Colin Firth Page 7

  At the time, those involved with Valmont were unconcerned by the competition. ‘The characters are motivated differently, the plot concentrates on different storylines, it has a different ending,’ said Colin. ‘During the entire six-month shoot, nobody mentioned or even thought of the other film.’

  Forman’s version of the story focused on Cecile, the pretty young virgin seduced by the manipulative and unfeeling Valmont. In an article in Harpers & Queen, Colin recounted being rather taken aback when one of the older actresses on set, Fabia Drake, studied him for some time over lunch before declaring, ‘You are Valmont, aren’t you! Miloš is very clever at casting; he can see right into a person’s heart.’

  ‘Valmont is known as one of the most cynical and destructive sexual manipulators in fiction,’ he wrote. ‘I, on the other hand, have always preferred to think of myself as a fairly decent sort of fellow.’ Having always assumed he had been cast against type, the statement made him examine the role more thoroughly and helped him realize the subtlety that the director has been striving for.

  ‘As an actor in my first “Don Juan” role, I was overwhelmingly tempted to play the wickedness for all it was worth,’ he recalled. ‘I remember looking at seventeenth-century portraits and wondering how one identifies a philanderer … sexy eyebrows? A vulpine grin? I then looked in the mirror and realized that Forman evidently did not think so.’

  A serial seducer he may not have been but, although he was now twenty-eight, he had never settled with a girlfriend for long. All that was about to change as the sexual tension between Colin and co-star Meg Tilly became an off-screen romance.

  In an interview about the film, Meg agreed with her leading man and the director about the qualities of a good Lothario, and inadvertently revealed what had attracted her to Colin. ‘You know the guys who are the most dangerous?’ she asked in an interview with Australia’s Woman’s Day. ‘The ones who make you feel the most comfortable. They make you laugh and they make you feel like the most fascinating person. Valmont LOVES women. And any man who’s a philandering womanizer has to really be able to get inside a woman’s head, don’t you think? Would you fall for some guy who’s just obnoxious? Maybe once in a while, if you feel real sorry for him.’

  As his feelings for Meg grew, and became inevitably more public among the cast and crew of the movie, the passionate scenes together became more problematic for the intensely private actor.

  ‘I have found it very difficult to do a love scene with an actress that I’m involved with,’ he confessed. ‘That was particularly the case with Meg; we found it very, very hard to make use of our relationship on the screen. You can feel invaded, you know, with half the crew around. The last thing you’re going to do is giggle and do the take so many times you get bruised lips.’

  While Colin and Meg were falling in love things were also hotting up on the rival production amid reports of an affair between Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich, which ended his marriage to Glenne Headly in 1988. Meg, who was married to Tim Zinneman and had two children at the time, was quick to distance her new relationship from the Dangerous Liaisons affair.

  Admitting the two were an item, she begged a journalist from Woman’s Day, ‘Just don’t say it was like Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer because it wasn’t at all like that. I’d been separated from my husband six months. It was after the movie was pretty much over that we decided to go out. Toward the end we started letting our characters go. We were so into them we could let them go. And that’s when I realized, hey, I like this guy.’

  The feeling was mutual. Colin was seriously in love for the first time. Having been surrounded by self-absorbed actresses all his adult life, he found Meg to be caring, sweet and refreshingly honest. She was a good listener who didn’t talk about herself all the time and who put family at the centre of her life. Although she was the same age as Colin, her life as a single mum to Emily, four, and David, two, meant she had grown up much faster and he admired her maturity.

  But filming on a set for six months, far away from home, can crank up the intensity of any new relationship and Meg, fresh out of a marriage, was keen to take things slowly. When not filming or working in LA, the celebrated actress kept her feet firmly on the ground by escaping to a woodland retreat in Canada with her children. After Valmont, she filmed The Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson, before deciding to take a year off because her daughter was starting school. For now, Colin was a welcome guest when he could get away from his burgeoning career. ‘He comes to visit and it’s wonderful,’ she revealed in December 1989. ‘He works out of London. I need breathing space. I’ve gotten out of a relationship that seems very recent, and I don’t want to leap too deeply into another. It’s nice. He’ll come back and visit.’

  Although still based in London, the rising star was becoming a name in the States and went to LA to make the small independent movie Femme Fatale. His character was an artist in search of his missing wife, played by Lisa Zane, who discovers disturbing secrets about her life. So unimpressed was he that he warned audiences they would be ‘very unlucky’ to catch him in the movie.

  He didn’t feel the same way about Valmont, even though its release was completely overshadowed by the runaway success of its star-studded competitor. Colin, who ususally viewed his own work with a ‘gigantic sense of futility and disappointment’, says all his doubts ebbed away when he watched the completed two-hour film. ‘I emerged dazzled and emotional,’ he said, although he humbly pointed out that his enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that he is on the screen for a relatively short time.

  The fact that Dangerous Liaisons had established itself as ‘the definitive version’ was a frustration and he was disappointed by the fact that Hollywood, and the cinema audience, seemed incapable of embracing two very different interpretations of the same story. The French critics loved Valmont, with one calling it ‘a genuine masterpiece’, but many were critical of the fact that the philandering antihero was too likeable, which was precisely the effect that Miloš had been after. Malkovich’s Count had oozed animal sex and malevolent charm, but Colin stuck by his director’s theory that a successful womanizer would be likeable to women.

  ‘The part I play is no more the John Malkovich role than Hamlet is the Laurence Olivier role,’ insisted Colin. ‘Besides, when one is doing Hamlet, one is always using the same script.’ Colin was convinced that the film would stand the test of time and said to Harpers & Queen that it would have to ‘free itself from its various associations before it can be judged clearly’.

  More immediately, however, Valmont should have been a calling card to Hollywood. Miloš Forman was a hugely respected director, with Oscars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus already gracing his mantelpiece, and the names Annette Bening and Meg Tilly both held some sway in acting circles. If nothing else, Colin’s performance in the film could open doors to agents, producers and casting directors. But he was already displaying what he later termed as his ‘tendency to withdraw’ and was railing against his own success.

  ‘I’ve never thought of having a “career”,’ he told Premiere magazine in 1989. ‘For me it’s just one job and then another job.’ And he suggested that ‘In ten years’ time I’ll get over this nonsense,’ and give up acting.

  In fact, it almost happened a lot sooner than that. Buoyed by his feelings for Meg, and their shared wariness of the Hollywood set, he was about to disappear for two years into the wilds of Canada. After three visits to LA for work, Colin felt like a fish out of water there and decided to refuse all the meetings that he was offered with the movie bigwigs, telling himself that it was a matter of principle.

  ‘I told myself I was a purist, but actually I was shit-scared of it all,’ he told The Times in 2000. ‘Now, if it happened to me, fine. I’ve dropped that pose of shunning it. I’d still hate the intrusion, but I believe you can stay yourself. The ones who really whore out were whores at the beginning. If I were only good at it … If I could distinguish myself at those parti
es and chat shows, it might be easier.’

  Meg regarded Tinseltown with similar mistrust, despising the superficiality of the beautiful people in the industry.

  ‘Everybody comes up and even if they’re friends or nice people, they say “So and so’s getting so much, you know what their quote is now? And so and so, everybody hates that one now. And, did you see her fat ass?” Everything can get a hold on you and you have to say, wait a moment, I’m really lucky in my life.’

  Very much in love, the couple retreated to a log cabin, found by Meg, in the rolling hills of British Columbia three hours from Vancouver. The isolation appealed to Colin and to begin with he immersed himself in family life with Meg and her two young children. ‘It’s wilderness. Serious wilderness. It’s not a trip to Wimbledon Common,’ he said to The Observer in 2000. ‘And I rather fancied the quaint idea of the wilderness. It’s really the middle of nowhere.’

  Not far from the Arctic Circle, the area was so cold that snowdrifts were common and often they couldn’t open the door to leave home. There was no television and Colin spent much of his time making furniture and chopping logs. On 20 September 1990 Meg gave birth to their son, William Joseph Firth. Colin had proved a great stepdad to Emily and David, whom he loved dearly, and he was delighted with his first child. But work was scarce and he was beginning to worry about the future. His successful career to date seemed to count for nothing, even in the most provincial of theatres.

  ‘I wrote to local Vancouver theatres saying what I’d done, without blowing my own trumpet, and that I’d be happy to do kids’ workshops, but not one of them replied,’ he recalled ‘When I read a piece in a British tabloid saying that I’d been sniffing round Hollywood, trying to get a Jeremy Irons-type break, when all I’d been doing was changing nappies, I felt that all that mattered was that I’d gone. It felt dangerous.’

  He began to wonder if he was cut out for life in the wilderness and whether he would ever work again. After two years he had gone from the brink of a Hollywood break-through to almost total obscurity. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it as a career move,’ he later joked.

  As his doubts about his retreat mounted, the relationship began to develop cracks and even the vast landscape itself began to crush his spirits. Having grown up in Hampshire, Essex and Missouri, he was not prepared for the isolation in this frozen backwater and for that he blamed himself.

  ‘I’m too much of a lightweight for it,’ he said to The Times in 2000. ‘I had a kind of reclusive impulse at the time, but not that reclusive. It was too wild. If you go north from where we were, there’d be nothing but woods and grizzly bears, until you get to the Arctic Circle. I found that oppressive. You couldn’t even go for walks. There were instructions about going for walks. You take a flare and a map and a blanket and a bell, because within twenty minutes you can get lost by going round in circles.’

  Becoming a father for the first time, while thrilling, had also come as a shock. Looking back, Colin feels he wasn’t mature enough to embrace the huge changes in his life. ‘I was thirty and I still felt far too young for anything like that. I hadn’t quite got over not being eighteen any more, and having a child changed my life dramatically.’

  Colin began to fly home for the occasional role. In the summer of 1991 he starred in a run of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker at London’s Comedy Theatre, winning rave reviews for his portrayal of the disturbed and unhappy brother, Aston. Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph called him ‘hypnotic’ and said his account of his character’s treatment in a mental hospital sent ‘shivers coursing down the spine’. He took an uncredited role in Martin Donovan’s Mad at the Moon, opposite his Apartment Zero co-star Hart Bochner, and signed up for a docu-drama about the capture and release of the Beirut hostages, in which he played John McCarthy. But in order to reboot his career, he knew he had to face reality and base himself somewhere more accessible.

  In 1992, with heavy heart, Colin sat Meg down and quietly told her the relationship was over and that he was going back to London for good. Will, whom he adored, was just two and the heart-wrenching decision had taken much soul-searching. In the long tearful discussions to follow, Colin vowed to be a good dad to Will and to see as much of him as possible. Though heartbroken, Meg accepted that the couple wanted different things and staying in Canada would finish Colin’s career.

  ‘We were together for four years in a log cabin in the forests of Canada, where she grew up,’ said Colin. ‘But I missed London. For two years I didn’t act; I just did odd jobs as a carpenter and being so cut off from the world began to get to me. So I went back to England.’

  After long heart-to-hearts, the pair parted on good terms, determined to stay that way for the sake of their son.

  ‘He’s one of my best friends,’ Meg revealed two years later. ‘We just couldn’t make it work with him having to live in England for his career, and me here. There was too much separation.’

  Colin returned to London, bruised and battered from the painful break-up and devastated at leaving his toddler son behind, nearly 5,000 miles from England. The need to see Will as often as possible would shape the rest of his career, meaning long stints in the theatre were impossible, the long American summer holidays had to be kept clear and, occasionally, a less than perfect part would be accepted purely because it brought him closer to his son.

  In 1994 Colin admitted to taking the role of a twisted drama coach who trains his female student through a series of mental tortures in The Playmaker purely so he could travel to LA. ‘My son happened to be in LA at the time,’ he told The Sun. ‘It was a three-week job and it paid extremely well. I knew it would be complete rubbish and I sincerely hope no one ever sees it.’

  He rarely returned to the log cabin and would either spend time in LA, where Meg had another home, or fly Will to London to stay with him. It was on one such trip that Will saw his father on screen for the first time. Both his parents had felt it was better not to confuse the boy by allowing him to see his mum and dad in fictional situations that he didn’t understand and Meg had never allowed her children to have a TV in the cabin. ‘It’s not everybody that sees his or her father on a screen, or on the television,’ explained Colin. ‘And I wanted him to feel relatively normal.’ At the age of three, however, Will was on an aeroplane and the inflight movie happened to be one of his father’s. The surprised toddler pointed to the screen, stood up and shouted, ‘That’s my daddy!’

  Despite their distance, Colin remained, as Meg put it, an ‘involved father’ and shares a great relationship with his son to this day.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Fall Before Pride

  IN THE SPRING of 1992 Colin returned to England to play John McCarthy in the Granada drama Hostages. John had been released in Lebanon in August 1991, after five years as a prisoner of Islamic extremists. His fellow captor, Brian Keenan, had already been free for a year, Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland were released in November, and the final US prisoner, Terry Anderson, in December. Throughout his incarceration John’s girlfriend, Jill Morrell, had devoted her life to the campaign to free the hostages and the docudrama focused on both the plight of the men in Beirut and the struggle of their friends and family at home.

  Colin studied all the footage that he could find about John’s bravery and composure to betray the emotional and physical reaction the young journalist would have been through in captivity But filming brought some gruelling scenes which gave a taste of the ordeal, even if it was only for a brief time. The hardest scene, he revealed, was recreating the transportation of the hostages, wrapped up ‘like mummies in grey parcel tape from ankles to nose’ and made to lie in shallow coffin-like drawers while they were driven in a lorry for eight to ten hours. One French hostage, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, was trussed up this way for ten hours and was so distressed he begged his captors to kill him.

  ‘It wasn’t until the tape was wrapped above my hands, which were by my side, that I realized how trapped I was beginning to feel, and it wasn’t til
l it got past my neck and chin that I realized it was going to get even worse,’ he told Elle magazine. ‘It robs you of your physical sense of yourself …’

  Aware that his own experience was nothing compared to that of the real hostages, he added, ‘I know it always sounds terribly precious when an actor talks like this. Someone has been through this for five years and an actor does it for the cameras and says, “Absolutely horrific, I must go into therapy.” But it gave me a clue. And you apply your imagination, so you are not thinking about going off and having a shower back at the hotel. You are thinking: what would I be feeling now if it was for real?’

  Like Tumbledown, the production hit controversy before it hit the screen. John McCarthy objected to the idea of his life being retold as a TV drama and pleaded with Granada to pull the programme. The account must be fictionalized, he insisted, because he didn’t want to be seen as ‘a character dreamt up by a scriptwriter’.

  He added: ‘I don’t understand how Granada can present a realistic account of what I went through when I haven’t told Granada or indeed anyone else what it was like. I do hope the viewers aren’t given the impression that they are watching a true account of my experience. I have made my opposition clear to Granada and I am saddened that they are still going ahead.’

  Granada’s Director of Programmes Steve Morrison argued that Brian Keenan’s sisters and Terry Anderson’s sister Peggy Say, played by Kathy Bates in the programme, had all had some input into the script. Jill Morrell, played by Colin’s A Month in the Country co-star Natasha Richardson, had also been co-operating until John was released.

  ‘When the hostages see this film they’ll agree that the story should be told. They’ll like the film,’ he said. ‘It is not our object to sensationalize these stories, it is our object to tell what really happened. We think the public needs to know. The hostages are all very strong, courageous men and they have been through all sorts of counselling and have all talked at length about it when they came out.’