BEWARE THE INSIDIOUS GRIP OF DARCY FEVER

A few days after the last episode of Pride and Prejudice was broadcast on BBC in November, Colin Firth returned to London at the height of what British newspapers had dubbed Darcy fever. For three days the Man Who Was Darcy walked through the crowded streets, eager to see if anyone recognized him.

Of course, no one saw in the gangly, unpreposssessing Mr. Firth the smoldering and heart-wrenching Mr. Darcy he had once created out of his strangely neutral face. The world passed by. Finally, an old school friend insisted on taking Mr. Firth back to his office where, forewarned, women gathered about him in awe. 

"I was so embarrassed," Mr. Firth recalled. "I was frozen. I felt as if I'd lost my whole personality." His friend told him in response, "Colin, you never had any."

As Mr. Firth, 35, guffaws at this joke that he tells on himself, there is a moment of recognition. It is as if in this one careless story he has revealed the two sides of his character that have both dogged and blessed his remarkable career: absolute confidence in the power of his work coexisting with a pronounced ambivalence about embracing success.

Tonight at eight, Mr. Firth gets another chance to test his ardor and that of his audience, when Pride and Prejudice begins its American run on three successive nights on the A&E network, amid a tidal wave of Austeniana on file alone: Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, even Clueless (Emma updated).

In England, Price and Prejudice attracted ten million viewers each week. Whether Darcy fever strikes the American romantic imagination with the same intensity may depend on Mr. Firth's impact in the first of the three parts, when he has little to do but smolder handsomely. Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth and Alison Steadman as the awful Mrs. Bennet monopolize the screen, with Susannah Harker (Masterpiece Theater's House of Cards) as Jane and Julia Sawalha (Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous) as Lydia. The production was adapted by Andrew Davies, who wrote the scripts for the PBS series House of Cards and Middlemarch.
 

Colin Firth's performances have always provoked the question of whether he is or will be a star. He is one of the few British actors who has never been out of work since he left drama school. Four performances as Hamlet at the Drama Center (an explosive and controversial school in London, not unlike the early Actors Studio) created enough buzz in the small, closed world of London theater for him to be cast at once in Another Country in the West End and then in the film version of the play.

His film portrayal of Judd - the prickly, driven Communist schoolboy in an established private school - encapsulated everything about his acting style that was to come: compressed, full of understated force and density, and deeply touching in its pivotal scheme of transformation as the walled-in Judd responds to human sympathy. The moment did not rely on words. Mr. Firth's deep, resonant voice never changed key. His body barely moved. His face remained blank: it was all in his eyes.

Therein lies the reason for Mr. Firth's unnoticed walk through the West End of London weeks ago: it was as simple as his never looking anyone in the eye. As he averts his eyes, all expression vanishes behind that pleasant mask.

In the Tunisian desert, on the set of The English Patient, based on the Michael Ondaatje novel that won the Booker Prize in 1992, Mr. Firth is taking a break from his role as Geoffrey Clinton, the catalyst of the film's tragedy. The producer is Saul Zaentz, the 73-year-old independent film maker who has 13 Oscars to his credit: the director is Anthony Minghella. It is hard at first for the visitor to catch the actor's eye. He chats politely in a beautifully controlled voice (remainders here of a whole school of British actors, notably Paul Scofield). It was in part his voice that won all those hearts in gray, cold Britain as Darcy came to confess his love for Miss Elizabeth Bennett.

At 25, he starred in A Month in the Country, a film about a World War I veteran whose life was crushed before flowering by the experience of that slaughter and who fell in love with a country vicar's wife (Natasha Richardson). It is one of the roles of which he is proudest, and in true English fashion he credits the director, Pat O'Connor ("I never had to display for him").

The question remains: Is he, or could he be a "star"? Mr. Firth was 27 when he starred in his first big film, Milos Forman's Valmont, which proved unsuccessful with critics and with moviegoers.

"No, honestly," he said reluctantly, "I can say I didn't know enough to be disappointed."

But even before Valmont  came out, Annette Bening, his co-star, was in Hollywood seizing the moment, creating her opportunities. Mr. Firth, by contrast, withdrew to the haven of a private world, a long relationship, now ended, with his other co-star, Meg Tilly, by whom he had a son. The boy, who is now 5 years old, is still very much at the center of his life.

Mr. Firth is not entirely conventional. He is one of three children of middle-class parents, teachers in Africa who returned to England when he was four. Asked about his past, Mr. Firth talks of kind and worthy parents, of a home short of money but filled with books and intellectual curiosity. The British press, however, has expressed astonishment that this embodiment of the English aristocratic oligarchy in the early nineteenth century went to a large, tough school near his home in Hampshire. Articles about him have concentrated on the rough local accent he grew up with, the scrum of playground fights and his poor showing as a student.

He learned to hide his feelings and take on the rough local accent when young. Mr. Firth recalls that he read The Odyssey for himself at home but would not deliver his homework at school nor even always both to attend. He did so badly in his final exams that he had to retake English.

"The morning of retaking my exam," Mr. Firth said, "I thought, 'Really, life's too short.' I simply couldn't be bothered to go."

A whole school of English acting has come from just such conflict: the instinct to withdraw from competition, the refusal to deliver the expected. It does not make for stardom on a global scale, but it has produced many knights of the British theater, oddballs all, with the manners and camouflage of "regular chaps."

It is no coincidence that Mr. Firth's time at the National Youth Theater was not much more successful.

"I was told I would be a 'useful Shakespearean actor,'" he said, following with another guffaw. "It was better than I'd expected. I was perceived as terribly ordinary, and I thought of myself as terribly ordinary." Mr. Firth flourished instead at the Drama Center, a place that was confrontational, physical, full of ideals of struggle and change. There he was recognized, taught that "if you're under the spell of something, you can cast a spell."

That lesson has carried him through theater ("I did Schnitzler's Lonely Road with Anthony Hopkins. I learned so much from him. He gave me everything, he listened intensely--and yet it was him everyone looked at"), through film (the stirring Advocate last year) and through television (most notably in Tumbledown, a harrowing story of a soldier shot in the Falklands war).

"Tumbledown," he says, changed his career. "Before that I was beginning to slip into a lot of callow youths," said Mr. Firth. "If I've got a rather neutral face, it doesn't make much sense to put me in rather neutral roles."

The success of Darcy makes no sense to Mr. Firth, even frightens him. At one point he suggested it was all Jane Austen, at another the makeup and hair dye. Perhaps it was the actor's stillness, the years of hiding and of condensing everything, that burns through Darcy's passionate journey into life.

"If you're trying to contain at all costs what's going on, that produces stillness," Mr. Firth agrees. "Darcy is a man who wants his position and his intellect to be enough, and then he can't sleep at night because of his desire."

"I thought to myself: 'This is where he wants to go across the room and punch someone. This is where he wants to kiss her. This is where he wants sex with her right now.' I'd imagine a man doing it all, and then not doing any of it. That's all I did."