Colin Firth (22 page)

And the names kept coming. TV stars Martin Freeman, Andrew Lincoln, Kris Marshall and Gregor Fisher signed up for secondary roles while Rowan Atkinson, Claudia Schiffer and Billy Bob Thornton signed up for cameos.

Hugh Grant plays a single Prime Minister who takes a fancy to his cockney tea-lady while Emma Thompson, his sister, is watching her marriage to Alan Rickman fall apart over an infatuation with his secretary. Liam Neeson is a widower struggling to help his stepson to come to terms with
his mother’s death, Andrew Lincoln a best man in love with bride-to-be Kiera Knightley, and Bill Nighy a has-been rock star looking for a revival.

Colin’s character is a writer who walks in on his girlfriend’s sexual liaison with his brother, packs his bags and flees to the south of France. There he falls for the Portuguese housekeeper, even though they can barely exchange a word. For Colin, the love across a language barrier had ‘echoes’ of his own relationship, despite Livia’s impeccable English.

‘It’s a comedy of misunderstandings,’ he said to the
Daily Express
in 2003. ‘And it also has poignancy to it. That’s something I know quite well because I’m married to an Italian who I’m quite sure would not have married me if she’d understood everything I said!’

It reminded him, he told the
Irish Times
, of his continuing efforts to improve his Italian and ‘the whole business of the opportunity to learn a language becoming part of courtship. And, of course, it is such an attractive language and an attractive place. In a lot of other countries it would not have been so pleasant.’

Richard had originally intended two of the stories to be stand-alone films – coincidentally Hugh’s Downing Street tale and Colin’s writer’s retreat romance – but after the success of the two previous ‘boy meets girl’ movies he felt he needed to move on. ‘I’m not at that stage any more,’ he said.

The role of the articulate wordsmith attempting to find other ways to express himself harked back to that bout of laryngitis in his teens, and it seemed perfect for Colin. But he admitted the character was hard to get to grips with at first. ‘I found it rather difficult to relate to the bumbling romantic fellow because I don’t feel like him at all or think I’m as nice as that guy,’ he told the
Daily Express
. ‘I wouldn’t be as patient
and self-deprecating. I’m not necessarily an optimist in terms of romantic love. I’m not the type of romantic who enjoys the weepy movie and then sighs sweetly about it.’

Filming began in September 2002, with most of Colin’s scenes in France, meaning he missed out on the UK premiere of
The Importance of Being Earnest.
His paths barely crossed with those of his illustrious co-stars until a final scene in London.

‘There were two days when we shot the finale at the airport where we were all there and that was quite extraordinary really. It was an implausibly large number of big names all together,’ he recalled. ‘I felt I had this sweet little pastoral film in France all to myself and it was just slightly disillusioning to show up at the premiere in New York and realize that all these other much more famous people thought that it was their film!’

The rom-com opens, as it ends, with unashamed sentimentality as couples and families greet each other at Heathrow airport and a voiceover declares that during the tragedy of 9/11 the phone calls from those trapped in the Twin Towers were all messages of love. ‘If you look for it, I’ve got a nasty suspicion you’ll find that love actually is all around.’

In an uncontroversial comedy, the 9/11 line left Richard open to criticism but he was happy to risk that in the name of the overall theme. ‘I wrote it and liked how it sounded,’ he said. ‘And the fundamental fact is that wherever there is crisis and horror, there are also just families and people falling in love, normal people.’

Colin identified the secret of Richard’s runaway movie success as a tendency to write about the middle classes. British comedy and drama had tended, in recent years, to
focus on the underprivileged areas of society, such as sink estates, striking miners and unemployed factory workers. His well-written, gushing love stories are pure escapism, and that’s what pulls an audience in.

‘He has done something which is very hard to do in film, which is to write about middle-class people,’ he told
The Times
. ‘The unspoken law in film tradition is that they offer no drama – you can ridicule them, you can satirize them, you can have them in a sitcom, but not have them going about their lives and falling in love.’

Before the £30 million rom-com was released, bookies were laying odds of 3–1 on its being the biggest British box office bonanza of all time. The action culminates on Christmas Eve and its release in November 2003 brought the film-makers many a festive gift.

In
The Daily Telegraph
, David Gritten revealed that the early screening at the Toronto Film Festival had gone down a treat and declared that
Love Actually
had reaffirmed Richard’s ‘stature as a great populist entertainer. Move over
Calendar Girls
, here comes the year’s big British movie hit.’

Christopher Tookey, in the
Daily Mail
, wrote that ‘Curtis weaves together these varied but complementary strands with sublime artistry. He knows just when to put in the big comic set-pieces, when to give us romantic escapism, and when to bring a dash of realism.’ And he concluded, ‘If I had a sixth star to award, this movie would get it. And I wouldn’t mind a side bet on it becoming the highest-grossing British picture of all time.’

Many of the US reviews were less favourable, with the
New York Times
sniffily calling the move ‘an indigestible Christmas pudding’ but the news wasn’t all bad.
USA Today
’s
Claudia Puig scorned cynics with her verdict that ‘
Love Actually
is irresistible. You’d have to be Ebenezer Scrooge not to walk out smiling.’

When Colin and Hugh picked up the plaudits for their comic perfomances, they had already been reunited on the set of the
Bridget Jones
sequel,
Edge of Reason.
As they did the round of interviews for
Love Actually
, they hammed up the rivalry. ‘I always hoped Colin would be bad,’ bitched Hugh. ‘And, indeed, he is!’

In an appearance on GMTV, the
Notting Hill
star, who is actually one day older than Colin, claimed his
Bridget Jones
love rival was getting too old to play the romantic lead. ‘It’s very difficult to like Colin,’ he deadpanned. ‘I feel sorry for him in the regard that he is starting to look his age, poor old boy. The question arises, is he too old for romantic comedy now? And I think he is. The problem is, one eye has started to droop a little. You can dye your hair as much as you like but sometimes …’

Joining in the joke, Richard Curtis added, ‘I’m writing a film in which Colin’s going to play your father next.’

Colin, talking about their work on the sequel, quipped, ‘It was a joy to see Renée – and to see how much Hugh Grant has deteriorated in three years.’ Although he did profess to like his co-star, ‘despite his outrageous rudeness about me’.

The interlaced love stories of the Yuletide treat proved a hit with the British public, bringing in a record-breaking £6.6 million in its opening weekend. Despite lukewarm reviews in the US it beat
Bridget Jones’s Diary
with an opening weekend of $18.6 million (£11 million) and its worldwide gross, by May 2004, had reached $250 million (£150 million), just short of
Bridget Jones
.

Having been pigeonholed as brooding romantic lead for so long after
Pride and Prejudice
, Colin found the legacy
of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
had the opposite effect, with casting directors keen to place him in light comedies. Ironically, he now yearned for something more meaty. ‘What I’m doing now is paying the bills nicely, but I would like to get back to drama,’ he said. ‘I know people are saying, “Why is he doing comedies? He’s making bad choices.” I’ll have to go against the flow big-time if I want to change direction. It’d be turning round an ocean liner.’

To make a start, after his brief sojourn in France on
Love Actually
, Colin moved on to neighbouring Luxembourg in November 2002 for a rather more intense filming experience. In
Girl with a Pearl Earring
,
playing Dutch master Jan Vermeer, he was also leaving behind his recent ensemble pieces to become the star of the film. His main competition for the audience’s attention was an up-and-coming American actress called Scarlett Johansson. Although she had already shot
Lost in Translation
, the Bill Murray movie which would elevate her to the A-list fame, it had yet to be released. She was second choice for the role, after Kate Hudson dropped out, and she was two weeks short of her eighteenth birthday when filming began. Yet Scarlett was about to put in a scorching performance that stole the show.

Despite being called back after Kate dropped the part, Scarlett didn’t need to be asked twice, mainly, she said, because of Colin. ‘They thought I would really need to be buttered up – that I would be so upset I was not the first choice,’ she recalled to
The Scotsman.
‘But I had the greatest leading man ever. It was so smooth and so much fun.’

Girl with a Pearl Earring
is based on Tracy Chevalier’s novel, which invents a life for the mystery girl in Vermeer’s famous painting and speculates on the relationship between artist and muse. Vermeer died at the age of forty-three,
leaving a widow and eleven children, having never sold a painting. Before flying to Luxembourg to film, Colin read the novel and then immersed himself in books on the painter and visited numerous art galleries, including the one in The Hague where the original work hangs, to get a feel of his work.

‘Something hits you when you see the real thing on the wall,’ he said afterwards.

Scarlett took a different approach, refusing to read the book because ‘I just didn’t want to be told what I should be feeling at a particular time’.

‘Colin and Scarlett are very different from each other in how they approached their roles,’ author Tracy Chevalier revealed. ‘Colin became a complete Vermeer egghead. He travelled all over Europe to see Vermeer’s paintings. He took painting lessons and learned how to make his own brushes and grind his own paint. He was very engaged in the script.’

Despite his extensive research, Colin, who had played a painter on numerous occasions before, was no artist. ‘I used to paint a bit when I was younger but you could give me a lifetime of lessons and I’d still never be able to produce a Vermeer,’ he admitted to the
Daily
Express.
‘Luckily, I just have to look like I can hold a brush and that’s about it.’

The unspoken passion simmering between the two leads is largely unspoken, resulting in long lingering looks between the pair and very little dialogue. It was a style that suited Colin’s internalized method of acting and also came naturally to the expressive features of his beautiful young co-star.

‘It’s such a rare role because it’s about her wonderful inner thoughts, which is so appealing for an actor to play. There’s no cheesy dialogue to describe the way she’s feeling,’ she explains.

‘I could just be quiet, which is rare. Often writers fill the voids with awful dialogue that’s very hard to say.’

Darcymaniacs the world over were looking forward to their hero donning a seventeenth-century smock and putting on his best smouldering look. But Colin was hoping he’d never hear the word ‘smoulder’ again.

‘Oh, God!’ he exclaimed at the mention of it by Fiona Morrow for
The Independent.
‘I hope it doesn’t come across like that. I don’t consciously smoulder anyway – I never have. Smouldering is something that’s kind of come to me. Actually, it was a bit worrying the other day on set. I was looking at Griet and going through my own process and doing what I thought, you know, was wanted, and afterwards I got a comment about my smouldering look and I just thought, “Oh, Christ!”’

Smouldering, he suggested, was something that nobody does consciously and, despite his brooding image, he insisted his wife thinks he’s a bit of a dork.

‘You’d have to ask her but I don’t think she thinks I’m the strong, silent type in real life,’ he laughed in an interview with the
Daily Mail.
‘I’m more of a nerd. I’m a fairly dorky sort of person. If I went around trying to smoulder at people in real life, they’d just laugh at me.’

When the camera wasn’t on the brooding looks of Colin and the sweet, seductive face of Scarlett, the mood on set was jovial. Scarlett, remarkably confident and irreverent around her older co-stars, found Colin’s long seventeenth-century wig a source of much amusement. ‘Scarlett kept calling me Fabio. And what I thought was my sizzling look was met with a smirk, and “I can’t believe it’s not butter”,’ he revealed. ‘If your leading lady bursts into fits of laughter at the sight of you, it’s a challenge,’ he said at a press conference.

But Colin gave as good as he got, picking on the tight white headdress Scarlett had to wear as the household maid. ‘Colin kept saying I looked like a peeled egg,’ she said to
People
. ‘He also said I looked like a Q-Tip. He’d stick little Q-Tips with happy faces on them up on our makeup mirror.’

Coming out in January 2004, a year after filming finished, Peter Webber’s beautiful movie won wide acclaim and several award mentions including three Oscar nominations. But while Colin was roundly praised, the press seized on the outstanding performance of young Scarlett, who was duly nominated for a Best Actress BAFTA and a Golden Globe, as well as the visually stunning look of the film.