FAN FATALE

Gorgeous, pouting Colin Firth - chest rippling Mr Darcy to a nation of smitten women - is about to appear as football obsessed Mr Bloke in the film version of Fever Pitch. Will the legions he once charmed still adore him. 

And will he look good in Arsenal Boxer shorts as a translucent Regency shirt?

THE LAST TIME I interviewed Colin Firth I had to explain who he was; it was that long ago. In 1992, Firth was 31 and had only newly graduated from his career's extremely promising phase. After a mild set-back as the lead in Valmont, Milos Forman's largely ignored version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the actor seemed to be entering a period of graft and consolidation. He struck me as thoughtful, wholesome and unglamorous, another freckly gingerhead, and a Colin for heaven's sake - although I should have heard alarm bells when the press officer wondered if he could be persuaded to sit on her lap for the interview. When I meet him for lunch this time around, Firth is ludicrously famous. If Sean Connery only truly became Sean Connery when he played James Bond, Colin Firth is now the iconic Colin Firth thanks to a succession of chill Sunday nights two autumns ago during which 13 million of us gaped as he played Mr Darcy in Pride and prejudice. The papers immediately declared Firth the most fancied man in Britain, and were right. Bridget Jones, the fictional, bimbo columnist of the Independent, has been on about Darcy ever since. When I tell an otherwise sophisticated young woman on a train whom I am writing about, her body visibly ripples with pleasure and envy. Gift-horse inspectors scrutinise his looks and conclude they are too good to be true.

I foresee how his casting as the lead in Fever Pitch will be criticised. The film, based loosely on Nick Hornby's best-selling memoirs, is the story of a romantic triangle between a man, a woman and a football club, in which Paul and Sarah's romance is jeopardised by Paul's obsession with Arsenal. But whereas Sarah is played by the stern and plausible-looking Ruth Gemmell, Firth cannot help but make Paul so impossibly charming you wonder what Sarah has to complain about. Now, if Paul had looked a bit more like the loveable but short, bald and big-eared Hornby...There is a similar niggle about Firth's role as the cuckolded officer in the English Patient. No woman, I have heard it said would leave Firth for Ralph Fiennes, whose khaki shorts reveal legs on the spindly side.'I was very much the outsider in that film,' Firth says when we sit down and he orders a glass of wine he doesn't drink. '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 [Kristin Scott Thomas] and this other bloke, and I eventually lose her to Ralph Fiennes - - I am never going to let that happen again.' And I doubt any future director will allow it to happen either. But this slight narrowing of acting range is only one of the problems Mr Darcy has brought Firth.  Friends he never knew he had have declared themselves. 

Unwanted career advice blitzes him. Speculation about his personal life has become intense and at times censorious. 'If you are a celebrity,' Firth says, 'there is this immediate suspicion of everything you do. It is not
universal, but there are those who think you are therefore calculating about everything you do in your life.'

Suspicion even falls on your girlfriends. His current partner, Livia Giuggioli, a producer's assistant he met shooting the BBC's dramatisation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, has been accused by the press of being impervious to his fame.  'It is so unfair,' Firth says, 'and, also, the poor girl met me before the Darcy thing happened and she hadn't heard of me. 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.'

The 'stuff' that happened can be reduced to a single scene in Pride and Prejudice, the one in which Darcy dived fully clothed into his estate'," ornamental lake and emerged in a state of some blousoned transparency. It seems that the adaptor, Andrew Davies, envisioned something even racier. 'As Andrew had written it, I was supposed to be naked when I dived,' Firth reveals. But Firth drew the line at that? 'I didn't really want to do it naked and the BBC wouldn't get me to do that anyway. I mean, they couldn't have shot it and preserved BBC decency. And the alternative was underpants and I'd rather have done it naked than in underpants. And then, the other point was, nobody wore underpants in those days.' What did they wear? 'I think they used their shirts. They apparently had these very long shirts and just sort of put them underneath like nappies, you know.' Sounds complicated for peeing, but maybe not.'So then there was a move to create a sort of fantasy impression of Regency underpants. I went for a fitting for these things that looked a bit like a sailor's pantaloons. They were knee-length, and I looked awful in them and basically the designer vetoed that. It was my idea to do it fully dressed simply because I thought if you're supposed to show a moment of impetuous spontaneity, the next best thing to stripping off is just to go in dressed.'

And it ended up with a newspaper offering the shirt as a prize? 'Yes, Iknow,' says Firth, not utterly amused, 'but the other thing was, the underwater sequence was shot in a tank in Ealing, and I hit my nose so hard on a steel girder at the end of the tank that we couldn't film the next day. With so much gushing blood and swelling, nobody was thinking, "This is really going to get them going".

So something must have happened in the editing room. "Something did". I honestly think so," he says and admits that he fears he may have misappropriated Darcy (which is daft; he was splendid, even on dry land). Firth's first instinct is modesty, about his looks and his talent. When I mention Circle of Friends, an Irish movie he made in 1994, in which he was rendered virtually unrecognisable by a moustache, Firth explains: "I am generally so non descript that it always seems that they want to do something with me, to define me a little bit. " He points out when we eat our lunch without his being recognised and the one moment I think he is going to be asked for his autograph, it turns out the waitress has come to admonish him for smoking. As for his acting , he insists that he has never been any better or worse than what is written on the page". But this cannot go unchallenged. Rewatching Tumbledown, the 1988, real life drama about a wounded Falklands guardsman, I was impressed by how detailed his impression was not only of suffering but of the military ethic tensing under disillusionment. 

Nevertheless when it came out he was physically ill with disappointment watching  all his "familiar facial gestures". And lest we imagine Firth is necessarily at home among the officer classes he so often plays , let us remember that he failed the 11 plus went to a Winchester secondary modern rather than Winchester and that his family live for a period in a small council house in Billericay. With Fever Pitch, The English Patient and the forthcoming A Thousand Acres, co-starring Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, this is surely the year we should celebrate Firth's ability above his looks. But this is not to deny that his career, following his professional debut in both the West End and movie versions of Another Country, has had its puzzling lows. I could mention Femme Fatale from 1990, in which he plays a man who discovers his wife is a succubus. I would ask you to consider Apartment Zero in 1988, about two weird roommates in downtown Buenos Aires, which he defends as a cult success. If it were generally available on video, I would offer you Playmaker from 1994, in which Firth plays a power-tripping drama coach. Firth said yes to these, but turned down the Jack Nicholson part in a remake of The Shining. 

While Nick Hornby praises Firth for reading scripts for literary merit rather than with a tape-measure, others regard his career choices as bizarre. Compare him, say, to his Hollywood-bankable contemporary Ralph Fiennes. 'He's a wonderful actor and actually he's doing things that I feel I'd like to be doing in some ways,' Firth admits. 'It's a good example. But it's only a passing sensation because, quite honestly, I've been so involved with Fever Pitch that I wouldn't have swapped it for whatever he's doing. I wouldn't have swapped A Thousand Acres for whatever he's doing. It's just sometimes I look at some people and I think, "Now, this is a person who's judged very well." I think there's a lot of sort of paradoxical things going on at the same time, a swing between "I can do anything" and "I'm a charlatan and I shouldn't be doing this job at all. I'm bluffing. I'm going to get found out." And I find that self-doubt quite common with actors, but coexisting with an extreme confidence, a sense of injustice that anybody else has got a better career.'

This lack of a game plan - it isn't part of a general wariness about committing himself to a profession he once said he intended to be out of by the time he was 40?

'It might be. It might be just a big cop-out, but I don't think so because I don't think it's any more secure to try and create a game plan for yourself I think it's just naive.' Commitment-phobia is the most commonly diagnosed condition of the unmarried heterosexual male aged 36, but Firth was footloose from birth. He spent his first four years of life in Nigeria, where his parents were teaching, and another year in St. Louis. His parents returned to live in Essex, and then settled in Winchester. His adult life has repeated this restless pattern. Filming Valmont in 1988, he fell in love with the (former) actress Meg Tilly and moved back with her to Canada, where they had a son, Will, who is now five. But after six years, the relationship petered out, amicably he says, and he returned to live in a modest flat in Hackney, east London. As well as the frequent visits to Canada and now Santa Monica, California, which is where Meg and Will have moved, Firth also earns air miles as a frequent flyer to Rome, where Livia lives. And let us not forget Firth's 'brief fling' with Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet.

'It wasn't at all a brief fling,' says Firth. 'I've never mentioned this to any member of the press but I don't see why I shouldn't now, just to clear it up. It was written about as a brief location fling. Jennifer Ehle and I were together for almost a year. I had known her for a few years a little bit and the relationship began when we were working together and lasted until - well, it was all over by the time Pride and Prejudice came out.'

There were reports that they found the final Darcy Elizabeth kiss difficult to take seriously. 'No, that was one take. We were losing the light. There was no giggling. Why would we giggle? No, we were involved with each other, but it's perfectly simple to do a chaste little matrimonial kiss.'

But audiences are always going to be fascinated by location romances. On the one hand, we are assured sex scenes are very chaste to act in; on the other, Bacall and Bogart, Hepburn and Tracy, Burton and Taylor... And wasn't Meg Tilly De Valmont's seducee in Valmont? 'Actually,' he says, 'in both the cases I don't feel that the relationships were products of acting out the scenes. I have found it very difficult to do a love scene with an actress that I'm involved with. That was particularly the case with Meg; we found it very, very hard to make use of our relationship on the screen. You can feel invaded, you know, with half the crew around. The last thing you're going to do is giggle and do the take so many times you get bruised lips.' He does realise his sex life is a matter of enormous interest, I suppose. The quote from the files that is always being repeated in profiles is: 'Falling in love stops you from 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 around.' "If I said that, I've rather lived to regret it,' he says. 'I mean, I don't think love is pure egoism don't really believe that at all. I mean, there's some truth in it but it's a terribly simplistic, cynical thing to say.'

When I last saw him, it was to promote Hostages, a drama- documentary in which he played John McCarthy. He told me that McCarthy's incarceration in Beirut had a metaphorical meaning for him. 'When you dig a bit,' he told me, 'people compare their experiences to being a hostage: the traps imposed on us by our own fears of daring, of change, of losing people, our careers, or our security... I'm constantly going through life wondering what my traps are... both in my career and personal life.' At the time, he was emerging from his relationship with Tilly. Perhaps now that he is speaking more warmly of love, he is contemplating settling down?

'I'm beginning to find it an attractive idea. I mean, not just beginning, actually; it's been growing on me for a while. I used to romanticise the itinerant, artistic life, full of heartache and new experiences, and I've probably courted that, cultivated it in myself, made it seem rather Bohemian and fascinating. I don't know if I can take it much more. I really feel a bit too old. I would like to feel I had a more consistent base for myself.' Did Fever Pitch speak to him - the idea of the eternal schoolboy finally being persuaded to grow up by a good woman? 'Oh yes. Even the attitude the character has about, you know, "This relationship is going to last about a week. I really ought to buckle down and settle. It's time to grow up. You can only spend so much time playing Subbuteo. " That's definitely in me somewhere.'You see, Nick [Hornby], in so far as it's his story - and I've never really pried that much as to how much of this story is autobiographical - - but, you know, Nick strikes me as someone who has done it all, who has succeeded in those aims. He seems to have taken a very mature approach to his life.'

He says all this, but he also says that he asked not to he considered for the part of Mr Knightley in Andrew Davies version of EMMA because "Knightley left behind all the vanities and fripperies of youth - and I haven't despite being old enough to have done so."

So I am afraid , gentle reader , I cannot plainly answer your enquiry: is Colin Firth now a good bet for marriage? He says he intends to fly Livia from Rome to watch Arsenal play, but I don't get the impression he is about to buy her a season ticket. She is quite a bit younger than him. As we take coffee at the bar and Firth lights a cigarette , I ask what it's like going out with a younger woman. "Well ," he says "until recently, it had never happened before. Until Jennifer I think everyone I had gone out with had been older than me. I don't really feel conscious of Livia being younger. In terms of maturity , it is like being with an older woman and she is not so much younger as papers like the daily Express think. They think she is 22 and she is 27. It is only nine years, so it is not a huge gap. She is so much more mature than I am. She is settled and rooted. And she is not an actress for a start, so she is nearly as f***ed up as I am".

He is not really f***ed up, is he?

"I don't know", he muses, "It is difficult to assess your own f***ed upness".

It is so, but he has the consolation of knowing there is a nation of women out there willing to give their best shot at straightening him out.