They encouraged their children to think and read and they were rarely allowed to watch television at home. Instead, Colin spent his Saturday mornings learning to play the piano and would entertain Jonathan and Kate with jokes, shows and impressions. ‘He loved acting out from the time he was at school,’ says mum Shirley. ‘The big thing then was Batman, so Colin was Batman all the time and I had to make him a costume.’
Kate would join in the dressing-up games and make up little stories with her brother. ‘I was the princess in jumble-sale ballgowns, he was the prince in cloak and breeches.’
A rare treat would be permission to watch Top of the Pops, and one particular performance by Marc Bolan, singing ‘Hot Love’, left a lasting impression on the wide-eyed ten-year-old. ‘I loved all the glitter and corkscrew hair,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be rock and roll and not to grow up and wear a suit.’
After moving around Essex for four years the Firths returned to Hampshire, the county of Colin’s birth, when he was eight. His father took a job as a lecturer at King Alfred’s College in Winchester and the family settled in Alresford, a picturesque Georgian town on the banks of the River Arle, just outside the city, which was voted Country Life’s favourite market town in 2007. Shy Colin had another first day at school to get through, at the local Dean Primary School, and this time he would be going into an established class. Yet again, Colin would turn chameleon to fit in.
‘It had been astonishing to me in my first ever school in Essex that the kids didn’t talk as my parents did, in BBC “received pronunciation”,’ he said later. ‘Just when I thought I’d mastered the Essex accent, I was in a Hampshire school. And later America. So, strangely enough, I became an actor.’
Still a reluctant student, he did find inspiration at school in the form of teacher Chris Pines, who went on to become the mayor of Winchester. Taking on the ‘generally disgruntled pupil’ at the age of ten, the young form tutor, only in his twenties himself, managed to engage Colin in a way none of his predecessors had.
‘He’s the most wonderful teacher I ever had,’ Colin told the Hampshire Chronicle. ‘He loved the kids. He loved teaching. He inspired my interest in education. He made teaching and learning exciting and I remained friends with him for many years afterwards.’
While other teachers in the school used threats and punishments, including the cane, Chris used encouragement and humour. ‘He was incredibly approachable,’ said Colin in the Times Educational Supplement. ‘He maintained discipline through wit rather than any sort of rod or threat of detention. I was quite porous to new ideas at that age. He taught, and I soaked up, everything to do with grammar, writing, dinosaurs and the prehistoric age.
‘We had corporal punishment at the school: usually a whack on the hand with a ruler or cane. I remember in one art class Chris was cutting paper at the front and he called me up because I talked too much. He told me to hold out my hand and I thought, “This isn’t like him.” I was really quite scared for a moment. I held out my hand and he told me to hold out the other one as well. He then put a bin bag in my hands and poured his rubbish in.’
Chris, who was reunited with his former pupil in 2007 when Colin was presented with an honorary degree from the University of Winchester, remembers an animated and sociable lad.
‘He was an exuberant, lively, interested child,’ he says. ‘He wanted to know everything that was going on around him and he was keen, but not necessarily academically minded. He enjoyed his social life.’
One thing Colin didn’t enjoy was the school dinners. The stodgy meals of the sixties put him off meat and he objected to the dinner ladies making him sit at the table until he had eaten every last morsel. ‘We were always being reminded of “the starving people in Africa”,’ he told The Observer. ‘I remember thinking at the time that even they wouldn’t eat this. I’d leave the dining hall with a pocketful of sausages and tinned peas. I preferred it being there than in my stomach.’
In spite of Mr Pine’s best efforts, and his academic background, Colin failed his eleven-plus, meaning a grammar school place was out of the question. And before he could settle into a secondary school the Firths were on the move again. In 1972, when Colin was eleven, David accepted an exchange year, teaching at a college in St. Louis, Missouri. The family packed up their things and flew to America, along with a large group of fellow teachers embarking on a similar adventure. For Colin, the year in Missouri was to prove the best and worst of times. At the local high school he was moved up a year because the education system in the UK began a year earlier than the US. However, the leap meant he was the least mature in the year group and he felt awkward around the older boys. In a class of boys with long hair and earrings who would bring drugs to school on a regular basis, Colin was an outsider, seen as an English geek. ‘I was still into train sets,’ says Colin. He struggled once more to fit in but he is the first to admit that his tendency to get lippy didn’t help matters.
‘American kids were a hell of a lot more sophisticated,’ he told The Observer. ‘I was barely out of grey shorts. I’d come out of primary school, where my classmates had grass-stained knees and collected football cards. They were more like something out of Woodstock. I was like something out of Just William. They had slogans on their backs that were to do with the Vietnam War. I felt like a geek. I made up for it with a false cockiness. Before I got rejected, I would tell someone to fuck off. Someone would say, “What’s your name?” and I’d say, “Mind your own business.”’
The ‘subtle isolating behaviour’ of two or three members of his class had a surprising effect on his grades. Despite his unhappiness, the struggling student was suddenly A-grade material thanks to some fantastic teachers and a lot of time spent on his own. Colin’s former teacher Carol Welstahoff remembered him as a studious child who always had his head in a book.
‘The others kids didn’t take to him because he was different. To them, he was your stereotypical English schoolboy. I think it was a lonely time, but he spent a lot of it reading. He was a very conscientious, top-of-the-class student.’
Away from school, however, things were more interesting for the curious lad. In the extended school holidays, David and Shirley took the children on long trips around the United States in an old Volkswagen camper van. On their first trip, over the Christmas break, they travelled south, through Mississippi and Tennessee, stopping at Memphis, and then on to Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Another journey saw them heading east to Arizona, through Kansas and New Mexico. Colin adored the trips and marvelled at the many different landscapes the old bus trundled through.
‘There are so many versions of the planet on one continent,’ he says. ‘Everything from the landscape to the vegetation to the people blew me away. Americans are bursting with warmth and friendliness. When our old Volkswagen broke down – which it did frequently – people fixed our car and offered us hospitality with no expectations. It’s something Europeans don’t realize unless they’ve travelled the real small-town America.’
Shirley remembered the seven years she had spent growing up in Iowa, so felt at home in the States. Being firm believers that travel broadened the mind, she and David were determined to show their children as much of the country as they could squeeze into a year’s visit.
‘They were extremely keen to expose us to those sorts of experiences and to open up the world to us, and not just be focused on one’s own postal district,’ remembers Colin.
They were happy family times, sharing the wide-open spaces of the American countryside and sleeping at night in the cramped interior of the VW camper. But Shirley remembers one hairy moment when Colin’s adventurous streak left her panic-stricken. ‘I have a memory of Colin walking along the edge of a wall, obviously testing us out, because the amount of adrenalin I used up in that moment was colossal. We were all petrified because it was a mile down if he had fallen, but this was somebody who was very daring.’
Colin’s time in America was, he says, a ‘decisive year’ but much of i
t, especially the school days, remains a ‘hideous memory’. Twenty years on, he would return to his old high school in St. Louis where he was somewhat relieved to find it was ‘pretty nasty. The place was horrible and had the atmosphere of a reform school. It made me realize that it wasn’t all me.’
By the age of thirteen, when the Firth family finally settled in Hampshire for good, Colin was a well-travelled boy. But from the perspective of a teenager, desperate to fit in somewhere, that didn’t always feel like an advantage. ‘People always feel alone at some point in their lives, definitely,’ he told the Daily Express.
‘Childhood can be pretty grim in that way. We travelled a lot and though I consider the travelling to be the single most enriching feature of my childhood, the down side is that there is an element of loneliness.’
But Colin had picked up more than a slightly cocky attitude during his time in the States, and his return to his homeland was not going to be easy.
CHAPTER 2
Acting Up
AFTER THEIR AMERICAN adventure, Colin’s family arrived back in Winchester in 1973, the year of glam rock. David Bowie was the biggest-selling artist since the Beatles, Mick Jagger was voted Best Dressed Man and Slade were rocking the charts. Colin’s first rock heroes, T-Rex, were enjoying hits with ‘20th Century Boy’ and ‘The Groover’ and stars were wearing more make-up than their female fans. On the fashion scene, platforms and flares were everywhere and big hair was bang on trend.
At the difficult age of thirteen, with so many other distractions, the last thing Colin wanted to be doing was joining yet another new school. And his attempts to blend in at St. Louis had left an unwelcomed legacy. His new classmates at Montgomery of Alamein school in Winchester immediately dubbed him ‘the Yank’ because of his Missouri twang and Colin chastised himself for being ‘feeble minded’ enough to have picked up an accent in the year away.
The image of Colin as a posh pupil at a top public school, which many in the past have inferred from the cut-glass accent he now uses, is miles from the truth. Montgomery of Alamein may have been a boys’ school but it was also a secondary modern state school with some fairly rough inhabitants. The accents were rural Hampshire and the language far from the world of Jane Austen. ‘It was “Firthy, come and get a smack in the mouth” and “Who you fucking looking at?” he told The Times. ‘I wouldn’t have survived sounding as I do now.’
The isolation was not helped by Colin’s ignorance of popular culture. His parents refused to let him watch commercial television, allowing only BBC programmes into the home. As a result he was excluded from playground conversations on the most popular shows, such as Crossroads, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and even Magpie. As well as a difficult time with the pupils, the actor maintains that most of the teachers at the school despised him and were convinced he would amount to nothing. His form tutor once informed him he would be lucky if he ended up working in a shoe shop.
On another occasion he scored three per cent in a chemistry test, being awarded two points for writing his name and two points for the teacher’s name – then losing one for spelling Sir’s name incorrectly!
Added to the mix was the fact that Colin was going through puberty in a boys’ school, something that had not escaped him at the time. ‘I was not crazy about being at an all boys’ school,’ he told the Daily Express in 2007. ‘Girls, to me, looked fantastic but out of reach. So I think that added to the general mood of being an awkward adolescent.’
While intelligent, he found school didn’t teach the subjects he was interested in. For example, while they were studying Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, he was more interested in Existentialist writers such as Albert Camus. When he asked if he could learn guitar at school, he was told that wasn’t a ‘serious instrument’ and offered the baritone euphonium instead.
‘My education was deeply stifling,’ he says. ‘Nothing that I had experienced in the classroom has had anything to do with life. At that age your entire being is invaded by your sexual consciousness, and all you’re getting is algebra and French. I’m delightfully happy as an adult, but I was not very happy as a child. I’m very suspicious of people who romanticize their childhood.’
Dad David recalls, ‘He would have found it difficult fitting in at any school – partly because of moving and partly because he wanted to go off and follow his own interests.’
School pal Arron Reilly remembers Colin was much happier out of school, experiencing the outdoors: ‘We used to go camping together, get a tent and go walking,’ he revealed. ‘We would talk about girls but we weren’t brilliantly successful with them. I think we were both a bit scared of them.’
Colin’s reaction to the rigid education he so despised was a quiet rebellion, starting with the occasional day bunking off with Arron. ‘We would sneak off to the fields and have a fag,’ says his old friend. ‘Colin didn’t like school. He didn’t get into a lot of trouble, although he did bunk off.’
Colin admits he was ‘quietly resistant’, choosing to opt out and pay little attention rather than openly challenge authority. He was, he says, ‘neither an identifiable wild rebel nor someone who toed the line in a meaningful way. I didn’t really like the system, I didn’t like the education. I didn’t fight it very courageously. I just didn’t go along with it very much. ‘My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn’t smash windows or get into fights: if I did I was strictly on the receiving end.’
The late headmaster, Dennis Beacham, ran a tight ship at the school and told the pupils, ‘Don’t whinge, don’t moan, don’t tell me you’re tired. I’m tired too.’ Colin’s passive protest made little impression on Dennis, who pointed out, a tad spikily. ‘He was a somewhat quiet, withdrawn boy, academically moderate,’ he said. ‘By and large, he passed through school without any colour at all. He made no impact on the school.’
As in primary school, however, Colin remembers one special teacher who did manage to spark his interest in a subject, and had faith in his ability to make something of his life. Angela Kirby, who has since passed away, taught English language and used humour and drama to grab her pupils’ attention.
‘She was a creature of the theatre,’ recalled Colin in the Times Educational Supplement. ‘She had quite a camp, wicked wit, with a shock of bright white hair and flowing velvet dresses. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and would use humour and gentle teasing on us pupils.’
In a class full of sexually maturing boys in a single-sex school, the flamboyant teacher caused quite a stir, despite her advanced age. ‘It was strange to fancy her – she must have been at least fifty and she was no beauty – but we all did,’ says Colin. ‘I think it was her friskiness and sophistication we liked.’
Most importantly, however, she ignited a spark of interest in the disgruntled pupil and, when other teachers wrote him off, she was convinced he was university material. She would nurture the young enthusiastic reader to an A at O level.
Despite his lack of academic prowess in other departments, young Colin harboured ambitions to become a doctor. All that changed when a bout of illness in his early teens fired up Colin’s thirst for literature. While no doubt revelling in the opportunity to skip school, he was also devouring all the books in the house, including Homer’s notoriously difficult tomes The Iliad and The Odyssey, a precis of which he had first come across in Look and Learn magazine. ‘I felt it was something that should be capitalized on and he did one of his O levels in English literature early,’ says mum Shirley. ‘He was reading everything that we had. He got very interested in Greek mythology.’ With the help of another passionate teacher, Stanley Payne, he took the early exam and passed with flying colours.
While his new-found passion for reading was a genuine escape for the budding actor, he also had a less angelic motive and later admitted, ‘I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky.’
Throughout his schooling, Colin maintained his love of acting but even that left him in a dilemma within the confine
s of the school. While he loved performing in school plays he felt foolish in front of his peers and explains that ‘it wasn’t exactly the cool thing to do’. He threw his energies, instead, into extracurricular drama and swapped his Saturday morning piano lessons for acting classes. Writer and actress Freda Kelsall, a friend of Shirley’s, was in the process of setting up a weekend acting school in the local community centre and encouraged all three Firth children to join.
‘We had no idea that for each of them it was to help decide their future careers,’ says Freda. ‘Colin was fourteen then, energetic, committed and inventive. As the eldest, he needed to decide sooner what he wanted to do with his life, and I began coaching him for drama school external exams. I always believed he’d do well.’
Freda, who still writes and performs in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, was to coach the lad throughout his teens and has remained friends with him. The loyal star is quick to credit her contribution to his success and remains grateful for her tutelage. ‘He doesn’t court celebrity, but tries to use it to the advantage of others,’ she comments in the Hebden Times. ‘He’s good company, honest and generous, an acute observer, very funny, yet deeply thoughtful, as he was as a teenager.
‘He often credits his Saturday morning classes and early coaching in interviews, and surprises me sometimes. He says I taught him “the reality of the inner world”, and when I saw The King’s Speech I understood what he may have meant by it.’
Best pal Arron Reilly also shared his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics and together they appeared regularly in plays in the village hall at Ropley, near Alresford.
‘Colin had bigger roles than me but he didn’t give me any idea he wanted to be an actor,’ says his childhood friend in The Sun. ‘He was interested in the arts, and we would mimic things like Monty Python.’
Colin Firth Page 2