Colin Firth Read online

  ‘I romanticized the idea of artistically deranging oneself, whether it was a rock star fucking himself up with drugs or Rimbaud’s conscious disordering of the senses,’ he says. ‘Being sane was a tedious, suburban thing to be. Unfortunately it’s not the brilliance, but rather the screwing up, that’s easy to achieve.’

  His parents’ habitual frugality had also stood him in good stead for student life. The meagre grant, he was finding, didn’t stretch far in central London and he struggled to find enough money for food and lodgings.

  ‘I’ve slept in railway stations,’ he recalls. ‘As a student, there was little pride and some grim places, grimy squats. It was just the sort of thing that students do.’

  Choosing Nick Cave’s ‘Heart Attack Line’ on Desert Island Discs in 2005, he said the track was reminiscent of his years in a student squat in Chalk Farm ‘when one was quite happy to live in squalor.

  ‘This was a period when I was homeless, not on the street but on other people’s floors. You’d come home starving and try to find something in the fridge, and it wouldn’t be there, so you check behind the sofa!’

  Former acting coach Freda Kelsall was still in touch with Colin and remembers a visit to one grotty north London bedsit. ‘I went to see him and he didn’t have much money,’ she said. ‘He had holes in his shoes and was going to walk two miles to a play. But he was determined. I thought: “This boy is going somewhere.”’

  But it was a means to an end, and another turning point in the star’s life. ‘This is when I got my act together,’ he says. ‘To the immense relief of everyone around me, I suddenly wanted to do what was expected of me.’

  Impressed with his good-looking protégé, who had cut his hair and adopted a less hippy look, Christopher Fettes paid Colin the ultimate compliment. If he could avoid being cast for his movie star looks, he said, he could become the next Paul Scofield. The comparison to his ultimate hero spurred Colin to work even harder. After years of teaching aspiring actors, Christopher had found his Hamlet and in Colin’s final year he was cast in the lead role of his mentor’s professional production. Colin disputes the general perception that the play was put on as a vehicle for him, although the college had never staged it before or since. ‘He was engaged in a professional production of Hamlet and he had to teach us as well and it was more than he could do,’ Colin concludes modestly.

  Whatever the truth, Colin’s troubled Dane was a sensation, described by one member of the audience as ‘incredibly dark and glamorous’. And casting directors sat up and took notice. In early 1983 Colin was drafted in to play public school boy Guy Bennett in the West End production of Julian Mitchell’s Another Country and he had some pretty big shoes to fill. Rupert Everett had made the role famous in its out-of-town run at Greenwich Theatre and had transferred to the West End with Kenneth Branagh playing the opposite role of Tommy Judd. When Colin was asked to audition, he was competing to replace Daniel Day-Lewis, but he wasn’t the only one. The advert had been in The Stage, thousands had turned up and competition was stiff.

  ‘There were guys dressed up,’ he says. ‘They tried to put the costume on, which doesn’t sell, I don’t think. And it’s a really superbly bad idea; it’s far too keen-looking. If you were to sit before the director and were a bit sceptical about your own chances for the role, they tended to like that. Anyway, I got past first base. It was a classic thing. I don’t know if it happens any more, but it was the darkened auditorium and the light on the stage.’

  Typically modest, however, he claims it was his looks that clinched the audition. ‘Others were far better than me,’ he says. ‘But they weren’t looking for a short fat guy with a slight Scandinavian accent. They wanted someone who walked and talked and looked like me.’

  The play, loosely based on the life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, centres on the friendship of two public schoolboys. Guy is openly gay and Tommy is a Marxist. Both are shunned and despised by their peers and their masters. While public school was far from his own childhood environment, Colin immediately identified with both characters because of his experiences as an outsider. He accepted a salary of £150 a week and dropped out of drama school early. Even so, he was surprised that casting directors were already seeing him as one of the English upper-class set. ‘To my astonishment I was identified immediately as silver-spooned, plummy.’

  Lifelong friend Kenneth Branagh remembers the buzz around the play and the succession of brilliant actors who made their name in it, including Colin.

  ‘When I was just about to leave Another Country, which was the first play I’d done when I was twenty-one, I remember coming in at the end of the run and downstairs rehearsing were Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth, who was getting ready to take over,’ he says. ‘Also we used to go for a drink after the show with Gary Oldman, who was in a play next door, and Tim Roth, who was across the street in a play. It was one of those moments when you aware of a whole group of actors who were all starting at the same time and really going places so it’s pretty nice when you bump into them these days, and we’re still here, as it were.’

  The play won Colin rave reviews and resulted in a moody poster of his young, good-looking face being plastered all over London. ‘To me, it felt like megastardom,’ he said. ‘I made no distinction between that and a Hollywood role. I’d only been in London three years.’

  Another Country launched the careers of Branagh, Everett and Day-Lewis as well as future Merchant Ivory star James Wilby. Colin couldn’t believe his luck. With his first West End role came an agent and an Equity card, crucial for an acting career but incredibly hard to obtain. There also came the feeling that he had taken the right path, after all, and the happy knowledge that he had already shown his family that he could follow it through. ‘That fairy godmother never appears again. It dwarfs what Pride and Prejudice felt like. I went from nobody knowing who I was and everyone doubting me to my dad taking photos of the poster on Finsbury Avenue.’

  Indeed David couldn’t have been more proud and was, no doubt, a little relieved. ‘We never dreamt he would be straight on to the West End stage. It was about rebels against the system, so it was quite appropriate. Seeing him on stage was amazing, but the thing that made the biggest impact was going down the road past the Shaftesbury Theatre and seeing his portrait, huge, outside.’

  As he was heading straight to the West End stage, in a leading role, without finishing his course, his peers naturally assumed he would soon be getting too big for his boots. But, as he has demonstrated to great effect ever since, Colin is resolutely down to earth. ‘In the end I bought the drinks for a long time,’ he says. ‘I had to be humble.’

  Others’ perception of him did concern him, however. ‘For a while I felt I had to be excessively modest so people didn’t think I was above them,’ he admitted to The Guardian in 1996. ‘I forgot to return a phone call and now it was because I was thought arrogant, not because I was scatty and always had been. Then I realized nothing had changed. I was working, that’s all there was to it.’

  Two months into the run, Colin had another extraordinary stroke of luck. Director Marek Kanievska was planning a movie based on the Mitchell play and had cast Rupert Everett, the original Guy Bennett, in the lead role. The obvious choice for Tommy Judd might have been Kenneth Branagh, whose West End performance in the play had won prestigious awards, but his career had taken off and he was busy in Australia filming Boy in the Bush. Legend has it that Colin was asked to do a screen test in his place and that Marek was suitably impressed. Kenneth has a different recollection. ‘The issue may have been that I wasn’t available but I couldn’t tell you whether they didn’t just want Colin anyway,’ he insists. ‘I was in Australia doing the television series and to be honest I don’t know the truth of that but he did a fantastic job in the film. Of course, I’d have been thrilled to do it but he was great.’

  Whatever the truth behind the casting choice, Colin considered himself lucky to be landing his first film role so early in his career
. ‘I never even expected to work,’ he recalls. ‘When I left, I’d have been euphoric to get a spear-carrier in repertory. Films seemed like another world.’

  With only his second acting job, Colin was about to become a film star. While he had cause for celebration, he sometimes seemed less euphoric than confused. ‘I don’t know what to expect next because I’ve lost my bearings,’ he said during the filming of the movie. ‘My sense of ambition has been numbed completely. When I got the part in the film, I already had a job and I didn’t know how to react. On stage, you function on adrenalin, but the medium of film is very bizarre. The energy is different because the work is so detailed, so subtle. All I know is that I have to cope with what comes next in a very sober way and give myself a breathing space to sort things out.’

  Some six years later he reflected that this wonderful opportunity had terrified him at the time. ‘I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the change of roles as the change in medium,’ he said. ‘It was not knowing if there was anything specific I should be doing that was so frightening.’

  And co-star Rupert wasn’t about to make the experience any easier.

  CHAPTER 4

  Toffs and Tiffs

  IN JULY 1983 filming began on the film version of Another Country at Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire and various locations in and around Oxfordshire. Some scenes were also filmed at Earl Spencer’s family seat of Althorp House, whose sumptuous rooms provided many of the interior shots. Although uncredited, Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, can be spotted briefly by eagle-eyed moviegoers in a scene where the schoolboys sing the patriotic hymn ‘I vow to thee my country’, a line of which provides the film’s title.

  Moving the action to the big screen meant the glamour of the garden parties and stately homes could be better contrasted with harsher interiors of the boarding school’s locker rooms, and the whole story gained a glossier, more photogenic look. It also moved the love story between Bennett and fellow pupil Harcourt, played by Cary Elwes, from off stage to centre stage.

  While surrounded by genuine public schoolboys, such as Rupert and his old Etonian pal Piers Flint-Shipman, credited in the film under the name Frederick Alexander, Colin held his own on screen, with his clipped upper-class tones and boyish good looks making a real impact. Off camera, however, he wasn’t fitting in quite so well.

  Having been part of the process at its outset, and surrounded by friends who had worked with him since the play’s first outing in Greenwich, Rupert Everett was keen to stamp his authority on the set and was soon ruling the roost. Unfortunately for Colin, the flamboyant star took against him, labelling him ‘ghastly’ and ‘boring’.

  In his autobiography, Red Carpets and Banana Skins, public schoolboy Everett admitted that he had initially fancied his co-star but he and Piers, who played Jim Menzies in the play and film, soon dismissed Colin as a ‘grim Guardian reader in sandals’.

  ‘He produced a guitar and began to sing protest songs between scenes,’ wrote Rupert. ‘“There are limits,” said my friend Piers Flint-Shipman when “Lemon Tree, Very Pretty” began. Colin was visibly pained by our superficiality.’

  Secondary-modern kid Colin, who came from a very different background to the pair, was an earnest, politically minded young man at the other end of the scale from the frivolous attention-seeking star. ‘Colin was very red-brick university, strumming a guitar,’ Everett recalls. ‘I remember him saying once that if he earned any money he was going to give it to the Communist party or something like that, and I was way in the other direction. He wasn’t really much fun. We were at the end of the working-class revolution in the theatre at that time, that Look Back in Anger generation. English theatre was still very politically motivated when I started out, and it attracted a very politically motivated type of person. Colin was the kind of emblem for Redgraveism, and I didn’t fit into that and I didn’t like that whole Royal Court, RSC kind of right-on “kill ’em with art” vibe.’

  Colin has since disputed Rupert’s version of events, claiming he never wore sandals and that he doesn’t remember bringing a guitar on to set either. Certainly, he says, he never learned to play the 1960s folk song, which compares love to the pretty but bitter fruit of the lemon tree.

  ‘I did bring a copy of The Guardian, so I suppose the essence of Rupert’s version is sort of true,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph. ‘It was a grisly experience – he was so badly behaved, and had the most powerful bullying technique, which was that he shimmied on to the set, and everyone promptly fell in love with him, so it was awful to be subsequently excluded by him.

  ‘One was very easily seduced by Rupert. And he was much more worldly than me – I thought I was sophisticated, until I met him.’

  And Rupert concedes that his youthful self was less than charitable to the inexperienced Hampshire lad. ‘I’m sure I was just as nightmarish as he was, you know,’ he has said. ‘And Another Country was kind of my gig – I’d done the play, the producers were my friends, and I was probably a bit cocky in those days, you know, especially towards Colin.’

  Colin agrees that ‘Rupert got on with very few people. He found us all ghastly, naive and bourgeois.’ But he admits there were faults on both sides. ‘Basically I was unbelievably dull. And Rupert, well, among his virtues was not tolerance of earnestly dull people, so it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven at that time. We were both ghastly in our different ways.’

  Rupert’s obvious disdain made the set an uncomfortable place for Colin, and the Russian spy drama sparked a cold war between the two rising stars that would last for nearly twenty years. But the dynamic between them worked well on screen. The disaffected schoolboys of the film, although friends, are wildly different characters. Guy is a flamboyant, pleasure-seeking extrovert who enjoys the privileges his upbringing affords and is hungry for more. Tommy Judd, closer to Colin’s personality at the time, is an intense, banner-waving Marxist who sees the public school and its hierarchy as a ‘system of oppression’.

  Contrary to popular belief, Judd is not based entirely on Guy Burgess’s friend and accomplice Donald MacLean, but on an amalgam of one Esmond Reilly, a Wellington School boy whose left-wing magazine was banned, and John Carnford, a Communist killed in the Spanish Civil War.

  Judd is ridiculed and ostracized for his views, and Colin admired the character’s conviction to his cause. ‘I’d never have Judd’s strength in terms of allowing himself to become a joke in order to publicize his convictions,’ he said. ‘The way he sticks by these convictions all the time makes him unique. Most people don’t have that kind of courage. They prefer to go along with the crowd.’

  While sharing the earnestness of Judd, Colin claimed he was more in the mould of Bennett when it came to his own reaction against perceived injustices in the system and Montgomery of Alamein.

  ‘Kids from middle-class families were slotted into academic pursuits while those from less literate backgrounds did carpentry. I wasn’t a Communist, and when I rebelled against those assumptions, it was more as Bennett would have done. I was scruffy, I was cocky and I was trouble, but I didn’t go around voicing principles.’

  As well as launching Colin on to the film scene, Another Country afforded him a taste of the high life to come. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1984 and won the coveted award for the Best Artistic Contribution. At twenty-four, Colin was walking down the red carpet at one of the most prestigious events in the film calendar and being fêted by all those around him. Everyone except, of course, Rupert. The leading man, claimed Colin later, refused to speak at the press conference for the movie because of his co-star’s presence.

  While it was his first foray into the trappings of stardom, the young actor didn’t exactly shrug off his earnest image with his reaction. While his hedonistic and well-connected co-star was, no doubt, enjoying the parties and people that Cannes’s famous Croisette offers festival-goers, Colin took the luxuries bestowed on him with a large pinch of salt.

  �
�It’s a shock how quickly you take things for granted,’ he said. ‘How after three days of limousines, big dinners and photographs in Cannes, it stops being interesting. I certainly feel that as an actor, you have to ask yourself every day why the hell you do it.’

  Although he later admitted that sudden fame ‘blew me away’, Colin appeared sanguine about his uncertain future at the time and ready to roll with the punches. He had expected to pay his dues on leaving drama school and work his way up from the walk-on part, and his dream had been to start his own theatre company, but Another Country had already lifted him to another dimension and he confessed, rather plaintively, that ‘I’ve lost my bearings’.

  ‘My sense of ambition has been numbed completely,’ he said. ‘When I got the part in the film, I already had a job and I didn’t know how to react. On stage, you function on adrenalin, but the medium of film is very bizarre. The energy is different because the work is so detailed, so subtle. All I know is that I have to cope with what comes next in a very sober way and give myself a breathing space to sort things out.’

  While it must have felt like doors were opening in every direction, it would be a while before he would get another breakthrough role. In the meantime, he was never one to rest on his laurels, taking a variety of stage and screen roles including a tiny part as a young policeman in the screen actor’s rite of passage, Crown Court. Directly after Another Country wrapped, he resumed the Bennett role to complete the West End run. And in August 1983 he auditioned for the lead role of Armand in a TV adaptation of Camille. The costume drama, based on Alexander Dumas’s novel, is the story of a young, wealthy man whose love for a courtesan threatens to bring shame on the family. After his father begs her to leave Armand, she reluctantly agrees, only to rekindle the relationship when poverty and ill health threaten to ruin her.