Shot in the autumn of 2005 in Slovakia and Tunisia, it meant months away from home. But it was not this fact that almost made him turn down the role. While Brad Pitt caused a sensation in a mini leather skirt in Troy, Colin was determined not to repeat the revealing outfit and almost backed out over the costume.
‘Whether you have the build or not, you can be killed in a costume,’ he fretted to the Daily Record. ‘Russell Crowe didn’t look ridiculous, but even if you have the most incredible physique there is still the danger of looking comical flaunting it in a skirt. You might become some kind of cheesy erotic fantasy. It is dangerous if you have beautiful legs and dangerous if you have legs like pipe cleaners. I can leave you to guess what applies to me.’
Luckily, it seems the Romans had invented tailoring just before the fall of the Empire. ‘I’m not in a skirt,’ he sighed with relief. ‘Thank God, history was on our side. I was going to turn it down on the grounds of costume alone, then I got shown lots of fifth-century Romans in trousers. I thought, if that’s where we’re going it’s fine.’
Despite an impressive cast, which also included John Hannah, Kevin McKidd and Ben Kingsley, the £40 million Roman romp failed to light a candle at the box office.
While Colin was visiting ancient Rome, a new Mr Darcy was hitting the big screen. Matthew Macfadyen took on the role of the Austen hero opposite Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet for the movie version of Pride & Prejudice. Firth fans instantly dismissed the possibility that anyone could step into the tight breeches of their ‘dear boy’ but Colin was secretly hoping the usurper would steal the crown.
At the premiere of Nanny McPhee, Colin admitted he hadn’t seen the recently released film but added, ‘I hear Matthew is fantastic. I knew he would be. That role was terrific to me ten years ago but I think it’s other people, not me, who have found it weird that someone else should play it. I played Hamlet once and I’ve seen others play that, too. I don’t own the Darcy role and never wanted to. I’m very happy to let as brilliant an actor as Matthew take on the mantle.’
Sadly for Colin, the film was met with endless comparisons to his own legendary Darcy, and he usually came out on top.
‘I was hoping that would bury it at a crossroads at midnight with a stake through its heart but it didn’t quite do that,’ he said.
With ten years of Darcymania following him around like a ‘school nickname you can’t shake’, Colin was finally coming to terms with his sex symbol status. ‘At the time of the whole Pride and Prejudice thing I was at odds with it really,’ he reflected. ‘But now I’m ageing I say, “Enjoy it and milk it, man.”’
CHAPTER 18
Father and Mamma
AT THE AGE of forty-five, Colin had over thirty films and several TV roles, including the dashing Mr Darcy, under his belt. But he insists he is far from a workaholic.
‘People think you never stop, but the reality is I have an average of two films a year,’ he explained in 2005 to the Daily Record. ‘I used to do a lot more films back to back before I had a family of my own. They are my reason for paring it down a bit.’ He also wanted to avoid being too prolific, in case the public got tired of seeing his face on the screen. ‘I think people do need a break from you. If there is a Bridget Jones film out, you are on the side of every bus. I get sick of being stuck in traffic in London and getting overtaken by a bus with my face on the side.’
Having worked solidly since leaving drama school at the age of twenty-two, he was aware of how lucky he has been and has often noted that the ease of his path to fame, without the years touring in rep that other actors often endure at the beginning of their careers, occasionally gave him pangs of guilt. ‘There is an unease,’ he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs. ‘I was brought up with a lot of Protestant values and you’re supposed to pay your dues somewhere. Perhaps your soul needs a bit of hardship to develop so I do wonder when the catch is to come.’
It wasn’t coming any time soon. In 2006 Colin was very much in demand and about to embark on a bumper year with two TV movies and several high-profile films in the pipeline. He began the year in London, filming the television version of Harold Pinter’s Celebration and a gritty drama about homelessness, Born Equal. In the latter, he plays a wealthy hedge fund manager whose conscience is pricked by an aggressive encounter with a homeless man. To assuage his guilt, he begins to help out at a local shelter where he meets a group of people whose lives are a million miles away from his own, including a teenage runaway (Nichola Burley), a Nigerian asylum seeker (David Oyelowo) and a violent ex-con (Robert Carlyle). Directed by Dominic Savage, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the revolutionary drama Cathy Come Home, the film was largely improvised, which was a new experience for Colin.
‘Dominic doesn’t even rehearse,’ he told The Independent. ‘He just switches on the camera and says: “Go for it.” It’s like jumping into a freezing pool – you just hope you pop up again alive.’ He found it hard to identify with his character, who treats his pregnant wife with contempt and rarely thinks of the hurt he causes others, and he confessed he would never be able to do Mark’s job in real life. ‘I wouldn’t understand what a hedge fund manager does even if you sat me down and explained it to me for an entire lifetime,’ he said. ‘Anything financial gets actors into a complete terror. I start to suffocate when I see numbers on a screen. It takes me right back to that utter inability to get anywhere with maths O level.’
While he has thrown his weight behind campaigns for the rights of asylum seekers and Third World coffee growers, he admitted he had often overlooked the plight of his own countrymen. ‘Getting into detail about how some people do live, right on my doorstep – the traps that people find themselves in – was sobering and it did give me a jolt,’ he said to the Sunday Express. ‘My wife has had a subscription to the homeless charity Shelter for a long time. I have tended to put my energies in a different direction, though this has woken me up on homelessness. I can’t say that I came to a new judgement, but I’m a little more aware. I will remember that the next time I walk past a homeless person. I hope that is the effect of the film; that it will lodge itself as a reference point and have some way of working its way in as the years go by.’
Another thought-provoking drama kept Colin at home in the late summer. When Did You Last See Your Father? is a tender family story based on the memoirs of Blake Morrison, who wrote the book when grieving over the loss of his own dad. On learning his father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Blake returns to the small village where he grew up to help his mother and sister care for the old man. During his stay he looks back over the troubled relationship of the two men, and their failure to connect on an emotional level.
Blake’s father Arthur is a domineering, often irritating figure in his son’s life and Colin said he couldn’t be further from his own ‘quiet, unassuming’ dad. Now very close to his parents, the actor was happy to take the blame for any friction in the relationship in his younger days. ‘I was a surly, pretentious adolescent, like Blake’s portrait of himself,’ he said. ‘My father and I were not close in a cosy sense but I am as connected with my father as Blake was with his. The difference is my animosity with my dad was left behind in my teens. But, even now, three seconds in my parents’ company and a tone of voice or trigger will bring me back to being fifteen.’
Like millions of viewers after him, Colin was moved to consider his own parents’ mortality by the movie. ‘All the stuff that the movie deals with, it’s not stuff that occurred to me for the first time,’ he told the Big Issue, ‘but it does make you reflect. My parents are actually young and healthy, so it’s not like time is imminently running out but the fact is, this is the time we’ve got and don’t wait for the last minute.’ In his own family, he revealed, there had been no early deaths but at the age of thirty-five he was shaken by the first loss of a grandparent: his grandfather. ‘It was a shock, some part of me finding out we weren’t immortal in my family.’
The film, and his role
as both father and son, led to a great deal of self-analysis. ‘I asked more questions about myself through this film than anything else I have ever done,’ he told the Daily Express. ‘I am both a son – my father is now seventy-three – and a father. How good have I been at both? Could I be better? It is not too late, so how can I change?’
Dad David loved the film so much he went to see it a second time. ‘He’s very into the questions that it asks, partly because he’s just lost his father and probably feels more like a son when he watches,’ said Colin. ‘He’s not a demonstrative, loquacious person, he keeps very much to himself in a way but was very moved by the film. I haven’t really sat down with him – this is one of the things you don’t do, sit down and have that conversation. Blake sits at Arthur’s bedside and they’re going through bills!’
The scenes when Blake cringes as his father charms a bar full of drinkers struck a chord with Colin, making him think of his relationship with sixteen-year-old Will. ‘I think I’m probably the kind of father more like Arthur than Blake,’ he pondered. ‘I’m no shrinking violet myself and I dare say that his toes curl when I’m thinking I’m being charming.’
While his own scenes are powerful and moving, Colin felt a flash of recognition for those which starred Matthew Beard as the young Blake. The simple pleasures of a childhood in the sixties came flooding back. ‘Washing the car on a Sunday, having iodine put on your cuts, putting a tent up come hell or high water – the whole thing resonated,’ he recalled. ‘Camping trips in the rain were not unusual when I was growing up. To me, though, there was never any recreation about freezing rain in a field …’
Released in October, When Did You Last See Your Father? won rave reviews, with Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian moved by this ‘deeply felt’ drama and Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail called it a ‘well-crafted, beautifully acted little film’. It also landed six nominations at the British Independent Film Awards and, perhaps more importantly, managed to reduce grown men to tears in cinemas all over the country and had them straight on the phone to their dads.
Colin had barely finished filming before he was on a plane to the New York for back-to-back rom-coms. Then She Found Me was a pet project for Helen Hunt, who had spent eight years adapting Elinor Lipman’s book and bringing it to the big screen. The central character, played by Helen, is a schoolteacher suffering a midlife crisis after her husband leaves and her biological mother, a chat show host who had her adopted as a baby, tracks her down. The actress-turned-director almost rejected Colin for the role of the father of a student whom the teacher falls for because she thought he was too good-looking.
‘I think I was afraid, and he was afraid, that he’s so appealing that the minute he comes on screen you’d stop worrying about April,’ she said. ‘If he showed up and was just so perfect and dreamy that all of her problems were over, the movie would have been over ten minutes in. I actually wrote the part for someone much less tall, handsome and appealing.’
After wrapping, Colin stayed in the Big Apple for The Accidental Husband, playing the publisher fiancé of radio agony aunt Uma Thurman.
Both hitting the screens in 2007, the movies were received with very different reviews. Then She Found Me was largely praised and Colin’s performance as the single dad riding to the rescue of the emotionally battered April won critics over on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Frank (Colin Firth) is any woman’s dream, a manly but sensitive and witty soul whose first wife must have been insane to leave him,’ gushed Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star. The Observer’s Rex Reed declared, ‘The Hunt–Firth team has a glowing chemistry.’ Fluffy rom-com The Accidental Husband, however, saw Sunday Express critic Henry Fitzherbert slamming Colin for playing ‘another stiff Brit in a picture that will do him no favours’ and The Telegraph’s Tim Robey commenting that it ‘lacks the faintest spark of originality’.
In between his many filming commitments, Colin found time to take up the cudgel on behalf of his mother’s pet cause, fighting for the right of asylum seekers. In February 2007 he joined forces with Shirley’s charity, the Southampton and Winchester Visitors’ Group, and five prominent bishops to campaign against the deportation of a Congolese nurse who called himself Pierre. The young man had fled to Britain after being tortured and jailed for refusing to administer lethal morphine doses to political opponents of the military leaders. After hearing about the case from Shirley, Colin personally contacted the newspapers to publicize the man’s plight.
‘Nobody likes an actor with a cause, least of all me,’ Colin told The Independent. ‘But there is good reason to believe this guy is at risk. He is certain that if he returns he will be murdered.’
The army nurse had escaped the Democratic Republic of Congo after his brother bribed guards at the jail, and had been living in the UK, sleeping on friends’ floors, for five years after his application for asylum was turned down. As the Labour government prepared to fly him home, along with another forty other failed asylum seekers, Colin could not contain his anger. ‘It just makes me so furious,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be nineteen kids on this flight, a chartered plane because they don’t want kids kicking and screaming on a commercial flight when they bundle them out through the back door.
‘This man has been exemplary. To me it’s just basic civilization to help people. I find this incredibly painful to see how we dismiss the most desperate people in our society. It’s easily done. It plays to the tabloids, to the middle-England xenophobes. It just makes me furious. And all from a government we once had such high hopes for.’
In a letter to The Guardian Colin wrote, ‘There is considerable evidence of the dangers of returning to the DRC. It is imperative that this particular deportation is stopped; but this case represents a wider problem of wholesale deportations of asylum seekers. This man is a nurse who has been in the UK for five years and behaved perfectly while here. Now, instead of making badly needed use of his nursing skills, our government is prepared to connive at his murder.’
In a plot twist worthy of a Hollywood movie, Pierre and three others received a last-minute reprieve, even as the plane stood on the tarmac at Stansted airport. A legal appeal was successful and he was allowed to remain in the UK. ‘I am overjoyed because we have worked very hard for him,’ said Shirley, on hearing the news. ‘He had a very good case and would have been in danger if he had been sent back. There is a culture of disbelief at the Home Office in assessing applications from refugees. It doesn’t always try to get at what the truth is.’
After railing against the government over asylum seekers, Colin turned to pure anarchy – on the set of St Trinian’s. Oddly enough, it was his old adversary Rupert Everett who approached him to star as a starchy school inspector, having come up with the idea of remodelling the classic comedy series for a modern audience. Rupert was playing the dual role of headmistress Miss Fritton and her brother Carnaby, as played by Alastair Sim in the original movies. Colin was Geoffrey Thwaites, an old flame who is now determined to instil discipline into the unruly schoolgirls or shut the place down.
Working together at Ealing Studios, the pair finally made their peace and became good friends. Colin, whom Rupert nicknamed Frothy, acknowledged their past difficulties but said they was now firmly in the past. ‘It wasn’t really a feud or a war of words. It was a war of stony silences,’ he said in an interview with the author. ‘It didn’t really go beyond the end of that film in 1983. We didn’t really see each other for eighteen years.’
Buoyed by their new camaraderie, Rupert wrote a foreword for the paperback version of his autobiography, Red Carpets and Banana Skins, putting Colin’s side of the fallout on Another Country. ‘Colin Firth says he did not bring a guitar to the set of Another Country and that, even if he did, he never learnt to play “Lemon Tree”. Last week, on the set of St Trinian’s, which we are filming as this tome goes to print, he went even further and categorically swore that he had never worn sandals (without socks, maybe),’ he wrote. But he couldn’t resist a
side swipe, concluding, ‘Reinvention is the celebrity spring clean.’
One scene called for the two actors to end up in bed together, and the new relationship was sealed with a kiss.
‘We are getting on terribly well, especially now that we have finally been united as lovers,’ Rupert told the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Although I think Colin took it a little bit too seriously – he wanted to do take after take of the snog scene. I suppose he’s always been rather in love with me.’
In turn, Colin revealed that the scene had ‘rather surprised me. Rupert turned into a giggling schoolboy. He was adamant that we shouldn’t kiss; I was adamant that we should. But the chemistry was definitely there in the end.’
Surrounded by beautiful young girls, including Gemma Arterton, Talulah Riley and Lily Cole, the older pair were the ones indulging in the juvenile pranks on set. On one occasion, when Colin was due to grope Miss Fritton’s chest, Rupert stuck inflated balloons up his costume in the hope they would burst and put Colin off. When the prank went wrong he let his co-star in on the joke. ‘Next time, he put pins in his fingers so he burst them when he grabbed me,’ recalled Rupert. ‘It certainly startled the crew.’
Colin remembered watching the original films as a child and being frightened of the miniskirted temptresses of the girls’ school. ‘I can’t remember how old I was but I was probably under ten when I saw these films and I was very attracted to then, and very frightened of them, which is quite an explosive combination,’ he said in an interview with the author. And he admitted the outrageous outfits worn by the young actresses in the movie were far from politically correct. ‘We dress our children up in this bizarre way, which has a quasi-adult feeling about it so it endows them with a precocious kind of adulthood,’ he said. ‘Then we complain when people fetishize them. We’re not in a safe PC area, definitely, but it’s something that has been a central part of English culture for decades. So yes, there is a slightly pervy element to the whole thing.’
Colin Firth Page 19