Colin Firth (13 page)

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 happened 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.

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.’