With thanks to Jim and Rob
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2011
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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ISBN: 978-1-84317-688-6 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-717-3 in trade paperback format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-720-3 in EPub format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-721-0 in Mobipocket format
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Cover design by Ana Bjezancevic
Front cover: Craig Barritt / Getty images for AFI.
Designed and typeset by Ana Bjezancevic
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
1. Out of Africa
2. Acting Up
3. The Past is Another Country
4. Toffs and Tiffs
5. War and Peace
6. A Dangerous Liaison
7. The Fall Before Pride
8. The Darcy Dilemma
9. True Romance
10. Bride and Prejudice
11. Stage Fright
12. Darcy Revisited
13. Pride and Parentage
14. Hollywood Hope
15. Love and Beauty
16. Trauma, Tiffs and Tots
17. Man on a Mission
18. Father and Mamma
19. A Singular Success
20. A King Among Men
Index
FOREWORD
THE MOMENT I fell for actor Colin Firth was not, as it was with most fervent fans, the iconic scene when he emerged dripping and indignant from the pond in Pride and Prejudice. It was when he proved his heroic worth by coming to my rescue, in real life, and being every inch the gentleman off the screen as he was on.
The occasion was a press junket for St. Trinian’s at a posh London hotel, where Colin was paired up with the executive producer and co-star Rupert Everett for all interviews. Despite the boarding school remake being his own project, Rupert appeared, looking unshaven and grumpy, in a shell suit, and slumped in his seat with little more than a glare in my direction. By contrast, Colin, casually dressed in a black jumper and smart jeans, greeted me with a winning smile and a warm welcome.
Throughout the interview, every time Rupert responded to my questions with a monosyllabic and sullen tone, his charming co-star jumped in with chatty, frank and downright witty replies.
As the interview drew to a close I felt an overwhelming rush of gratitude for this self-effacing star, who laughs off his ‘sex-god’ image and greets plaudits and awards with a look of slight embarrassment. And I was smitten.
We have met many times, before and since, and he is never less than enthralling. A devoted family man with a deep-seated perspective and a strong sense of injustice when it comes to political matters, Colin is intelligent, articulate and friendly. While writing this biography, and in talking to many actors and directors who have worked with Colin throughout the years, a picture emerges of a hugely likeable man who commands both respect and affection from everyone he meets.
Despite fame, fortune and female adulation he remains a truly charming man.
INTRODUCTION
‘DARCY? BUT ISN’T he supposed to be sexy?’ This damning indictment was Jonathan Firth’s reaction to brother Colin’s casting in Pride and Prejudice.
Yet in 1995 his taciturn romantic hero made TV history when he emerged from an impromptu dip in the lake, with the merest glimpse of flesh showing through his soaking-wet white shirt. Half the nation swooned and the thirty-five-year-old actor became the thinking woman’s sex symbol, taking on a persona that was to prove both a blessing and a curse in the years to come.
Now the Oscar-winning star of The King’s Speech, Colin’s life has been one of contradictions. He is the quintessential Englishman who spent his early life in Nigeria and a year in the States, has an Italian wife and a Canadian son. He is perceived as a public school toff, even though he went to a secondary modern in Hampshire. He is the romantic lead who has had only three serious girlfriends and is devoted to his wife; the rom-com star who prefers dark, twisted characters to comedy.
A nomadic childhood in Nigeria, Missouri, Essex and Winchester left Colin feeling like an outsider and yet, by forcing him to change in order to blend in, steered him towards his chosen career. Before he had finished drama school, Colin had been cast in a hit West End play, which resulted in a film role, and he hasn’t stopped working since. Picking up his Oscar for The King’s Speech in 2011, he joked, ‘I have a feeling my career just peaked.’ In fact it was the highest pinnacle of the many he conquered throughout his career, which had often seen him reach the verge of greatness, only for him to come across another trough.
‘I have this weird thing where I keep getting discovered,’ he says. ‘Another Country was a break for me, then Tumbledown was another break. Everyone talked about the fact that nobody knew me until then, then Darcy came along and the same was said again. Then Bridget Jones – and still no one knew me.’
When offered the part of the dashing Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Colin was thirty-four, and considered himself past the age of the romantic lead. But his smouldering performance – and that iconic lake scene – set him on a path that would take him from heart-throb to national treasure, through roles as Renée Zellweger’s suitor in Bridget Jones’s Diary, one of three potential fathers in Mamma Mia! and grieving university professor in A Single Man.
But it was his portrayal of stammering monarch George VI in The King’s Speech that would bring Colin out of the shadow cast by Jane Austen’s hero. At fifty, Colin is happier than he’s ever been. He has a beautiful wife and three sons, whom he adores, his career is soaring and his mantelpiece is groaning with awards. And the aristocratic Mr Darcy has finally been trumped by a king.
This book traces the highs and lows of the esteemed actor’s life and career, from his unconventional childhood and unhappy schooldays, the college days that turned him around and his early career. We trace the inside story of his rift with Rupert Everett, his playful rivalry with Hugh Grant, his years in the wilderness with Meg Tilly and the moment he fell in love with his stunning Italian wife, Livia. Find out about the causes that move him to direct action and the family that keep him grounded.
The first ever biography traces the route from Hampshire to Hollywood, via stately homes and sumptuous palaces, and gives a true insight into one of Britain’s greatest actors.
CHAPTER 1
Out of Africa
ON A WARM, sunny day in 1995, Colin Firth stood by a cool, clear lake in the grounds of Cheshire’s beautiful Lyme Hall. As the cameras started to roll he slowly stripped off his jacket and waistcoat for the scene that would change his life for ever.
Yet, ringing in his ears were the words of his younger brother and one or two female friends who had expressed amazement at his casting as
the ‘dashing and handsome’ Mr Darcy in the BBC’s production of Pride and Prejudice. Secretly, the thirty-four-year-old agreed with their harsh assessment.
‘I am totally unlike him,’ he told the Daily Express some years later. ‘He was this taciturn, dark, sexy guy and that is just not me. He rode horses and owned a wonderful home in Derbyshire. I ride a bike, talk a lot and do not live in luxury.
‘I nearly turned it down because I could not have been more wrong for the role. And that one decision, had I gone ahead with it, would have changed my life.’
Mr Darcy’s impromptu dip, and subsequent stilted conversation with Elizabeth Bennet as he stood, dripping and abashed, in a white shirt and breeches, would become one of the most iconic scenes in TV history. But it was to prove a double-edged sword. While launching a career which most fledgling actors can only dream of, Darcy was to become a ‘part-time burden’ which would stay with him for the next fifteen years. Journalists would raise the name of Austen’s surly hero in every interview, casting directors would struggle to see beyond the curly mop and white breeches, and even his wife Livia would tease him when he clambered out of bed looking less than perfect with a cheeky, ‘Oh look, it’s Mr Darcy!’
‘It got my name recognized but it also put me in a box,’ he told The Times in 2007. ‘Things were going well; I was building a diverse working life. Twelve years on it feels like a school nickname you can’t shake. It occurred to me the other day to change my name to Mr Darcy and be done with it.’
The part had him pigeonholed as ‘posh totty’, the strong, silent type. He was the quintessentially English heart-throb with the cut-glass accent and, many assumed, a wealthy family and public school upbringing. In fact, the public perception of Colin Firth was way off the mark. The future star had a nomadic childhood in Africa, England and America and a chequered education in a variety of state schools. A search back into the Firth line shows no links to landed gentry and no Jane Austen-style fortune. As Colin himself asserts, ‘I don’t own a horse or acres of property. I’m a secondary-modern school kid with no links to nobility. Yet I played this taciturn, dark, sexy guy and everyone remembers it.’
• • •
Colin’s parents, David Norman Lewis Firth and Shirley Jean Rolles, were both born in India where their own parents were missionaries. His paternal grandfather, Cyril Bruce, was an ordained minister and the son of a wool merchant from Huddersfield. Shortly after graduating from Cambridge in 1930, he moved to the Indian province of Bellary, where he would preach for nineteen years.
Shirley’s father, who went by the rather grand name of Montague John Rolles, was the son of a Bournemouth butcher named Montague Rolles Rolles and descended from farming stock. Montague Jr and wife Helen were Congregationalist ministers when they arrived in India, during the rule of the British Raj, and they soon became involved in the Church of South India, of which Cyril was a founding member. Shirley and David met through the organization when they were three and five respectively. However, after a disagreement with the Church, Montague decided to divert his energy from religion to medicine and become an osteopath. To qualify, he moved his family to Iowa in the United States, where he would study for seven years before returning to India to set up a practice there.
Although Colin’s four grandparents were missionaries, and his paternal grandfather an ordained minister, he insists that ‘they weren’t the sort of missionaries who went around converting the natives and bashing people over the head with Christianity’.
For their part, Colin’s parents chose academic careers, with David joining the RAF as a student teacher, with the rank of flight officer, before becoming a history lecturer and Shirley, perhaps as a result of her devout background, choosing the specialist field of alternative comparative religions. They wed in 1958 at the Congregational Church in Battersea, where Shirley was living while studying for her degree. She went on to become a university lecturer but continued to study, publishing a PhD on death and bereavement in the Gujarati community in Southampton, for which she learned Hindi, in 1997.
Colin was the eldest of three, born in 1960 in Grayshott, Hampshire. Within two weeks his transient lifestyle began with a long journey to Africa. David had taken a teaching post in Nigeria and the family were to move there for four years. Colin’s younger sister Kate was born in the West African country two years later.
Being a very young boy when the family returned to England, Colin has sketchy memories of his time in Nigeria, but he can recall feeling miffed as he watched his dad travelling to the local high school to work. ‘I remember very clearly my father driving to work in a Beetle,’ he told The Guardian in 2001. ‘There was a dirt road that went perpendicular to the house and I would watch him go. I could still see him when he parked the car outside the school – it wasn’t far, but an unpleasant walk in the African sun. He was a little dot. And I remember thinking: “What’s he got to do there that’s better than hanging around with me?”’
He was not without his friends, however, and spent much of his time playing with an African boy called Godfrey. To his embarrassment, Colin later recalled ‘him trying to persuade me to come round to his place, and me being scared to go’.
While memories of those African years are few, the time spent there laid an important foundation stone in the building of Colin’s character. It taught him awareness of other cultures and sympathy for less affluent lifestyles which spilled over into his adult life when he became a passionate advocate of human rights and champion of asylum seekers.
‘It did make an impression on me, not least because people we’d known there continued to be in our lives as visitors,’ he said. ‘And there were constantly people from India so there was an immense cultural diversity under my own roof throughout my entire upbringing, and I consider that to be absolutely nothing but a privilege.’
On their return to England, the family moved to Chelmsford in Essex, and four-year-old Colin was sent to the local primary school. After the freedom he had learned to love in Africa, the rules and regulations of an English state school seemed stifling and somewhat baffling to the new pupil. ‘I didn’t take kindly to being sent to school, to this rather cold place where you’re given lots of instructions and nobody loves you,’ he said on Desert Island Discs. ‘You’re sort of on your own. I couldn’t believe I had to go back again the next day, I remember that. I thought, “My first day of a school is over, thank God for that. Now I can get on with my childhood.” And day two was a horrible shock.’
Colin’s dislike of school would dog him throughout his education, but it didn’t take him long to discover the one activity into which he could put his heart and soul. The revelation came when he was cast as Jack Frost in the school pantomime, at the age of five. The acting bug had bitten and the future Mr Darcy was getting a taste of great things to come. ‘I was in a pair of silver satin pants, a blue satin sash and, portentously, a billowing white shirt,’ he recalls. ‘I was a hit. I don’t know that I’ve been as much of a hit since, and I thought, “That is where the love and attention lies.” There was nothing else that gave me that level of praise and approval.’
As a mediocre student, the lure of the lights, the potential to impress and the need to relieve the boredom of everyday lessons appealed to the young Colin. He eagerly auditioned for any production open to him and would take any role, no matter how small. ‘I had tiny parts in all the stuff I did, but I loved it,’ he says. ‘That’s what made me apply to drama school and want to become an actor.’
The new-found love of acting also helped him settle into school and get along better with his peers. Having spent his first four years in Africa, learning his precise English accent from his parents and their friends, he was a stranger to the more common elements of Essex dialect and found it shocking. His first real job as an aspiring actor was to emulate his classmates.
‘Accents were an issue,’ he told The Times in 2007. ‘It was a shock to hear aitches being dropped. I felt like a freak speaking with the ac
cent I had. So I changed it and only started to speak like this when I was in the sixth form.’
The birth of second sibling Jonathan, in April 1967, completed the family. Although the brothers are the best of pals today, an age gap of over six years meant that Colin was closer to sister Kate as they grew up. ‘Colin left home when I was eleven, so it was a big gap,’ says Jonathan. ‘It’s only as we’ve got older that we’ve become closer.’
As the oldest sibling, he was a protective big brother who looked after the little ones and loved to amuse them. ‘We were competitive but also protective of one another,’ remembers Kate. ‘At infant school he gave me instructions not to leave until he collected me from the classroom. At break he always made sure I had enough money to buy a Thunderbirds chocolate bar.’
Although they both held good academic posts, David and Shirley were thrifty and instilled in Colin a sense of frugality that would see him shun the trappings of obvious or ostentatious wealth in later years. He is still, he reveals, ‘conditioned to save silver foil because it used to be expensive’. But he admits their prudence was often irritating to him as a child. ‘It annoyed me sometimes that they weren’t more avaricious. I would like to have had more gadgets in the house, more expensive toys.’
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