Colin Firth's Sexy Sensibility

After playing an intense, brooding Darcy in the hugely popular miniseries "Pride and Prejudice", Colin Firth is suddenly an actor Hollywood is dying to know. By Laurie Winer. Photographed by Peter Lindbergh.

People have confused him with Peter Firth, who played the horse lover in the film version Equus. People have mistaken him for his own brother, the actor Jonathan Firth, who looks just a little bit like him. Then there was the time a British reviewer wrote, as Firth remembers it: "The worst thing about this film is the appalling spectacle of the loathsome, flabby, spotty , sweaty back of Colin Firth pumping up and down on top of someone or other." The actor in question, though, was in fact not Colin Firth but Colin Frears.

"Such mix-ups ended forever the day Colin Firth stepped forward to become the Darcy of the '90s, in the superb and compulsively watchable film of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, produced by A&E and the BBC. The three-part series earned A&E its highest rating ever when it aired here in 35-year-old Firth says. "Everyone wants to capitalize on whatever interpretation they have of my career. I have no idea what to do next."

In England, Firth's commanding performance as the romantic lead in the series produced the phenomenon dubbed "Darcy fever," attracting 10 million viewers a week and temporarily blotting out memories of Laurence Olivier's heartthrob Darcy of the 1940 film. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to know who this dashing new Darcy was and what he did in his spare time, and the tabloids responded with frequent, and frequently inaccurate, exposés of the lives and loves of Colin Firth.

"The Daily Express had three days on my tangled love life, says Firth, still incredulous. They didn't talk to me. Instead, they took quotes my parents had given to the local village gazette and ran them. They invented a smoldering crush -- that was how they put it -- on an actress I'd met only once, Joanne Whalley. You can't sue, because none of the things they write are actually defamatory,and you don't want to insult Joanne Whalley, but I felt as if I were reading about someone else, who was using my name and my picture."

Firth has come to Los Angeles to visit Will, the five-year-old son he had with the actress Meg Tilly, his costar in the 1989 Milos Forman film, Valmont. "L.A. is a good place to spend time with a child," Firth says, "because there's little else to do here. This is the blandest city I know." "Currently he lives in London -- alone, as far as anyone can tell. Sitting now in a Santa Monica restaurant overlooking the ocean, Firth inspires curious glances from women who seem to be trying to place him. We are meeting just a week after Pride and Prejudice aired in the U.S., but making the matchup is tricky -- in real life Firth looks younger than Darcy and not nearly so imperious. His hair is a full shade lighter, which accounts for some of the difference, but as I sit opposite him, I notice also that what he offers the listener is not so much storybook gallantry but a kind of deep and flattering seriousness. He gives each of my questions so much consideration that after a long response he may stop to say,"If you asked me tomorrow, I might have an entirely different answer." There's something careful about even those sentences that sound tossed off or playful. "I'm not an above-average brooder, " he offers with a gentle apology. "And I don't smolder. You really can't smolder without darker hair."

Pride and Prejudice may have added value to his name in Hollywood, but Firth had earlier created a string of film portrayals of enormous delicacy and scope and made six lauded forays onto the stage. To get a sense of his range, compare his intensely intelligent and prideful Darcy with the role he filmed just prior: the unappetizing, dissipated Simon Westward, a British aristocrat who seduces the beautiful Irish lass Nan (Saffron Burrows) in Pat O'Connor's 1995 film, Circle of Friends. Compare Darcy's black, piercing stare with Simon's dull, affectless response to Nan, who, about to surrender her virginity, confides to him that she has been saving herself for "someone really special."

Firth does, however, carry one trait from character to character --his unique ability to make thought both visual and active, to use his face as a screen. This quality is what drew director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella to cast him in the forthcoming film version of the acclaimed Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient, which stars Ralph Fiennes. "I persuaded Colin at a time when his star wasn't quite so high, " recalls the British auteur. "In fact, at the time, I had to remind people who he was." Firth had the role of Richard II in the 1986 London radio production of a Minghella play called Two Planks and a Passion. "He's a fantastically good actor," Minghella continues. "There's a sort of transparency to Colin's inner life that only the best actors have. He has to do very little, it seems, to give you access to his inner being."

That quality was needed in The English Patient. Minghella describes one scene from the movie, in which Firth's character, Geoffrey Clifton, returns to his hotel to pick up something he's forgotten and sees his wife (played by Kristin Scott-Thomas) dash out, clearly for an assignation. Firth sits in a cab outside the hotel all night, waiting for her return. The film cuts back and forth between his expectant face and the tender love scene being played out elsewhere. "Nothing happens, but it's a tremendous scene, because you're very sympathetic to Kristin, but Colin keeps pulling the point of view around to him," says Minghella. "He brings a gravitas to a character who could have been something of a buffoon."

Firth recognizes that he could stand to be more of a buffoon at times, but he adds:"I don't think a great many things are achieved by crudely exerting yourself upon them. Still, I'd love to do the cartwheels and the fireworks and the pyrotechnics. I would love to dazzle. I just don't have a great capacity for it." Stepping outside now to reclaim his car from the valet, Firth grows suddenly sunny, if not quite dazzling. We joke about the confused women in the restaurant: Was that really Darcy? "Clearly I should have worn sideburns and a big hat," he says. Overhearing him, two women waiting for their cars stop, their mouths dropping open. Apparently, no cartwheels will be necessary.

In an era where many actors seem to spend more time developing their pecs than their craft [could this be a jab at Mr. Cruise?]Colin Firth really stands out (Colin Firth’s Sexy Sensibility, Laura Winer May). The subtlety and power of his acting, as well as his remarkable range makes him fascinating to watch. Of course his good looks and seductively beautiful voice do not detract form his appeal.  Phyllis Stern, Somers, NY

Thank you so much for the pictures of Colin Firth (Photographer Peter Linburgh).  Until now we have starved for this.  There are many Firth fans on this side of the Atlantic who can’t get enough of him.  Judith Gershater, Burlington, VT
 

 Without Prejudice

Colin Firth most emphatically is not Mr Darcy. Millions may have iusted after him as he strode, be-breeched and immaculate, across the Wiltshire fields, desperately constraining his violent passions, but, if they hope to meet the personification of proud Mr Darcy in Firth, they will be disappointed. Or will they? Firth in the flesh is much more outgoing a character than Darcy articulate where Darcy is silent animated where Darcy is restrained less sure of who he is what he wants where he fits in. He does not want to take his place in the Hollywood firmament which beckons so enticingly — nor to re-enact the Darcy role. ‘Fm not going to do that again’, he insists. ‘I’m not going to be that again. No, I'd-be bored to death’.

Luckily for him, he is not in a position to have to submit to typecasting. Ever since he was plucked straight from drama school and plunged into the leading role of Guy Bennett in the stage play of Another country (and later, more attractively to my mind, the enigmatic and intense communist Judd in the film version) he has not wanted for work. ‘Acting’ he explains, ‘was the first thing I ever got any approval or attention for, and I craved attention’.

The range and depth of his roles has been astounding and confirms his status at 35 as star chameleon among British actors. Take his upcoming parts: at the end of the year, he stars as Nostromo, an insanely vain Italian at sea in the imaginary South American country of Castaguana, in the BBC’s adaptation of Conrad’s classic novel.of American materialism and political corruption. Then he leaps into a flying suit and bleaches his hair to play Geoffrey Clifton (opposite Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas) in The English Patient, Anthony Minghella’s film of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel. From there, he dons the red and white of the dedicated Arsenal supporter to hang out at Highburry with fellow Gunners fans, to play the author in Nick Homby’s Fever Pitch, which he chose above a big-budget Hollywood remake of The Shinning.

His decision can be put down to a combination of intellectual integrity (his parents are academics; his grandparents were missionaries), his new relationship with a beautiful 22-yer-old Italian, Livia Giuggioli, and a need to leave himself more free time to visit his adored son, Will, five, in Canada, where he lives with his mother, Meg Tilly, Firth’s former love and co-star in Valmont.

His is a peripatetic life, more so than for most actors, because of Will. When in London, he lives in a flat in the East End, and wanders around the capital with a greater degree of anonymity than might be expected for the thinking Englishwomen’s number one pin-up. This suits him: he is not easy with fame, he is too intelligent to glory in attention. He says he does not always feel he belongs here or indeed anywhere: ‘Wherever I am, people always say, you’re always away”. You feel like the invisible man. I’m never here, I’m never there. So where am I?’.

Colin Firth is no Darcy but he is a thinker a man of deep emotions which one senses he prefers to suppress. Take, for instance, his pronouncement on love: ‘Falling in love stops you caring for so many other things. I don’t enjoy being overwhelmed by someone. I don’t often fall hopelessly for someone. I don’t need a woman’.

True ~ It is hard to say. Firth comes across as a passionate man intense intelligent and funny. Given a choice between Mr Darcy and the real thing I’d take Colin Firth any day.