The thirty-six-year-old actor was blissfully happy with Livia and had listened with some scepticism to actors complaining about the ‘price of fame’ in the past. But, as the couple attempted to arrange their wedding in privacy, they were finding that Pride and Prejudice had changed Colin’s life for ever.
‘I think I kept trying to characterize it as something that didn’t make any difference,’ Colin revealed. ‘It’s very hard to analyse it. It might have made me a little bit self-conscious about things … I don’t know whether it taps into some instinctive fear of being pursued or being spied on, but when you wake up in the morning and you see the house staked out, you see there’s somebody out there, waiting for you, or they’re standing by a car, even if there’s only two people, a photographer and a journalist, the impulse is to draw the curtains and keep peeking, and wondering if they’ve got the telephone number. It makes you paranoid, basically. They are things which in the scheme of things seem very harmless to most people and a small price to pay for all the perks, and that’s fair, but if I’m asked directly what it did to make my life any different, that’s probably the only thing.’
In the meantime The English Patient hit cinema screens with maximum impact. Released in November 1996 in the United States in order to qualify for the following year’s Oscar nominations, it hit the UK in March, shortly after scooping thirteen Oscar nominations. It went on to win nine, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Juliette Binoche and Best Director for Anthony Minghella. Kristen Scott Thomas lost out to Fargo’s Frances McDormand while Ralph Fiennes, nominated as Best Actor, was pipped at the post by Colin’s future King’s Speech co-star and friend, Geoffrey Rush, for his role in Shine.
The film took the world by storm, lauded as loudly in the States as it was at home. Tom Shone, of The Sunday Times, wrote, ‘The English Patient is both a stirring epic and a great love story – Lawrence of Arabia and Brief Encounter rolled into one. You will not forget it.’ And he added, ‘That the cuckolded husband is played by no less than Mr Darcy gives you some idea of the array of good looks on offer in this movie.’
For Time magazine, ‘Poignant, ravishing, sharply felt, Minghella’s rich, magnificent English Patient is one of those rare films that transcends demographics. Its wit, sophistication and artistry never are at odds with the fundamental pull of a powerful love story that out-Zhivagos Doctor Zhivago because it respects love’s mysteries, admits it doesn’t know the heart’s boundaries.’
For Colin to be starring in such a prestigious and well-received British movie, without receiving all the attention that he would have done in the Ralph Fiennes role, was a relief to him in the post-Darcy wave. But Ralph’s star was rising in Hollywood and Colin, who had deliberately avoided the lure of the LA lights, calling it ‘boring’ and stating, ‘You have to be very fond of palm trees’, was losing out on the lead roles. Preferring to pick projects on the basis of merit alone, he was happy with his choices.
‘He’s [Ralph’s] a wonderful actor and actually he’s doing things that I feel I’d like to be doing in some ways,’ he told The Observer in 1997. ‘It’s a good example. But it’s only a passing sensation because, quite honestly, I’ve been so involved with Fever Pitch that I wouldn’t have swapped it for whatever he’s doing. I wouldn’t have swapped A Thousand Acres for whatever he’s doing. It’s just sometimes I look at some people and I think, “Now, this is a person who’s judged very well.” I think there’s a lot of sort of paradoxical things going on at the same time, a swing between “I can do anything” and “I’m a charlatan and I shouldn’t be doing this job at all. I’m bluffing. I’m going to get found out.” And I find that self-doubt quite common with actors, but coexisting with an extreme confidence, a sense of injustice that anybody else has got a better career.’
A Thousand Acres was, in fact, another departure for him. Shot in Illinois and LA, it was a Hollywood movie with big names – Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards – and it required his first on-screen American accent. Based on the Shakespearean play King Lear, it was the story of a farmer dividing his land between his three daughters while slowly descending into madness. Colin was Jess, the son from the neighbouring farm who returns after a thirteen-year absence and manages to make hay with both Michelle and Jessica.
The movie made little impact and rather paled into insignificance beside the Oscar behemoth The English Patient and Colin’s equally Oscar-worthy next project, Shakespeare in Love. Before he began working on the latter, however, Fever Pitch hit the screens in April 1997. And while it was never going to be an Oscar winner, it was greeted with pleasant surprise by many critics.
‘Two of the greatest motivations in life are love and football,’ wrote Nick Fisher in The Sun. ‘Miraculously, Fever Pitch manages to bring them together, and weave a funny, touching romance around the trials and tribulations of Arsenal FC.’
In The Sunday Times Tom Shone was one of the few writers who understood Colin’s affinity to the middle-class Gunner fan over the upper-class characters he had so far won acclaim for. ‘If anything, Firth seems more at home surrounded by beer cans and pizza cartons than he did in the period dramas for which he is best known,’ he wrote. ‘So now we know. All Mr Darcy ever really wanted was to open his window and his lungs and shout obscenities at the top of his voice.’
After Pride and Prejudice, Colin was pleased his gamble had paid off. He admitted he had deliberately shunned anything in the Darcy vein and was happy to explain why he chose to turn down the big money deals. ‘There’s a big part of this which is extremely uncomplicated,’ he told The Observer. ‘I want to be well thought of. I want to make money from this. I want to be prosperous. I want to be respected. Like everybody else I want to have jobs that are inspiring and enjoyable and fun. With something as extraordinary as Pride and Prejudice and as unexpected as a cult attached to a character you’ve played, it is so difficult to understand what it was that you did that was apparently effective. But then you don’t want to be perceived to be trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice. So I think I probably did consciously go in all sorts of different directions.’
On 21 June 1997 Colin broke a million hearts when he married Livia in a quiet ceremony in the hilltop village of Città della Pieve. There can’t be many more romantic places on earth to tie the knot. The stunning medieval village nestles in the hills of Umbria, 50 kilometres south-east of Perugia, and boasts a beautiful thirteenth-century church, where the couple were married in front of a hundred family and friends, including his delighted parents. Livia wore a traditional white dress and both bride and groom reportedly shed a tear or two during the emotionally charged day. The overwhelmed star gushed, ‘It is the happiest day of our lives. I am the happiest man in Italy and she is the happiest girl.’
Livia’s mother revealed how the dapper actor won his in-laws over with his impeccable English manners. ‘My daughter has married an admirable English gentleman who treated his fiancée with the greatest of respect. In Rome, Colin would always bring my daughter back before 11 p.m. and he would sleep in a hotel.’ You would expect little else of the dashing Mr Darcy, after all.
After the service, the newlyweds and their guests celebrated with a picnic-style feast in the olive groves of her parents’ nearby villa. The romantic wedding went to plan and the paparazzi, much to Colin’s relief, stayed away.
Although deeply in love, and happy to pledge the rest of his life to his Italian bride, Colin later admitted that walking down the aisle was ‘the thing that’s required the most courage that I’ve done in the name of romance’. He added, ‘If you’re as scared of marriage as I was, it’s a pretty romantic thing to have done.’
As well as the flat in Hackney, Colin and Livia now shared a home in Umbria, in the province of Grosseto, near the Tyrrhenian Sea. The region is one of the most unspoiled areas in the country, with fabulous beaches and medieval villages surrounded by pine forests and high mountains. Colin had fallen for the Itali
an lifestyle as well as for Livia, and he loved becoming part of the Giuggioli clan. ‘What strikes me about the Italians is their attachment to family. Livia’s family is beautiful and very close. From the family is derived a sense of inner security and stability that is not found in other cultures. We English, on the other hand, are always wandering apart …’
In another interview, with the Daily Express, he remarked, ‘I also find it an interesting contradiction that they ignore basic driving rules but are so fastidious at the dinner table. My father-in-law is horrified when I put pasta and meat on the same plate!’
Asked what he loved about his adopted country, he replied, ‘Oh, you name it. It’s got most things covered, Italy. You can go there for the food alone. The fashion, the sculpture … it really excels in every corner of culture, other than pop music.’
Before he wed, Colin had set about learning the language and could now converse in his wife’s mother tongue. Although Livia was word perfect in English, he saw the relationship as a great excuse to learn a beautiful language and he felt he owed it to her to make an effort. ‘If you’re going to live your life with someone you should, as a mark of respect, try to learn their way of conceptualizing things,’ he told The Independent on Sunday. His mastery of the language is admirable, but he admits that his wife’s English is better than his Italian.
‘I studied Italian properly for a year or so, but I’ve reached a plateau,’ he revealed at the Hope Springs premiere. ‘If I was awarding myself grades, it would be a B-plus for effort and a C-minus for achievement. I do practise on my in-laws fairly regularly, but they’ve just come to understand that I’m simply no good at conversation – Italian conversation, that is.’
Rather than jetting off for a honeymoon, the happy couple embarked on married life with a few weeks in the beautiful Italian countryside. Marriage was set to suit both of them with Colin admitting he felt ‘much more settled and peaceful’, and Livia declaring, ten years into the union, ‘We’re a great match because I’m the ballbreaker and he’s the brains.’
The wedding finally laid to rest any speculation about his private life. Perhaps getting his off-screen life confused with this romantic screen image, some journalists had been keen to tar him with a Lothario image, fuelled by his past liaisons with leading ladies. Colin warily pointed out that he was no ‘Warren Beatty’, wandering around with a ‘bimbo on my arm’.
‘Until I met my present wife, at the age of thirty-five, you could name two girlfriends of mine,’ Colin asserted. ‘Yet there is this extraordinary image of me as a man who goes off with his leading lady all the time. In reality, any thirty-five-year-old man who can claim to have had two past lovers is hardly a philanderer.’
Back in England, the newlyweds decided to go house-hunting. The Hackney flat had served him well as a bachelor pad but was not where they wanted to settle for good, or start a family. With his career getting more promising all the time, they could afford an upward move and found a beautiful house in upmarket Barnsbury, in the heart of Islington. The secondary-modern kid from Hampshire had certainly gone up in the world. So had his chance of being recognized by his neighbours. ‘I was sitting in my house reading and two people came past and actually looked through the window,’ he said, shortly after moving in. ‘And one of them said, “Oh look, it’s Colin Firth.” It wouldn’t have happened in Hackney. Pride and Prejudice didn’t have such big penetration there.’
Shortly after their return to England, Colin took off to the Highlands of Scotland to shoot the low-budget British movie My Life So Far. Based on the memoirs of TV executive Denis Forman, and directed by Chariots of Fire helmsman Hugh Hudson, it is an affectionate portrayal of an eccentric upper-class family in 1920s Britain, seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old child.
Fraser Pettigrew is growing up on a wealthy Scottish estate run with an iron rod by his disciplinarian grandmother Gamma, played by Rosemary Harris and his beautiful mother, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Colin took on the playful role of Fraser’s eccentric and lovable father, Edward, an inventor who refuses to grow up. When Fraser’s wandering uncle returns to the estate with a captivating French fiancée in tow, both father and son find themselves disturbingly attracted to her.
‘There’s a high level of play about Edward,’ explained Colin. ‘He clearly has a love for his family, adores his life, thinks it’s paradise. But his folly threatens it all. And at times you think he’s unspeakable and lacks compassion. It’s a fine line to walk. You play some of these scenes and you wonder if there’s any redemption to him at all.’
Director Hugh Hudson claims that, in the role, Colin became as boyish as Robert Norman, the young lad playing his son. ‘Colin brought a sense of youth and impetuousness and delightful eccentricity to the role. He’s a very intelligent man and that comes off on screen – but he also played the role as a child, which is what Edward is: a child at play in the adult world.’
During one scene, filmed at Ardkinglas House in the remote, heather-strewn hills of Argyll and Bute, Colin runs alongside a loch, out on to a jetty and jumps into the freezing-cold water. The obvious comparisons to Darcy’s famous dip didn’t escape the crew and, after several minutes in the icy water, at a temperature of 4° Celsius, his usual sense of humour deserted him. As he emerged to a round of applause from the crew, one onlooker commented ‘You’ve earned your money today, Colin.’
‘Firth nods mutely,’ recorded an on-set visitor from the LA Times. ‘He’s been hearing about this scene all day in series of jokes from crew members. It’s not only that Firth would have to brave the bitter cold of the icy loch; the other source of mirth is that he became a major name in Britain partly as result of another scene in which he got soaked.’
At thirty-six, this was the first time Colin had played a father and his instant family came as something of a surprise. ‘You’d think that the first time you play a dad, you should start with an infant and then work up gradually, then play the father of a seven-year-old,’ he remarked. ‘I actually started off as the father of an actress who was twenty-one.’
Having returned to London, Colin was pleased to be able to pick up a prestigious, star-studded movie with Hollywood names and a brilliant script but which was to be filmed entirely in the UK.
• • •
Tom Stoppard’s brilliant script for Shakespeare in Love had been knocking about since 1993, when Julia Roberts was cast. Daniel Day-Lewis had reportedly turned down the role of the Bard, and the project was shelved. By the time it got into the hands of Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, four years later, it was hot property. There was barely an actor in Britain who wasn’t begging for a role. Director John Madden, fresh from the triumph that was the royal drama Mrs Brown, was hooked by the script on page one. Gwyneth Paltrow’s planned hiatus from movies was delayed so that she could play Will’s love interest, Viola, and the most sought-after British actress of all time, Judi Dench, declared she would take any part, ‘even someone slouching in a doorway’. She ended up winning an Academy Award for her role as Queen Elizabeth I.
Ralph Fiennes’s younger brother Joseph bagged the plum role of Shakespeare, US star Ben Affleck played celebrated actor Ned Alleyn, and the rest of the cast included Tom Wilkinson, Simon Callow, Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Antony Sher. Colin played the Earl of Wessex, the pompous suitor to the free-spirited Viola, and his future King’s Speech co-star, Geoffrey Rush, played the owner of the theatre where the young Shakespeare put on his shows.
The film had the young writer struggling with his romantic masterpiece – entitled Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate’s Daughter – until he falls for the beautiful Viola, who is already pledged to another (Wessex). Viola, in a foretaste of Twelfth Night, dresses as a boy to star in Will’s great plays and becomes a friend and confidante of the playwright.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as John Webster and Christopher Marlowe, crop up in the film, the latter being played by Colin’s old adversary Rupert Everett. Luckily, their characters
shared no discourse and the two actors did not meet on screen, or off, during the making of the movie.
Colin’s character, the Earl of Wessex, boasts blue blood and a bank account in the red. Something of a buffoon, he chooses Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola as his future wife more for her dowry than her stunning looks, after he is told she is as stubborn as ‘as any mule in Christendom – but if you are the man to ride her, there are rubies in the saddlebag’.
But while he remains the villain of the piece, vowing to whisk his prize away to the ‘New World’ as soon as her hand is secured, despite her love for Will Shakespeare, Colin found a way to empathize with him, as he does with all the characters he plays. Wessex’s desire to travel to America for a new life is, he claims, a sign of bravery. Like Geoffrey in The English Patient, the buffoonery hides a streak of courage.
‘His crime is that he is unintelligent and has no sense of humour, but for his times, at least he hadn’t used his power to kill anyone, unlike many men in his position, and as for going off to the Carolinas, that was not exactly a quick trip on Concorde in those days.’
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