Colin Firth (11 page)

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On his return to England, Colin settled into his bachelor pad in Hackney, east London and returned to the West End stage to star opposite Minnie Driver in the nineteenth-century Russian play
Chatsky
. The eponymous role of an angry young man returning to Moscow after a three-year absence and finding his world irreparably changed must have struck a chord with the prodigal son, just back from his own years in the wilderness. He certainly made a big impact on the critics.

The Guardian
’s Michael Billington judged Colin ‘a superbly tormented Chatsky: combining Alceste’s anger with Hamlet’s introspection, he makes you feel that the hero’s disgust springs from a genuine social and sexual idealism. He dominates a vast cast.’ Although it may have seemed a step backwards for many, Colin was pleased to be back on stage and delighted to be playing a character with such depth of emotion. Once more he was reminded of his first love, the theatre. His original ambition on leaving drama school had been to set up a company of his own but he had been diverted by the screen roles.

‘I never want to let go of the theatre, although I’m lured by films,’ he stated. ‘I’m very disturbed by what I feel to be the lack of progressive elements in acting.’

Although he was still in the business of making films, he insisted that the material for plays was often far superior to the film scripts he was offered.

‘Both film and theatre have their problems and appeal in different ways,’ he said. ‘There’s no question you’re working with better texts in theatre – the scripts are better. There never is a question of “what a great film script, we’d like to do that as well”. Once a film is done, that’s it, unless someone wants to do a re-make. You just don’t have great classic film scripts around that anyone can do.’

After opening at London’s Almeida Theatre on 11 March 1993, the play went on a sell-out six-week national tour with performances in Oxford, Richmond, Brighton, Newcastle, Malvern and Bath. In an interview with the local paper in Richmond Colin admitted that when the tour ended he had nothing on the cards. ‘I’ve no plans whatsoever, but I hope at the end of the six-week tour there will be something,’ he explained. But he also welcomed the opportunity to spend some time with Will, who he couldn’t see during the long run of the play, adding, ‘I have a son and I like to spend as much time with him as possible.’

An extended break did follow, during which time Colin flew to LA as often as possible to see Will, as well as bringing him over to England to spend time with the family. The relationship with Meg remained friendly, although he rarely returned to the Canadian home they had once shared.

Two home-grown TV dramas were next on the agenda, in 1994. In the first,
Master of the Moor
, Colin was cast against type as a slightly odd furniture restorer who becomes a murder suspect after discovering a woman’s body on his local moors. The three-part drama, filmed on Dartmoor, was based on the Ruth Rendell mystery and Colin’s turn – the nerdy, anorak-wearing Stephen, abandoned by his mother as a boy and unable to consummate his own marriage after four years – was far from the dashing romantic leads of
Valmont
and
The
Hour of the Pig
or the courageous heroes of
Tumbledown
and
Hostages.
But it reflected the one common denominator in the majority of roles that Colin has been drawn to throughout his career – that of the truly damaged individual. He is, he reflected in 2011, attracted by the feelings that men try to hide. ‘Violence, hysteria, fear, paranoia, weakness, cowardice, which I think everybody lives with, but they tend
to be shameful emotions,’ he said. ‘I think it’s important to reflect them. I think also that the story about the bloke who’s absolutely fine isn’t really a story. And so the further you can go with the problems the more the story is there. It’s not really a question of how fucked up I can make this person. It’s more to do with how high I can make the stakes. How big can I make the obstacles? I do believe the drama is more interesting if the obstacles are bigger.’

From there, he moved on to the TV adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s
The Deep Blue Sea
to play a former RAF pilot whose passionate affair with a married woman leads to the end of her marriage. When the philandering flying ace loses interest in his desperate lover, played by Penelope Wilton, she attempts to commit suicide.

A small part in
A Circle of Friends
reunited Colin with Pat O’Connor, his director from
A Month in the Country
, and his
Chatsky
co-star Minnie Driver. Set in Ireland, it’s the gentle tale of a group of young students in the fifties and Colin played the arrogant son of a wealthy landowner who beds the bewitching Nan Mahon, played by Saffron Burrows, leaving her pregnant and leading to her tricking another man, played by Chris O’Donnell, into marriage.

In the role of Simon Westward, Colin got to brush up on his horse-riding skills and his seduction technique. Both were to come in handy for the life-changing role that was about to come his way.

W
HEN
PRODUCER
S
UE
Birtwistle finally got the green light to film a new adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
,
after eight years working on the project, she already had her Mr Darcy in mind. She had worked with Colin Firth on
Dutch Girls
some ten years before and her husband, Richard Eyre, had directed him in
Tumbledown.
Sue was convinced that he had all the qualities needed to play the smouldering, taciturn landowner – but it seems she was the only one who was.

‘I knew he’d be perfect. But no one agreed with me – least of all Colin Firth himself!’ she told
The Guardian.
‘He thought Jane Austen was just girly stuff and didn’t want to do a classic drama. He didn’t know Darcy was such a famous character in English literature and was amazed at people’s reactions when he said he was considering the part – comments like wasn’t Darcy supposed to be sexy and Olivier played it and he couldn’t do it better.’

Having finally convinced the bigwigs at the BBC, Sue was heartbroken to receive a call from Colin saying he couldn’t see himself in Darcy’s riding breeches and he was off to LA any minute. In fact, he was seriously considering the very different role of a drag queen in the movie version of
Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

‘I was cast down in gloom,’ recalled Sue. ‘I wrote a long letter and couriered it and the script to Colin, urging him to read it on the plane. I waited a whole day in agony, with my fingers crossed, hoping that he would read it and reconsider. Finally he phoned – and claimed his part.’

All six scripts arrived on his doorstep at a time when he was sick of reading bad scripts and felt he really didn’t want to plough through another one for a drama he wasn’t keen on. ‘Everything seemed unreadable, and so the last thing I thought I needed was six episodes of a BBC costume drama against which I had a prejudice,’ he said later. ‘I was casting my mind back to the 1970s, when it was the last thing in the world I watched on television. I remembered it as stiff – stiff acting, stiff adaptations.’

Colin opened the envelope with some trepidation. During his teen years lost in Sartre and Camus, he had avoided reading the standard school texts of Austen and assumed them to be ‘girls’ stuff’. Still finding his feet in the film industry, he was also loath to commit himself to a project which would tie him to the UK for six months. By page 4 of Andrew Davies’s imaginative and sensual dramatization, however, he was hooked.

‘It was remarkable,’ he recalled in Sue’s book
The Making of Pride and Prejudice.
‘I didn’t want to go out until it was finished. I don’t think any script has ever fired me up so much, just in the basic romantic story terms.’

Even so, Colin was hesitant. While he had fallen in love with the story, he was having a great deal of trouble imagining himself as the leading man. He remembered one theatre review, which had cruelly asserted that ‘Colin Firth doesn’t have enough romantic charisma to light a 50-watt bulb’. He asked family and friends and they were little help. Brother Jonathan’s incredulous, ‘Darcy? Isn’t he supposed to be sexy?’ was not the only off-putting remark. Others harked back to Laurence Olivier’s performance in the 1940 film opposite Greer Garson, and told him ‘no one else could ever play the part’. Colin also pointed out that the book is written from Elizabeth’s point of view and therefore Darcy remains an enigma until the end and it is difficult to play a part that is based on everyone else’s image of him. ‘The only way to do it is to be Darcy already. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see Darcy.’

In the end it was Sue Birtwistle’s unerring faith that he was the only man for the job that swayed him. After a meeting, in which she inadvertently revealed the ending before he’d had a chance to read the final episode, he reread the whole thing and thought some more. ‘I agonized and imagined myself doing it, and then tested the notion of not doing it and it occurred to me that I would feel rather bereaved if I turned it down.’

As an established actor, Colin was not asked to do a screen test or audition. Having taken the decision to sign on the dotted line, the next step was the read-through, where he would meet his co-stars. Jennifer Ehle had been chosen from a wealth of hopefuls to play his love interest, Elizabeth Bennet, Alison Steadman would play her mother, Mrs Bennet, while the dainty shoes of her four sisters would be played by Susannah Harker, Julia Sawalha, Lucy Briers and Polly Maberly. The entire cast gathered in the BBC rehearsal rooms two weeks before filming and most, including Colin, were wracked with nerves.

Crispin Bonham Carter, who was cast as Darcy’s friend Charles Bingley, recalled going into the gents’ toilets and finding Colin ‘groaning aloud in agony, which was no help at all’. Consummate professional Alison Steadman soon put everyone at ease by launching into a spirited performance as the common but ambitious harridan Mrs Bennet. This broke the ice between the assembled company, who rounded off the evening with chilled white wine and nibbles, as they got further acquainted. A week’s rehearsal followed, at the insistence of director Simon Langton, where any glitches in the script could be ironed out and the first scenes to be shot were gone through. As the shoot is out of order, Darcy would be declaring his love for Elizabeth before the scene when they met was shot.

‘There was definitely a lot of pressure on us,’ he told
The Independent
. ‘It was a five-month shoot and that was in the third week. It was one of the first major dialogue scenes we had to do. It was very intimidating for that reason, and I spent the weekend doing a hell of a lot of homework on that particular scene just before we did it. I remember people trying to take the pressure off it. They were going round saying, “Don’t worry about Scene 47. It’s just like any other. Just treat it like any old scene.” Of course it all made it worse.’

Before filming began, Darcy’s look had to be perfect and make-up designer Caroline Noble admits her first reaction to Colin was dismay. Whereas the Jane Austen hero is dark and brooding, he turned up with fair hair, cut short, and a moustache he had grown for another part. ‘I think I actually said, “Oh God!” Because I was surprised,’ said Caroline.
‘Simon thought he’d arrived “looking like an unmade bed”. But Colin was open to all suggestions.’ At their request, he allowed his naturally curly hair to grown out in the weeks leading up to filming and it was then dyed a dark brown. His eyebrows and lashes were also dyed to complete the look. The dark look was accentuated by the deep greens and grey of the costume and the early sketches of the outline show the riding breeches and knee-length boots that would come to define the character.

Five months of filming began in a field in Grantham in June. As the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy is often away attending to business in the Austen novel, Colin had big breaks between his stints on the shoot, a fact that unsettled him. Although he was the leading man, the story revolves very much around the five Bennet girls and their mother’s attempts to marry them off, and Colin admits that his old feelings of being an outsider crept in. ‘I came down to location and all these other people were there, whom I didn’t know at all, doing another film which seemed to be about a family of girls … It did interfere tremendously, I think, with my sense of being part of it.’

He did form a tight bond with some of his male co-stars over a shared love of music. During the evenings together, when raffles, quiz nights and boules competitions kept the cast amused, Adrian Lukis, David Bamber and Colin would bring out their guitars and practise long into the night.

Filming took place in several rural counties, including Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire. For Netherfield, the home of Charles Bingley, who falls for Elizabeth’s older sister Jane, Edgecote Hall in Banbury was chosen. The beautiful stately home of Lyme Park in Cheshire doubled as Darcy’s palatial home. Due to a change
of management, however, only exterior shots could be shot there and the interiors of his home were filmed at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. This not only created a split shoot, meaning the cast and crew had to travel between the two locations, sometimes to finish the same scene, but it also meant that, if the weather turned, it wasn’t so easy to switch to shooting interior shots instead.

The country house of Lyme Park was built in the 1720s and nestles in a deer park of 1,359 acres on the Derbyshire–Cheshire border. Now owned by the National Trust, it was chosen as the perfect home for Darcy because, as a man on ‘ten thousand a year’, he would have the most impressive estate. It was here that the famous lake scene, which sees Darcy emerge in his dripping shirt after taking a dip, was filmed.