Another old acquaintance who was shocked by the sex symbol tag was Jennifer Tilly, the actress sister of Colin’s ex Meg. ‘I was on a chat show when they announced the next guest as “England’s new sex god, Colin Firth”. I couldn’t believe it,’ she laughed. ‘When you know someone as your sister’s boyfriend, it’s hard to see them as a heart-throb.’
Even Colin couldn’t really believe what he was hearing about Darcy mania, until mum Shirley sent him a recording of a radio discussion on the subject. ‘I thought, “Christ! This has never happened before, this is extraordinary.”’
• • •
As the nation swooned over Mr Darcy, Colin was off on his travels once more. Having filmed a few scenes for The English Patient in Italy, a happy coincidence for courting couple Colin and Livia, he flew to the deserts of Tunisia for a nine-week stint. With journalists clamouring for interviews, and posters being pinned up in offices all over the country, his ‘tendency to withdraw’ once more kicked in and, refusing all requests, he was relieved to have an excuse to escape. ‘All this sudden attention threw me,’ he admitted. ‘I thought I knew where I was professionally. I didn’t think this was on the cards.’
The cuckolded husband of Katharine Clifton, played by Kristen Scott Thomas, couldn’t have been further from the romantic hero of the BBC series and was a comparatively small role. But the screenplay by the late Anthony Minghella, who was also directing, was immensely promising and Colin was keen to be involved.
The film, based on a Booker Prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, centres on a badly burned Second World War pilot, Ralph Fiennes, in the care of a young nurse, played by Juliette Binoche. Through a series of flashbacks, his doomed love affair with the married Katharine Clifton is revealed, as is his true identity. When her betrayed husband, played by Colin, finds out about their relationship, he exacts a terrible revenge.
Colin arrived in Tunisia in November 1995, at the height of Darcy fever, much to amusement of his co-stars. Screen wife Kristen told The Times, with a playful swoon, ‘I’m acting with the new heart-throb of England: Colin Firth. Darcy. He’s my husband. If you’re not convinced he’s a complete heart-throb, the rest of England is. They’re even doing Darcy clubs. People visit the house where it was filmed to look at the pond where he emerged in that wet shirt.’ Joking, she added, ‘It’s all make-up, you know.’
Acclaimed director Anthony Minghella was proud of his company for the movie and thrilled to have the new ‘heart-throb’ on board. ‘Colin’s an exceptional actor, one of the best of his generation,’ he said. ‘Like Ralph he’s a highly intelligent and adroit player and has in common with him an emotional rigour.’
For Colin’s role as deceived husband Geoffrey, he drew on his past feelings of exclusion, the sense that he was the only one left out of a private joke. ‘I was very much the outsider in that film. It seemed that what was really going on was between the others. I could be doing all the talking, but it was all about the glances between my wife and this other bloke, and I eventually lose her to Ralph Fiennes. I am never going to let that happen again.’
In a pivotal scene in the movie, Geoffrey returns to the hotel where he is staying with Katharine, to collect something he has forgotten, and sees her leaving for an assignation. As she spends a passionate evening with her lover, he sits in a cab outside the hotel all night, awaiting her return. ‘Nothing happens, but it’s a tremendous scene, because you’re very sympathetic to Kristen, but Colin keeps pulling the point of view around to him,’ commented Anthony. ‘He brings a gravitas to a character who could be something of a buffoon.’
Having moved around a lot in his childhood, Colin’s had always had a sense of rootlessness and his chosen profession had made his adult life equally nomadic. But as his romance with Livia grew stronger, he was beginning to crave a little more stability. And after two months in the sweltering heat of North Africa, filming in Tunis, Al Mahdia and Sfax and the desert environment of Tozeur, Colin was showing signs of settling down. ‘Wherever I am, people always say, “You’re always away,”’ he complained. ‘You feel like the invisible man. I’m never here, I’m never there. So where am I?’
But his relationship with the Italian beauty, who was still finishing her doctorate in English literature, meant that when he wasn’t filming he now had three bases – London, Rome and LA, where he spent time with his young son.
Will, now six, was at school in LA and Colin spent as much time as possible visiting him. The pain of separation from the lad was often intense but Colin didn’t feel that, in splitting with Meg, he had abandoned his son. ‘I don’t consider I have left him,’ he told The Times. ‘I go away a lot, and I come back a lot. Of course, I wouldn’t be seeing enough of him unless it was every day. And there are risks. There’s a danger you become a sort of Santa Claus. You have to find enough normality as well – to give a child the chance to be bored with you, take you for granted and feel it’s safe sometimes to reject you. I think about that a lot.’
In the wake of Pride and Prejudice, which had proved a hit in the States, Hollywood had once again thrown open its doors and even Steven Spielberg put in a call. Colin agreed to meet with the legendary director out of curiosity and flew over to LA to see him. ‘It was weird to find that someone who is such an enormous figure in the business was so chatty and informal and unassuming. He had his feet up, and was wearing a baseball cap and sipping a McDonald’s Coke.’ Exciting though it was to meet the man behind the biggest blockbusters of all time, Colin wryly reported, ‘He didn’t invite me to do his films.’
Colin was surprised at the impact the role was having on his profile. ‘Although before it, I thought I was extremely successful,’ he joked, ‘it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized that no one had noticed me.’
Typically, with LA calling, Colin’s response was to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction. After several multimillion-dollar contracts failed to raise his interest, he signed up to play middle-class football fan in Fever Pitch, at a fraction of the fee.
‘I was chased for big movie parts after playing Mr Darcy but they didn’t interest me,’ he told the Daily Mirror. ‘I am not comfortable in costume drama and some scripts were simply an excuse to get me back into tight breeches.’
TV offers were also on the table, but Colin shied away from the long-term commitments required. ‘The offers weren’t all abominable,’ he said. ‘But even if they weren’t, there would always be a little detail like, “Just sign here and don’t worry because it probably won’t happen but if this goes to a series, you’re with us for ten years”. It was very Faustian.’
The low-budget British film Colin chose is based on a best-selling autobiographical book by Nick Hornby but for the screenplay the author became the fictional character of Paul. Despite the public image of Colin the posh, privileged type, the part of the obsessive Arsenal fan was closer to his own reality than any of the aristocratic parts he had played.
‘There’s a tremendous amount of the character, Paul, in me, which I think is eventually true of most people I play, although I admit his cultural background is a bit closer to mine than Darcy’s.’ In the wake of the Austen hero he was desperate to do something at the other end of the spectrum and was happy to turn down the potential riches of the US market to prove he could be something altogether different. ‘It’s more fun being Nick Hornby,’ he insisted.
The decision to play an ordinary, modern-day Arsenal supporter didn’t win immediate approval from fans of football or Firth. Letters to newspapers asked why he was doing a football film when he could be playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights while Arsenal fans asked why this ‘snooty geezer’ was playing one of them. ‘I somehow feel I’ll be pleasing nobody now,’ he lamented.
But he was determined to challenge the stereotype of the typical supporter and strike a balance that would show both sides of the story.
‘There’s this idea that if you like football, you also like beer and grabbing women’s breasts,’
he said to The Times. ‘If you like rugby, you also like Dire Straits and wine. And if you don’t like either, you must be a pacifist vegetarian who is oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer.’
The screenplay touched a raw nerve in Colin’s soul and took him back to his teenage years, when his attempts at gaining some sort of street cred were scuppered by his middle-class background in a respectable suburban family. ‘I’m a secondary-modern-educated white suburban male,’ he told Intelligent Life magazine. ‘Nick was the same generation and grew up in Maidenhead, which is exactly like where I grew up, and what really resonated was this idea that boys from the suburbs don’t have any roots. You step out of school and into a cultural void. There’s no music from your part of the world that makes you want to weep into your beer. There’s been no artistic revolution or sacrifice. One ends up casting around for credentials of some kind, claiming some sort of Celtic blood, yearning to be a Delta bluesman – or in Nick’s case, Charlie George. I may be English, but my sensibilities reside in Rome. I may be middle class, but my granny comes from Brum. Anything just to give yourself a bit of substance.’
Colin was in Rome with Livia when he first read Fever Pitch and, once again, the thought of settling down crossed his mind. ‘It gave me a yearning for England and the sort of rootedness that Nick Hornby talks about – the kind of rootedness you have to find, because it is not something you grew up with … I felt he wrote about Englishness now – my generation – in an extremely unsentimental and yet not hostile or bitter way. And I found that quite unusual.’
Contemplating the transient nature of film-making, he sounded more and more wistful about putting down roots. ‘Making a film is so self-contained that very little else enters your consciousness,’ he told The Times. ‘Then it’s over, and the chances are that you will never again see people who have become your entire existence. A certain amount of consistency is essential to anyone, and I have found it difficult being without that as time goes on.’
While Colin was running from the Darcy image, co-star Ruth Gemmell could hardly get the famous wet breeches out her mind. When signing up as Paul’s girlfriend Sarah in the movie, she had no idea who would take the lead role.
‘When I found out that was nerve-wracking enough. But then when I had to kiss him before I’d barely knew him, I was terrified,’ she told the Sunday Mirror. ‘But he’s so lovely that he immediately put me at ease.
‘Like everyone else I’d seen him in Pride and Prejudice and was pretty impressed. So the prospect of working with him was scary. But I decided right at the start that if I felt nervous about the love scenes I would just tell him because he’s not the kind of man who would think that was funny.’
In order to get to know each other a little better, Ruth and Colin met in a London pub and shared a few drinks. The nervous actress found her co-star easy to chat to and was soon put at ease.
‘We had a few pints, swapped a few stories and by the end of it we knew how we were going to play the characters,’ she remembered. ‘By the time the love scenes came around he wasn’t the elusive Mr Darcy any more. He wasn’t even Colin the heart-throb. He was just Colin.’
She even confessed to falling asleep on the UK’s biggest heart-throb – while they were in bed together.
‘He was explaining the difference between the Premier League and the Nationwide League, and I’m afraid I got a bit bored and dropped off,’ she explained. ‘I know it was a bit rude and the truth was I had actually asked him. But when he started to tell me my eyes just glazed over.’
Although not as passionate about the beautiful game as Nick, Colin is a fan but says he is more a ‘watcher of the World Cup’ than a denizen of the terraces. ‘I envy his passion,’ he explained. ‘It must be great to have something to identify with in that way, to feel obsessive about. I feel very rootless, from my upbringing out in the sticks.’ Even so, the smaller, balding author Nick Hornby was delighted to have his fictional self played by one of the most fancied men in England. ‘Casting Colin was a unanimous choice,’ he said, adding, in jest. ‘It would have been even nicer to have had Tom Cruise.’
In another interview he joked, ‘Colin’s got a bit more hair than me, but otherwise we’re indistinguishable.’
But living and breathing the history of the Gunners on set meant Colin had soon become almost as obsessed as the author. ‘Arsenal has begun to have a disturbing influence on me,’ he admitted. ‘I was watching a documentary recently and thought: “Oh, they’re wearing Arsenal colours,” only to realize it was filmed at Christmas and they were Santa Claus outfits! And I’ve woken up with football chants in my head.’
‘He got really into it,’ Ruth confirms. ‘He’s the kind of actor who totally throws himself into a part. I know he went to lots of games with Mark Strong who plays his best friend in the film and he immersed himself in football memorabilia for the whole time we were working. But football gets you like that. I think it gives people a common bond, a sense of belonging. But Colin is not as serious as people think. He’s also a very sweet man.’
Although Fever Pitch centres on the Gunners’ championship-winning season of 1988–9, everyone involved was keen to point out that it was not a ‘football movie’ in the traditional sense. Rather, it turns a spotlight on Paul’s relationship with Sarah at a time when his obsession is reaching a peak, and Colin claimed it was actually a very romantic movie.
‘The film will appeal very strongly to people who aren’t die-hard soccer fans, or not fans at all,’ he insisted. ‘They’re not its target audience – it’s not something you can go and chant to. This is a romantic comedy with a capital R but there’s not a lot of sweet stuff, Paul and Sarah aren’t throwing petals over each other’s heads. They mostly argue – it’s about the problems in their relationship. It’s truthful and moving.’
While the film was being shot in London, Colin’s most famous fictional fan, Bridget Jones, was filling column inches in The Independent with her adoration for Mr Darcy. Nick invited Helen Fielding, the journalist behind the ditsy, blonde singleton on to the set and she wrote a hilarious account of their meeting in the second book. But the actor later revealed he felt uncomfortable with the visit.
‘I felt a little bit shy and clumsy and embarrassed,’ he recalled to The Times. ‘I felt I was the one making the faux pas and saying the wrong things.’ Her hilarious write-up, he claimed, ‘didn’t echo my recollection, although Nick said it was very close to what had happened. She wrote a thing about having followed me inadvertently everywhere around the set until eventually I said, “I am going to have to go on alone from here because it’s the men’s toilet.” I don’t remember that. Nick says it’s true.’
The lovestruck Bridget would have been horrified to encounter another of Colin’s set visitors. During visits to London, Livia joined her famous man and also hung out with Nick, who was by now a close friend of Colin’s. The author was very taken with the lively Italian, calling her ‘joke-perfect: PhD, beautiful in that sultry Italian way, funny and vivacious. She’s very good for Firth, because she’s absolutely not in any thrall to him.’ And, he added, she ‘affects to be completely mystified by the Mr Darcy situation’.
As a younger, more carefree bachelor, Colin had dismissed the idea of love and marriage with the oft-repeated quote, ‘Falling in love stops you from caring for so many other things. I don’t enjoy being overwhelmed by someone. I don’t often fall hopelessly for someone. I don’t need a woman around.’
Now, at thirty-six, he was warming to the idea of settling down and admitted that a stable home life was beginning to sound attractive. ‘It’s been growing on me for a while,’ he told The Observer. ‘I used to romanticize the itinerant, artistic life, full of heartache and new experiences, and I’ve probably courted that, cultivated it in myself, made it seem rather bohemian and fascinating. I don’t know if I can take it much more. I really feel a bit too old. I would like to feel I had a more consistent base for myself.’
Jennifer Ehle
had been, he revealed, the first younger woman he had dated and he insisted that Livia, nine years his junior, was more mature than him.
‘I don’t really feel very conscious of Livia being younger. In terms of maturity, it is like being with an older woman and she is not so much. She is twenty-seven. It is only nine years, so it is not a huge age gap. She is so much more mature than I am. She is settled and rooted. And she is not an actress for a start, so she is not nearly so fucked-up as I am.’
Colin was madly in love with Livia, and madly in love with Italy which, he said, had ‘inundated me with gifts’. The next step was, inevitably, a romantic wedding in the Italian hillside. Colin proposed and Livia happily accepted. The romantic hero had found his perfect heroine.
CHAPTER 10
Bride and Prejudice
HIS BRIDE-TO-BE MAY have been happily immune to his celebrity status but Colin was finding the swell of attention difficult to deal with. After Pride and Prejudice aired, the press staked out Colin’s Hackney flat and the engagement only made them hungrier for news on his love life. Pictures of him emptying his bins and even unloading a vacuum cleaner at his home were suddenly saleable goods. For the intensely private actor, it came as a shock to be at the centre of so much speculation. And it got worse when the British press followed the couple to Rome. ‘It was very, very unnerving in a way that it’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t had it happen. I was someone who wouldn’t have taken it seriously as a threat until it actually happened.’
Coping with the public reaction to the now infamous series was not a problem for the star, who claimed that most of his fans sent him edifying books rather than sexy underwear. ‘I feel a bit of an imposter,’ he joked. ‘I certainly don’t get mobbed in the street and nobody’s sent me their knickers yet. There is a “Fans of Firth” website now, or so I’ve been told.’ But the press intrusion was becoming a serious worry. ‘It became extremely important to me that my wedding day was not invaded by paparazzi,’ he told The Times. ‘We had the Diana experience in Rome of being chased through underpasses on motorbikes at the time leading up to the wedding. That night was the first night I’d decided it was a game, that this could be fun. I felt like I was in a Bond film. But you do get a bit paranoid. I got very skittish about being invaded, and also some of the trickery was unnerving. People phoning up pretending to be British Telecom, trying to get information, and you get this horrible feeling afterwards when you realize it wasn’t British Telecom and you’ve just told them things.’
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