For Colin, the decision was a relief as he admits to ‘a bit of the usual tension about getting your kit off’. He also believes, as many a female viewer would no doubt agree, that it is a sexy image because ‘we rerobed, not disrobed, Austen’.
Shooting the scene when the soaking-wet hero bumps into the object of his desire and exchanges a few bashful words, director Simon Langton had inadvertently created TV gold. ‘Nobody had the slightest inkling that Colin Firth, wearing a lightweight cotton voile shirt with his nipples showing underneath, would have such an effect,’ he said.
Almost a year later, the broadcast of that impromptu swim would propel Colin from a small fan base to an international sex symbol. And yet he was as blissfully ignorant as his director when it came to its potential impact. ‘For some reason it became a huge event, even though there was nothing in the way the scene was shot or scripted that anyone had the slightest suspicion would be seen as sexy,’ he said. ‘And then of course I found myself being waved at and followed down the street in London!’
Ironically, the thirty-four-year-old didn’t actually take the plunge in his most memorable scene. Simon also revealed, some years later, that the swimmer was in fact a stuntman as there were fears over the cleanliness of the lake water. Insurance clauses prevented the actor diving in and the underwater shots were actually filmed in a tank in Ealing Studios. ‘We didn’t want our leading man to catch Weil’s disease, which can be caught from rat urine in water,’ he admitted.
Colin’s dip in the studio tank didn’t go quite as planned either. ‘I hit my nose so hard on a steel girder at the end of the tank that we couldn’t film the next day,’ he said. ‘With so much gushing blood and swelling, nobody was thinking, “This is really going to get them going.”’
If Colin didn’t make a splash, his portrayal of Darcy certainly did. The series proved the biggest drama hit for decades and the final episode went out to over 10 million viewers. Britain’s latest sex symbol had pulses racing all over the country, including one woman who Colin was told was taken to hospital with high blood pressure and told not to watch any more of the series. She was 103.
‘It’s a testament to the contortions of viewers’ imagination that that scene is remembered the way it is because I read stuff about the wet shirt clinging to these chiselled contours,’ he said later. ‘And I didn’t have chiselled contours!’
On set, the dashing Darcy had conquered another heart – that of co-star Jennifer Ehle. Gorgeous, glamorous and single, the pair had been thrown together for five months filming the most romantic story of all time and the inevitable happened. They fell in love.
‘People fall in love with the people they meet,’ Colin later explained. ‘It’s as simple as that. I don’t think that actors have a greater predilection for bonking each other than any other group. I just think that your life is in upheaval. You’re taken away from your established roots and put in intimate circumstances with someone. I suppose it makes that sort of thing more possible. It certainly doesn’t happen to me all the time.’
Insiders on the set claimed that the air of romance was palpable during filming of the last episode, when Elizabeth and Darcy finally kiss. They tell of ‘bruised lips and sexual tension’ as the scene was shot, time and time again, to get it just right.
Colin dismissed the reports and said the scene was shot in one take. ‘We were losing the light. There was no giggling. Why would we giggle? No, we were involved with each other, but it’s perfectly simple to do a chaste little matrimonial kiss.’
By the time the on-screen love story hit the living rooms of the nation, however, the off-screen romance was over. The discreet couple had managed to keep it under wraps during filming but, with Darcy mania reaching epidemic proportions, the secret was discovered by the press long after the event.
‘We were together for almost a year,’ said Jennifer later and, referring to the attention that the pair received after the broadcast, she added, ‘It was a blessing that our relationship ended before the show was aired.’
Colin later insisted that the closeness of a shoot, especially one which takes up six months of your life, is bound to lead to on-set relationships. ‘There’s this absurd perception that actors are fucking each other all the time,’ he said. ‘But it’s just that you tend to end up with the people you work with.’
Jennifer also felt the on-screen passion contributed to the couple’s attraction to each other. ‘Being on location and acting in a story opposite somebody is incredibly conducive to falling in love,’ she told Tatler. ‘If you took two people who work in a bank and who might possibly fancy each other if they thought about it, and you make them stand there saying “I love you” every morning, really trying to mean it, eventually they might, you know, start to believe it.’
Having signed up for a TV series and a film, which together would mean months in Italy, Tunisia and South America, Colin was facing another long-distance love affair and the practicalities soon got in the way. The relationship floundered and the lovers went their separate ways. Clearly burned by the experience, Jennifer swore off dating fellow actors. ‘It’s so hard to have a relationship in this business,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to do it again unless it’s unavoidable. It’s just not worth it.’
As with Meg, however, there was no animosity and they parted on friendly terms.
‘Colin is a very nice guy and a great actor,’ Jennifer told the Daily Mirror in 2002. ‘He’s been good in everything I’ve seen, whether it’s Shakespeare in Love or Bridget Jones’s Diary. By the time Pride and Prejudice came out, we were not a couple. The way our so-called “affair” was reported was so wrong. We were two single people in a proper relationship which ended.’
It was strange, she added, that a publicity photo taken in the Blue Peter garden at the BBC studio in Shepherd’s Bush, on the day of the read-through, was published after the event, ‘like some sort of engagement photograph’.
Two years later in 1997, Colin decided to put the record straight about the romance. ‘It wasn’t at all a brief fling,’ he told The Times. ‘I’ve never mentioned this to any member of the press but I don’t see why I shouldn’t now, just to clear it up. It was written about as a brief location fling. Jennifer Ehle and I were together for almost a year. I had known her for a few years a little bit and the relationship began when we were working together and lasted until, well, it was all over by the time Pride and Prejudice came out.’
Pride and Prejudice was aired in the UK from 24 September 1995, when Colin was away filming The English Patient in Italy. Blissfully unaware of the huge impact his simmering alter ego was having, he was only home for one week during its six-week transmission and was astonished to find giggling women were stopping him in the streets. His agents, who had been largely unmolested by his fans in the past, were fielding thirty or forty calls a day from women wanting to know what he would star in next and whether they could see him at the theatre. Fan sites were being set up on the Web, and in Suffolk extra security had to be laid on to stop panting ladies stroking the doe-skin trousers that Darcy had soaked in his most famous scene. The mere mention of Colin’s name in female company was guaranteed to illicit a lovelorn sigh. He had become a bona fide sex symbol. And nobody was more shocked than he was. His new status was, he insisted, ‘the most improbable thing ever to happen to me as an actor. People would have howled with laughter if I’d tried to predict it. In fact, they did when it first happened.’
The modest actor, who admits he had been surprised to be asked to play the romantic lead at the age of thirty-four, was not always comfortable with his sudden popularity. But he was grateful it hadn’t come at an earlier age, when he might have fallen into the trap of believing his own publicity.
‘If this had come up early in my career, say when I started out at twenty-three, it would have been confusing and I would have had a very distorted image of myself and my strength as an actor,’ he said. ‘But I don’t look for male hunk roles. I think that can be te
dious both to play and to watch.’
The BBC adaptation became the biggest costume drama success story in the corporation’s history. Penguin couldn’t reprint the classic novel quick enough to supply the demand and the first batch of BBC videos, some 12,000 copies, sold out in two hours.
‘We put it all down to the appeal of Darcy,’ said a BBC spokeswoman. ‘There’s no other reasoning for it. Episode four was the killer. I’ve never seen an actor so consistently wet.’ Hysteria was reaching boiling point. ‘We’ve had people in tears, ringing us for copies. One woman called us crying yesterday because she couldn’t get a copy and she was going on holiday. She was desperate to see it before she went.’
Colin admitted that, despite his relationship with Jennifer, he had felt immune to the romance of the period drama and the ladies’ heaving bosoms. He told the Radio Times, ‘it wasn’t my cup of tea’ and added, ‘I felt like a drug dealer who doesn’t get high on his own supply. I’ll peddle the stuff but won’t use it. All I did was put on a costume and act.’
In 1996 the series was nominated for six BAFTAs, including Best Actor for Colin. On the night it was only Jennifer who picked up an award, for Best Actress, but the public attention stayed firmly focused on her leading man.
‘I don’t resent that he gained more notoriety than I from Pride and Prejudice,’ Jennifer later revealed. ‘I feel fortunate that I got to play Elizabeth Bennet in a good adaptation and got to escape the popularity and notoriety. I just hope that, with all the sex symbol stuff, people don’t forget what a damn good actor he is.’
Proud dad David enjoyed his son’s performance in the drama and was amused by the viewers’ reaction to the taciturn, moody landowner. Colin, he confirmed, couldn’t be less like the character. ‘I think people are quite shocked when they meet him,’ he told the Daily Mirror in 2001. ‘They expect him to be like Darcy, but he is quite an excitable person who likes larking around. He’s very noisy – the life and soul of the party. He’s a very dominant personality. He doesn’t get recognized much, because he doesn’t look like Darcy in his own clothes. But he was in a play in London and a group of American women arrived to see it. They had travelled all that way to see him.’
Ever the realist, Colin reasoned that the legion of women who had taken him to their hearts were not really lusting after him personally. ‘I enjoyed the recognition in some ways, but it was as if my whole career came down to that one part,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t really me that everyone was crazy about – it was the character.’
Back home in Hackney, he insisted, his neighbours couldn’t have cared less about his new-found idol status. ‘Nobody gave a shit,’ he recalled. ‘It meant I could go out in my pyjamas to pick up the Sunday papers and the bog roll, and nobody would comment. I didn’t fancy getting dressed to do those things. In fact, I still hate getting dressed.’
The Darcy tag propelled him to the A-list but, although it was fun to bask in the limelight for a while, it was also to prove something of a millstone around his neck for the next fifteen years. Even when he chose varied roles, as far from the nineteenth-century romantic hero as possible, the spectre of Darcy was to haunt him at every turn.
CHAPTER 9
True Romance
SOON AFTER FILMING wrapped on Pride and Prejudice Colin prepared to fly out to South America to film another BBC drama, a £10 million production of Nostromo. Leaving his relationship with co-star Jennifer Ehle behind him, the thirty-four-year-old actor was about to meet the love of his life.
The notoriously difficult Joseph Conrad novel is the story of Englishman Charles Gould, who inherits a silver mine in the fictional South American country Costaguana. As war threatens his livelihood, he enlists the help of a journalist and the eponymous hero Nostromo, an Italian sailor, to smuggle out his silver. When their ship is attacked by rebels, the treasure goes missing and only Nostromo knows its whereabouts.
Financed by a conglomerate of British, Spanish and Italian backers, the shoot was an international affair. Serena Scott Thomas played Gould’s wife, Italian Claudio Amendola took the title role and 15,000 Arhauco Indians stood in as extras. Filming in the stifling heat of Colombia took its toll on cast and crew alike and director Alastair Reid ended up in hospital after losing consciousness on set.
Struggling into his period costume while being filmed for a video diary, Colin stoically quipped, ‘You have to have a masochistic delight in sweating and suffering. The Brits love this stuff more than anybody. It is the Italians and the Spanish who complain about it.’
Other actors made his life uncomfortable too. Although he had spent much of the Austen shoot on horseback, and ridden in Valmont, he found it daunting to be controlling a steed on the noisier set, with a mock civil war raging behind him.’ You’d be sitting on a horse that wasn’t really trained in front of fifty to a hundred other horses and carriages on a dirt street in a shantytown with the camera miles away and a huge crowd and a language barrier and explosives going off,’ he explained. ‘They gave me a quite uncontrollable horse the first day, a mustang or something, and I was thrown for the first time in my life – and I pride myself on being quite good …’
In another scene, Colin’s character is being garrotted and he had a metal collar around his neck. Not understanding the instruction yelled at him, Colin was nearly strangled for real and, because of the language barrier, was unable to tell his Spanish co-star to stop.
A few weeks into the shoot, the Italian contingent were joined by a stunning twenty-six-year-old production assistant called Livia Giuggioli, working while on a break from studying at a university in Rome. ‘I was having a slightly miserable time and we’d four months to go, and she showed up,’ he said. It was love at first sight. ‘I immediately felt she was amazing, and it was very quick,’ he recalled. ‘It was instinctive, inexplicable, and I’ve never looked back. She is an Italian beauty and the smartest woman on the planet.’
Colin described the moment the couple met as being like a lightning bolt. Before he even spoke to her, he sensed a special connection. ‘We met in Colombia, in Cartegena, which is a staggeringly beautiful city full of staggeringly beautiful people’, he told Ellen DeGeneres. ‘I was on the steps of a church, a very old church in the plaza, and that was it – it was a bolt to the heart.’
The feeling was so sudden that Colin was frozen to the spot, too nervous to walk over and chat. ‘I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. And I realized with trepidation that she was coming closer and I’d almost hoped she wouldn’t come my way because I couldn’t cope. But she just came over and shook hands and she had this completely guileless air about her. She just shook hands and tried to speak to everyone in their own language and I was smitten. She dates it from that moment too, when we actually shook hands.’
By the time filming finished, the couple were deeply in love and splitting their time between her home in Rome and his flat in Hackney. But at twenty-six, Livia still lived with her parents and Colin had to put in some groundwork to be accepted into the family. ‘Because of the conventions of her family, being Italian, my courtship with my wife was quite formal and very old-fashioned,’ Colin explains. ‘And I think our relationship benefited from that.’
Fifteen years later, when he received the Best Actor gong at the Venice Film Festival for A Single Man, he paid tribute to her family for taking him ‘on trust’ and recalled the obstacles he had to overcome to win their approval. ‘I’d shown up as this very, very dodgy commodity, attached to their darling daughter,’ he told The Sunday Times. ‘When we got together, she told them, “I’ve got this English chap now”– one strike against me. “He’s an actor”– hmmm, oh, dear. “He’s nearly ten years older”– oh, boy. “And he’s got a kid with someone else.” I had a mountain to climb to win everyone over.’
A few months into the relationship, however, the full force of Darcy mania hit in the UK and, overnight, Livia became the most envied woman in the world.
‘The poor girl met me before the Darcy thing h
appened and she hadn’t heard of me,’ he told The Observer. ‘She is Italian and my name doesn’t mean squat in Italy. She just thought she had a fairly normal boyfriend and all that stuff happened.’
As the nation’s women went wild for Colin, he hid in Rome, where he could stay fairly anonymous and avoid the constant references to his wet breeches and clinging white shirt. He did attempt to impress his potential in-laws with his female following but they remained unmoved. ‘I mentioned, half jokingly, that I was something of a sex god in England,’ he recalls. ‘They both burst out laughing!’
Hearing the buzz about their daughter’s boyfriend from England, however, they were intrigued enough to arrange a night out at the cinema to catch one of his movies. The only thing playing at the time was Circle of Friends – not exactly the movie to prove his point. ‘Appealing in that I am not,’ he admits. ‘They were in despair at this ghastly, bloated, moustachioed English fool. Then, when they were sent tapes of Pride and Prejudice, there was a general kind of disbelief that anyone could find this man sexy.’
Even Livia’s friends were amazed by the British reaction to the repressed and emotionally stunted Darcy. Having watched the drama with Livia, one of her closest pals remarked ask incredulously, ‘Do the English find this sexy? Do they also find John Major sexy?’ Livia, meanwhile, found the frenzy over her English boyfriend hilarious.
Colin Firth Page 9