullen teenager and a parent. ‘It was a whole series of things and was as much as to do with what he suspected. It wasn’t one incident.’ The majority of the squabbles, he says, ‘were about washing dishes and homework. There wasn’t a massive meltdown.’

  Colin’s father put the minor misdemeanours down to the same headstrong nature that often got Colin into scrapes with his peers at school. His self-confessed tendency to mouth off when others would back down was often the cause of his woes. ‘He showed that he did have a strong personality and stood out for the wrong reasons,’ David says. ‘Nevertheless, I do think that kids who show they can hold an audience are sometimes troublesome and should perhaps try for acting.’

  Leaving Montgomery school with average O-level results, Colin went on to Barton Peveril Sixth Form College in Eastleigh, six miles outside Winchester, to study for his English literature, religious studies and drama A levels. His two years there, from 1977 to 1979, were to turn his life around. For the first time in his school career, he discovered learning could be fun, thanks once again to an inspirational tutor.

  In 2010 English teacher Penny Edwards was to accompany her star pupil to the House of Commons where he was presented with a Gold Award from the Association of Colleges in recognition of his achievements since leaving the college. But for now, Penny was the catalyst that spurred him on to greater things.

  ‘I really value what college did for me,’ he said at the ceremony. ‘Barton Peveril College saved me. I’ve always felt very grateful for the extraordinary level of faith they managed to maintain in me.

  ‘It’s left me with a belief that everybody deserves a second chance. My two years at Barton Peveril were among the two happiest years of my life. I must have been paying some attention as I can still quote randomly from Thomas Hardy and Lord Byron.’

  Colin arrived at the college with long hair, an earring, and a penchant for flares and lairy waistcoats. Penny, whose career at the establishment spanned thirty-six years until her retirement in 2010, remembers Colin as an intelligent, focused and determined lad.

  ‘Colin was very sensitive to literature and had this stage presence,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t surprised he did so well. Underneath the laddish exterior was quite a shrewd character who knew exactly what he wanted to do.’

  The tutors soon picked up on his natural talent for drama and those who saw him starring in the college productions of Sweeney Todd and Molière’s Scapino and were bowled over.

  ‘He was a lively and laid-back teenager who had an ability to dominate the stage,’ reveals Penny. ‘In those days I think he will admit he was not that interested in the academic side but very keen on learning as much as he could about practical acting.’

  With his love of rock music and his eclectic reading material, Colin found this was the first time he ‘slotted in very nicely with the in-crowd’ although he admits to a dodgy fashion sense. ‘I used to wear Rupert trousers,’ Colin cringed some time later. ‘Big flared tartan trousers. Revolting. And, God, my seventies hair’s enough to spend my life apologizing for. Vermeer hair. I burned a lot of my photos from the time.’

  English Literature classmate John Harrison remembers a Genesis fan ‘with long hair and an army or air force greatcoat and desert boots with an album under his arm – somewhat different to his suave presence now’.

  After years of waiting to get close to the opposite sex, the sixteen-year-old Colin was now mixing with girls on a day-to-day basis for the first time and, despite his lack of suaveness, their reaction was a taste of things to come.

  Fiona Ackroyd, who studied English literature alongside the future Mr Darcy, was one of the female students who was clearly impressed with her chiselled classmate.

  ‘He was an abs
olute sweetheart,’ she says. ‘He was drop-dead gorgeous even then, in the 1979 uniform of army greatcoat and desert boots.’

  Faced with this female attention, Colin, perhaps due to spending his teenage years in a boys’ school, was a little nonplussed. While friendly and outgoing around the young women, he was a little backward in coming forward when it came to romance.

  ‘He was very sociable and a lot of the girls liked him,’ says Penny. ‘This really beautiful girl had a terrible crush on him, but they never got together. It became a running joke.’

  While the drama and English had improved his attitude to education in general, he still had his moments of rebellion. On one occasion, when he was supposed to be resitting an A level, he decided instead to go back to bed because ‘it felt like a treadmill I didn’t want to be on’.

  Colin was offered university courses conditional on his results, but that decision to stay in bed rather than resit the A level cost him the chance of a place. He admits he has often had fleeting regrets about the missed opportunity.

  ‘For quite a while I felt there was something missing. Somewhere within what I think I would always declare has been my contempt for that, has been a sneaking envy,’ he told The Independent on Sunday. ‘I think I romanticized great seats of learning. I’d read a novel years ago which made me yearn to have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge, preferably in the twenties. You realize the experiences you’re getting are more to be cherished than dreams. I do think as one gets older that fantasies, certainly from my point of view, stop outweighing your actual realistic objectives.’

  Years later, the question of whether he had disappointed his father by not going to university still weighed on his mind, despite his considerable success.

  ‘My father was worried when I decided not to go to university,’ he told The Independent. ‘But only because he wanted me to be able to find something that was stimulating from which I could make a living. I lit on acting because there really wasn’t anything else that seemed feasible.

  ‘I did say to my dad later that I felt like I hadn’t fulfilled the family tradition and that I had missed something by not going to university, by not following that path.’ His father quickly assuaged his worries. ‘He told me that, considering all the things I’ve learnt for various roles, I haven’t missed out on much.’

  Looking back, he sees his youthful insurrection as typical teenage idleness but then, he says, it felt like a principled choice.

  ‘I would have gone to university had I not allowed myself to be derailed into moody adolescent laziness,’ he maintains to The Times. ‘I liked to characterize it then as a defiant decision to resist the system. But I was just resistant to schoolwork. If someone wanted me to read Shakespeare, I wanted to read Thomas Mann. If someone tried to make me listen to Brahms, I had to listen to Hendrix.’

  While at college, Colin earned some cash as a paperboy and part-time dustman. But when school was done, he felt there was only one place for an aspiring actor to be, and he headed for the bright lights of London.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Past is Another Country

  FOUR YEARS AFTER setting his heart on a career in acting, Colin’s college days were over and crunch time had come. He was determined to follow his dream and, in an effort to be close to theatres, Colin left the family home shortly before his nineteenth birthday and travelled to the capital. He had little idea of what a struggling actor’s life might entail and he travelled optimistically, ‘like Dick Whittington’.

  The year was 1979, the dawn of the Thatcherite era and a time of deep unrest for the country’s trade unions. One of Colin’s favourite bands, Pink Floyd, has just released The Wall and Meryl Streep had won the Best Actress Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer. Even the most ambitious of eighteen-year-olds wouldn’t have dared to predict he would one day co-star with this most fêted of Hollywood actresses.

  In a bid to tread the boards, Colin joined the National Youth Theatre where, according to him, he rose to the dizzy heights of ‘third fairy on the left’. He found a poorly paid job as stage door keeper at the Shaw Theatre in London’s Euston Road where he whiled away the time in his cramped cubbyhole reading Kafka and ‘staring into the abyss’.

  From there he moved on to the National Theatre, helping out in the wardrobe department and making tea. He would stay behind at night and says he was ‘alone in the building, alone in London’. It was a miserable time but Colin managed to stay focused, knowing that being inside theatres gave him the chance to learn about his chosen profession, get to know people involved and, perhaps, open the right doors.

  His opportunity came in a conversation with an art director at the theatre, who urged Colin to apply for the Drama Centre, on Prince of Wales Road, Chalk Farm. To his delight, he was accepted. ‘It was a salutary moment when I actually went to drama school and realized that this was what I always said I was going to do. No more fall-back,’ he told the Irish Times in 2003.

  The drama school, set up by a breakaway group from the London School of Speech and Drama, specialized in the Stanislavski method of acting, which the creator, Constantin Stanislavski, believed was the key to ‘theatrical truth’.

  Former principal Christopher Fettes explains: ‘The approach, which is Russian, is based on using your inner demons to express the emotions of your character; you turn your own frustration into someone else’s.’ Colin, he recalls, was a natural receptacle for the system.

  The method ‘simply doesn’t suit the Anglo-Saxon temperament in many, many cases,’ Christopher says. ‘But he responded to the training on every level, right from the early stages.’ The ability to communicate inner struggle without merely using words, previously seen in such greats as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, would become the basis for his most famous taciturn and ‘brooding’ characters in the future. It was a logical step on from the ‘reality of the inner world’ that Freda Kelsall had already instilled in him, but this drama school was no easy ride. The prospectus for the centre, whose other alumni include Pierce Brosnan, Frances de la Tour, Paul Bettany and Tara Fitzgerald, emphasized hard work and dedication.

  While he had been an unwilling worker throughout his school career, Colin chose the course because of this very toughness. Now he had his sights set on a successful career, he was prepared to put all his energy into making it happen. At last he understood the power of learning, and of striving to achieve his goal.

  ‘I chose the Drama Centre because it had a reputation as a hard school, and I thought my resolve should be tested,’ he said. ‘Either you bend under pressure or you respond to the challenge. I can be very lazy and complacent unless I’m pushed so I knew I’d be weeded out very quickly if I was making a mistake.’

  Study was six days a week and covered all the aspects of acting, from psychology of movement to the Stanislavski mix of ‘Russian emotional freedom and Jewish introspection’.

  It was, he admits, ‘very unconventional in English terms. It was very much motivated by the extraordinary personalities of the men who ran it; they were hugely charismatic and very powerful, and rather frightening teachers. It certainly galvanized a lot of us into taking our energies to a different level.’

  One tutor, Yat Malmgren, had himself been a student of Rudolf Laban, who had revolutionized dance teaching by formalizing its notation. Yat translated his teachings into acting, using it to explain movement. ‘We studied movement psychology and its notation,’ Colin told actors’ mag Backstage West. ‘We didn’t use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world.

  ‘It all sounds terribly alienating and full of shit, really, to people who don’t subscribe to it. I found that after a couple of years of it, it started to make an enormous amount of sense; it came as close as anything anybody really can to teaching acting. I think it’s very hard to teach acting. You certainly can’t teach talent. It made sense to me, and I still use it.’

  And C
olin certainly had talent. Unlike many of his schoolteachers, his tutors recognized his abilities and gave him leading roles in many of the centre’s productions, including Molière’s Tartuffe and Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  ‘As a boy and a young man, Colin was a person of conspicuous intelligence. Real intelligence,’ said Christopher Fettes in a statement that might have surprised Colin’s old headmaster. ‘It is very rare to have the privilege of training people for the theatre who are by nature poets. And Colin is.’ None the less, the exacting tutor wasn’t going to give the golden boy an easy ride. ‘It was an incredibly vigorous process, where you’d get rather pleased with yourself about what you were doing, and he would challenge you. He would give you cowardice,’ recalls Colin. ‘He would tell you to throw it all away.’ On one occasion, after weeks of rehearsal, the student actor was convinced the dark spin he had put on the lead in Tartuffe was going to blow his audience away. Christopher instructed him to start all over again and come back the following Monday with a completely different approach. ‘It was a torturous weekend. I just risked a completely different physicality. He was a healthy dose of a mixture of fear and respect that he engendered. He still has it over people even now.’

  Away from classes, Colin was living the typical student lifestyle, hanging out in friends’ flats and drinking cheap booze. But even now he found his middle-class background was getting in the way of his fitting in with some of his trendier peers. ‘The inverted snobbery was very aspirant, the alternative culture was riding high and I wanted to be a part of that. But my street cred certainly wasn’t going to be competing with the kids in that class: I wasn’t a smack addict and didn’t develop a criminal record.’

  He still flirted with the idea of a rock star lifestyle and, like many creative teenagers, fantasized about a hedonistic way of life and a downward spiral into self-destruction. His own sanity and stable middle-class upbringing, coupled with the dedication to his future career, kept him from going off the rails.