Colin Firth (28 page)

In
The Independent
he revealed he usually chickens out if nudity is involved, unless the script is exceptional. ‘It’s my
signal to run for the hills actually,’ he admitted. ‘If you really want do a film and there are necessary scenes where you are undressed, it’s one of the biggest sinking feelings an actor can have. You’re just thinking, oh yes, oh God, how much time do I have to spend in order not to disgrace myself and horrify everybody? The older you get, the harder the work and the more you’re hoping you won’t be asked to do that any more.’

The script also called for him to passionately kiss Matthew Goode and to rebuff an attempted smooch from Julianne. It was the latter he found the hardest. ‘It never even occurred to me that there was any issue about playing gay until Julianne kissed me, and I had to resist,’ he joked. ‘She made that very difficult for that moment. Matthew is a pretty good kisser. Julianne was much better – but I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it. That was the one moment when Tom Ford really had to get on my case. “You’re supposed to be a gay man – Jesus Christ, keep your hands to yourself, and get your tongue out of her mouth!”’

And Colin was happy at the suggestion that the role might make him a gay icon, quipping. ‘I’m happy to be any kind of icon! I’m not getting any younger!’

Director Tom Ford says he fell in love with Colin and his character during the filming. ‘You have to have a crush on every single one of your actors. But they’re also portraying a character – which, in this case, I wrote – so I had a crush on the characters anyway. I said to Colin, “I have such a crush on you.” Now I have a crush on Colin in real life. Who doesn’t? But that’s not the crush I was talking about. I had a crush on Colin as George. I felt the same way about Julianne. You need to love your characters.’

Colin’s sensitive portrayal of the heartbroken professor was hailed as his finest to date.
The Observer
praised his
‘captivating central performance’ and Wendy Ide of
The Times
called the film ‘a thing of heart-stopping beauty’ and commented, ‘Colin Firth gives one of the finest, most affecting performances of his career.’

Colin admitted he was pleased with the praise and was characteristically modest. ‘If you think you’ve done it before and no one’s noticed, there was probably something wrong. It may be because I didn’t do it adequately, or maybe it’s because all the other elements didn’t come together on that one occasion. This seems to have got through in ways that other things haven’t. One thing that is satisfying and a source of great relief is that I’ve been asked to do a great deal more. The focus is on me more than it’s probably ever been. It’s much better than having people saying they put a whole film on Firth’s shoulders, and he dropped the ball!’

In September 2009, two days after his forty-ninth birthday, Colin had one of the proudest moments of his life when he was awarded the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. Accepting his award in Italian, he paid tribute to his in-laws for accepting this ‘very dodgy commodity’ into the family and said the gong was ‘possibly the greatest honour of my life’.

‘I had a particular connection with Italy, as my wife is Italian, so that added to the joy, the charm, of the moment,’ he said later. ‘Everyone in Italy knows what that award means. And I had enough of the local lingo to express how I felt; there’s no other non-English-speaking country in the world where I could have done that.’ And he told
The Observer
: ‘I rarely seem to come home from Italy empty-handed – wine, balsamic vinegar, wife, two children, and now a nice piece of silverware.’

The Venice gong kicked off a rash of nominations
throughout the movie award season. Best Actor nods came from the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and finally the Academy Awards. The accolades reminded him of a previous BAFTA nomination, for
Tumbledown
, and the refreshingly honest star revealed his crushing disappointment when he lost out on the night.

`You don’t quite know how much you’ve got invested in something until you get a disappointment,’ he said during a press conference. ‘You can think you’re quite blasé about something – I’m not blasé about [the Oscar] by the way, nor do I have any expectations. Years ago, when I had a BAFTA nomination in my mid-twenties, I thought I was very blasé about that and thought awards were terribly unhealthy for our business, and I didn’t go to the BAFTAs. I was filming at the time, I wasn’t making a great statement. I wasn’t there and I thought I was very cool about it, until I found out I hadn’t won. I was absolutely shattered, and I was astonished that I was shattered.

‘I’m quite good at getting over these things, but I am still surprised how disappointed I was about it. If I’d won, I think I would still be under the illusion I didn’t care.’

This time, Colin did pick up the BAFTA and, in a hilarious speech, he thanked a fridge repairman for the gong. ‘What Tom Ford doesn’t know is I have the email in my outbox telling him I could not possibly do this,’ he said. ‘I was about to send this when a man came to repair my fridge … I don’t know what’s best for me so I would like to thank the fridge guy.’ He also lavished praise on the director who ‘knows what’s best for me’. And added to have ‘an encounter with Tom Ford is to come away feeling resuscitated, a little more worldly, better groomed, more fragrant, and more nominated than one has ever been before’.

In a bizarre postscript to the speech, Colin’s assistant tracked down the repair man who confessed he hadn’t even recognized the star during the fateful callout. ‘It was only when his personal assistant rang my work asking if the repair man who visited could attend a post-awards party that I twigged,’ Zak Marhri revealed. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing really.’

As Colin basked in award glory, Livia was making headlines with her ethical dress sense. Rather than splashing out on designer dresses worth thousands, the stunning Italian stole the show at the Golden Globes in LA in a second-hand dress. ‘No one here seems to get ethical fashion,’ she said. ‘But everyone was crazy about this dress. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many compliments for a dress in one night.’ She wasn’t adverse to kissing rival nominees either. ‘I kissed George Clooney, which made my night frankly,’ she said.

Unfortunately for Colin, he lost out at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars to Jeff Bridges, who scooped Best Actor for his role as an alcoholic singer in
Crazy Heart.
But, in the run-up to the award season, Colin had been working on the very film that would turn the tables at the following year’s glitzy ceremonies,
The King’s Speech
.

Between the two Oscar contenders, Colin made a second
St Trinian’s
film with Rupert Everett, starred with Orlando Bloom in the drama
Main Street
, and voiced the character of Fred in the 3D Disney production of
A Christmas Carol.
But while it looked like he was keeping busy, he confessed that they took up very little of his time.

‘
St Trinian’s
was about a week’s work and
A Christmas Carol
was four hours,’ he told journalists at a press conference in January 2009. ‘I’m not working my fingers to the bone. It’s not as much time as it looks. Since
A Single Man
wrapped, two Decembers ago, I didn’t do anything until May. That’s
not exactly the treadmill. I did a film called
Main Street
, which was four weeks’ work, then I had the summer off and did seven days on
St Trinian’s
. Then
The King’s Speech
– that was work, and that felt like work. I think I get more days off a year than you do. I get my downtime.’

The King’s Speech
, which began shooting in October 2009, charted the efforts of King George VI to overcome a crippling stammer in the weeks leading up to a crucial radio broadcast. Geoffrey Rush was to play speech therapist Lionel Logue and Helena Bonham Carter George’s loyal wife, Queen Elizabeth.

As Colin contemplated his forthcoming fiftieth birthday, it was exactly the kind of character role he was looking for.

‘Fifty does feel like a big number if you haven’t been there before,’ he said during a press conference. ‘I don’t relish the idea of losing my faculties, but I do relish the idea of roles getting more interesting – which for the moment at least is what seems to be happening. I think bad moments can leap out at you just as much as good moments – more often, probably. As a young actor, I remembered thinking I could do with a wrinkle or two, just to get something interesting on to this face. I longed for a bit of texture, a bit of character. I just thought I looked terribly boring. A few lines work quite well, really, as long as you don’t fall apart completely.’

Philosophizing about reaching half a century, Colin said life is marked by huge events throughout. ‘I think there are a series of crises through life, as you pass certain experiences that mark change and sometimes it is just an age milestone,’ he told
The Independent
. ‘Having children’s a big one. And not having children can be a big one. I think you see the rest of your generation going through things; there are moments when you look at your life and go what did or didn’t I achieve.’

Joking about having a midlife crisis, he added, ‘I’m in a fully fledged one right now. It’s in full swing. It’s been going on since I was about twenty-eight. I’ve resisted getting a motorbike by the skin of my teeth. I’d be dead by now probably because I’d be rubbish driving it. I mean, life is full of crises and I don’t think they are just to do with the ageing process, but there are certain physical changes that happen. A lot of people talk about their eyesight after the age of forty. I had 20-20 vision one minute and then suddenly needed glasses the next. And then you reflect – what else is going to go? My memory is not as good as it was. Your hair changes colour, falls out, all those sorts of things. You find you put on weight more easily, but then there are all these other variables – whether you’re married or divorced, whether there’s a war on, or natural disaster.’

If his eyesight was failing, at least his career was improving with age. After the triumph of
A Single Man
,
his royal role was about to fill his mantelpiece with the long-awaited gongs – and finally rid him of the ‘monkey on my back’ that was Mr Darcy.

I
N
2008
A
USTRALIAN
author Meredith Hooper went along to a fringe theatre reading of a play called
The King’s Speech
in London. The chance invitation was to set off a chain of events that resulted in the biggest British movie of all time. So taken was Meredith with David Seidler’s drama about George VI’s battle against his speech impediment that she immediately sent it to her son, the film director Tom Hooper.

‘I had about thirty unread scripts on my desk,’ recalled Tom. ‘She nagged away at me for about three months until I finally read it. And I was blown away by it.’

Together with producers Iain Canning and Gareth Unwin, he set about looking for funding and casting the lead roles. First on their list to play Australian voice coach Lionel Logue was Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush. Happily Gareth knew someone who lived two doors away from Rush in Melbourne so he cheekily mailed it to his friend, who duly
posted it through Geoffrey’s door. The actor was initially furious. ‘I got a very angry email back from Geoffrey’s manager,’ Gareth told
The Mail on Sunday
. ‘He ripped me to shreds, then ended with “but he likes it. Let’s talk”.’

The team then drew up a wish list of actors to play the King and his wife, Queen Elizabeth. Colin was top of the list along with Helena Bonham Carter, and both loved the script. The actor knew the basic facts about the abdication of Edward VIII, George’s brother, but was fascinated by the King’s personal struggle.

‘You always hear about Prince Charming who gave up the crown for love, but you don’t hear about the uncharismatic guy who had to step up in his place,’ he explained. ‘And poor George had his work cut out for him – he’s crowned during a massive constitutional crisis when monarchs all over Europe are being assassinated or going into exile. Worse, he was horribly shy and had a terrible stutter. These were the years when radio was coming in, and the King was expected to make public radio addresses live. There was no recording and editing.’

George, who was christened Albert and known to family and friends as Bertie, was terrified of speaking in public due to the debilitating stammer. Scolded by his father and mocked by his brother, he had tried numerous therapies to cure the impediment but none had worked. His devoted wife Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, employed the service of controversial therapist Logue, who improved the situation. But when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, Bertie became the reluctant monarch and called in Logue once more to help with the long radio broadcasts he would be required to make.

‘Bertie had to do something which you could almost
describe as heroic in order to get a sentence out,’ said Colin. ‘He wasn’t afraid of action in World War I but the idea of speaking, and speaking in public, terrified him.’

Scriptwriter David Seidler had waited nearly thirty years to tell the story, respecting the wishes of the Queen Mother not to dramatize it during her lifetime. In the 1970s he wrote asking permission and she wrote back saying that ‘The memory of these events are still too painful’ and that she wouldn’t accede in her lifetime. ‘I thought, “How long am I going to have to wait? One or two years?” She wasn’t that young,’ he recalled. The Queen Mother lived until she was 101, so he had to wait twenty-eight years for his moment of glory.