THAT TORTURED LOOK

His characters are obsessed, but Nostromo star Colin Firth remains the opposite.

The English screen’s favourite tortured neurotic, Colin Firth, fresh from committing suicide by plane crash in “The English Patient,” returns to ruin himself and everyone around him in PBS’ Nostromo.

Set in a fictional South American country called Costaguana, the story is about the evils of colonialism and the emptiness at the centre of the human heart.

“My character has an idealistic faith in the power of industry to civilize the world,” Firth said during a visit to Los Angeles.  “He revives a defunct silver mine that his father had started.  But as he succeeds with the  mine, his agenda starts to divert.  Eventually he’s willing to blow it up,  and himself too, rather than turn it over to the wrong people.  He  sacrifices his wife emotionally and everyone else.”

Such dodgy roles have become a Firth trademark because he’s more willing to be pathetic in public than any other handsome, virile, English-speaking actor around.  Even his Darcy in last year’s highly watchable A&E  version of Pride & Prejudice had more dark edges than Jane Austen imagined.

“I’m attached to playing neurotics,” say the 26 year old Firth, “but I must resist the impulse to sympathize with those creatures.  This one in Nostromo is tricky.  He’s not as simples as the old story of the idealist 
becoming a tyrant.  I don’t think I understood him or his obsession while I was playing him.  Yet now I’ve seen it, I’m as pleased with it as with anything I’ve done.”

Filming Nostromo for six months in the steamy Caribbean port of Cartagena, Colombia was no walk in the dappled spring sunshine, Firth reports,  “I’ve given up trying not to say it was horrible. 

“Wearing thick, stiff, scratchy Edwardian costumes in that heat was torture. Women fainted right and left.  Far worse was the impropriety of filming  in the middle of a ghastly shantytown.  You’re eating your tasty catered  lunch while groups of famished children wait b the garbage bins for what you might scrape in.  Having to flaunt our differences in that way was obscene.”

Firth survived Colombia to resume his tri-national lifestyle, revolving around work in London, girlfriend in Rome and son in Los Angeles.  In  L.A. to visit his 6-year-old son Will, he’s gone native – he wears sandals  and nondescript T-shirt and jeans, sports a week’s growth of beard and  allows his ginger hair to fall in wild ringlets.  Accompanying him is Livia Giuggioli, an Italian student nearly half his age whom he met on the set of Nostromo.

Long-range fatherhood, encouraged by his son’s mother Meg Tilly, is important enough that he’s in L.A. “almost all the time I’m not working,” he says.

Firth is one of the strongest survivors of what used to be called “the Britpack.”  Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day Lewis and Gary Oldman are other actors who burst into view in the mid-80’s.

Since he filmed Another Country with Everett in 1984, Firth has flirted  with international popularity without ever really achieving it.  He has consistently projected himself as a searcher, not an empire-builder. 
“I don ’t believe in careers,” he said early on.  “You can’t do each job honestly if you’re having a career.”  His view today is the same:  “I do parts for genuine reasons, not because I have a strategy.”

Such an attitude precludes capitalizing on success.  After he made Valmont, he chose to live with Tilly in near seclusion for several years. Similarly, Pride & Prejudice, which precipitated a British media rush centring on  Firth that called itself, “Darcy Fever”, hasn’t been a steppingstone to  anything.

“I don’t think it hurt me,” he allows.  “Possibly I’m being offered  more that I used to.

There’s nothing more wearying than last week’s flavour of the week.  J  B Priestly said, I’m never out of fashion because I was never in fashion.’  I ’ve always basked in that myself.”

Darcy fever never really hit home.  “You can’t walk around feeling thrilled indefinitely about even the biggest success,” he says.  “Things get  old.  I’ve done four jobs since then.  I was in Tunisia making The English Patient when Pride & Prejudice went out.  I had to take my mother’s word for it, that people liked it.  When your mother tells you something like that, you take it with a grain of salt.  The amusing part of it was that everyone around me in Tunisia was sceptical that Darcy fever even existed.”

So many actors pretend not to be seeking fame and fortune that Firth’s protestations naturally arouse scepticism.  But he has hewed to this line from the start.

All his post Pride projects reflect an unwillingness to go for the main chance.  He’s no hero in Nostromo, he’s inexplicably destructive in The English Patient and in his most recent project, a film called Fever 
Pitch, he plays a comically obsessed soccer fan.  He says, “the film is about being English, male, middle class, immature, dislocated and feeling  inadequate in relationships with women.  It’s not about soccer at all.”

Because soccer is as big in Britain as football, baseball and basketball combined in America, it’s hard not to feel strongly about one team or another.  The team Firth’s character follows is Arsenal, and Firth 
says, “Arsenal supporters, and by extension England itself, have a perverse fascination with perpetual misery.  You don’t know whether life is  awful because Arsenal is awful or if Arsenal is awful because life is awful.

England has a doomful existential acceptance of everything awful.  It’s a whole culture for losers.  Strong people are embarrassed when they  succeed. How can they hang out with their friends in a pub and laugh about the hopelessness of everything when they’re not hopeless?”

Waving his arm in the California sunshine, he concludes, “It’s such a contrast with the American attitude, which is that you can do something about whatever is wrong.  You don’t have to suffer.  Of course, America  has the opposite problem of being a dog eat dog society.  In Los Angeles, unless what you did last was a success, you’re not worth a seating in a  restaurant.”