Authors: Alison Maloney
‘He’s [Ralph’s] a wonderful actor and actually he’s doing things that I feel I’d like to be doing in some ways,’ he told
The Observer
in 1997. ‘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.’
A Thousand Acres
was, in fact, another departure for him. Shot in Illinois and LA, it was a Hollywood movie with big names – Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards – and it required his first on-screen American accent. Based on the Shakespearean play
King Lear
, it was the story of a farmer dividing his land between his three daughters while slowly descending into madness. Colin was Jess, the son from the neighbouring farm who returns after a thirteen-year absence and manages to make hay with both Michelle and Jessica.
The movie made little impact and rather paled into insignificance beside the Oscar behemoth
The English Patient
and Colin’s equally Oscar-worthy next project,
Shakespeare in Love.
Before he began working on the latter, however,
Fever Pitch
hit the screens in April 1997. And while it was never going to be an Oscar winner, it was greeted
with pleasant surprise by many critics.
‘Two of the greatest motivations in life are love and football,’ wrote Nick Fisher in
The Sun
. ‘Miraculously,
Fever Pitch
manages to bring them together, and weave a funny, touching romance around the trials and tribulations of Arsenal FC.’
In
The Sunday Times
Tom Shone was one of the few writers who understood Colin’s affinity to the middle-class Gunner fan over the upper-class characters he had so far won acclaim for. ‘If anything, Firth seems more at home surrounded by beer cans and pizza cartons than he did in the period dramas for which he is best known,’ he wrote. ‘So now we know. All Mr Darcy ever really wanted was to open his window and his lungs and shout obscenities at the top of his voice.’
After
Pride and Prejudice
,
Colin was pleased his gamble had paid off. He admitted he had deliberately shunned anything in the Darcy vein and was happy to explain why he chose to turn down the big money deals. ‘There’s a big part of this which is extremely uncomplicated,’ he told
The Observer
. ‘I want to be well thought of. I want to make money from this. I want to be prosperous. I want to be respected. Like everybody else I want to have jobs that are inspiring and enjoyable and fun. With something as extraordinary as
Pride and Prejudice
and as unexpected as a cult attached to a character you’ve played, it is so difficult to understand what it
was that you did that was apparently effective. But then you don’t want to be perceived to be trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice. So I think I probably did consciously go in all sorts of different directions.’
On 21 June 1997 Colin broke a million hearts when he married Livia in a quiet ceremony in the hilltop village of Città della Pieve. There can’t be many more romantic places on earth to tie the knot. The stunning medieval village nestles in the hills of Umbria, 50 kilometres south-east of Perugia, and boasts a beautiful thirteenth-century church, where the couple were married in front of a hundred family and friends, including his delighted parents. Livia wore a traditional white dress and both bride and groom reportedly shed a tear or two during the emotionally charged day. The overwhelmed star gushed, ‘It is the happiest day of our lives. I am the happiest man in Italy and she is the happiest girl.’
Livia’s mother revealed how the dapper actor won his in-laws over with his impeccable English manners. ‘My daughter has married an admirable English gentleman who treated his fiancée with the greatest of respect. In Rome, Colin would always bring my daughter back before 11 p.m. and he would sleep in a hotel.’ You would expect little else of the dashing Mr Darcy, after all.
After the service, the newlyweds and their guests celebrated with a picnic-style feast in the olive groves of her parents’ nearby villa. The romantic wedding went to plan and the paparazzi, much to Colin’s relief, stayed away.
Although deeply in love, and happy to pledge the rest of his life to his Italian bride, Colin later admitted that walking down the aisle was ‘the thing that’s required the most courage that I’ve done in the name of romance’. He added, ‘If you’re as scared of marriage as I was, it’s a pretty romantic thing to have done.’
As well as the flat in Hackney, Colin and Livia now shared a home in Umbria, in the province of Grosseto, near the Tyrrhenian Sea. The region is one of the most unspoiled areas in the country, with fabulous beaches and medieval villages surrounded by pine forests and high mountains. Colin had fallen for the Italian lifestyle as well as for Livia, and he loved becoming part of the Giuggioli clan. ‘What strikes me about the Italians is their attachment to family. Livia’s family is beautiful and very close. From the family is derived a sense of inner security and stability that is not found in other cultures. We English, on the other hand, are always wandering apart …’
In another interview, with the
Daily Express
, he remarked, ‘I also find it an interesting contradiction that they ignore basic driving rules but are so fastidious at the dinner table. My father-in-law is horrified when I put pasta and meat on the same plate!’
Asked what he loved about his adopted country, he replied, ‘Oh, you name it. It’s got most things covered, Italy. You can go there for the food alone. The fashion, the sculpture … it really excels in every corner of culture, other than pop music.’
Before he wed, Colin had set about learning the language and could now converse in his wife’s mother tongue. Although Livia was word perfect in English, he saw the relationship as a great excuse to learn a beautiful language and he felt he owed it to her to make an effort. ‘If you’re going to live your life with someone you should, as a mark of respect, try to learn their way of conceptualizing things,’ he told
The Independent on Sunday
. His mastery of the language is admirable, but he admits that his wife’s English is better than his Italian.
‘I studied Italian properly for a year or so, but I’ve reached a plateau,’ he revealed at the
Hope Springs
premiere. ‘If I was awarding myself grades, it would be a B-plus for effort and a C-minus for achievement. I do practise on my in-laws fairly regularly, but they’ve just come to understand that I’m simply no good at conversation – Italian conversation, that is.’
Rather than jetting off for a honeymoon, the happy couple embarked on married life with a few weeks in the beautiful Italian countryside. Marriage was set to suit both of them with Colin admitting he felt ‘much more settled and peaceful’, and Livia declaring, ten years into the union, ‘We’re a great match because I’m the ballbreaker and he’s the brains.’
The wedding finally laid to rest any speculation about his private life. Perhaps getting his off-screen life confused with this romantic screen image, some journalists had been keen to tar him with a Lothario image, fuelled by his past liaisons with leading ladies. Colin warily pointed out that he was no ‘Warren Beatty’, wandering around with a ‘bimbo on my arm’.
‘Until I met my present wife, at the age of thirty-five, you could name two girlfriends of mine,’ Colin asserted. ‘Yet there is this extraordinary image of me as a man who goes off with his leading lady all the time. In reality, any thirty-five-year-old man who can claim to have had two past lovers is hardly a philanderer.’
Back in England, the newlyweds decided to go house-hunting. The Hackney flat had served him well as a bachelor pad but was not where they wanted to settle for good, or start a family. With his career getting more promising all the time, they could afford an upward move and found a beautiful house in upmarket Barnsbury, in the heart of Islington. The secondary-modern kid from Hampshire had certainly gone
up in the world. So had his chance of being recognized by his neighbours. ‘I was sitting in my house reading and two people came past and actually looked through the window,’ he said, shortly after moving in. ‘And one of them said, “Oh look, it’s Colin Firth.” It wouldn’t have happened in Hackney.
Pride and Prejudice
didn’t have such big penetration there.’
Shortly after their return to England, Colin took off to the Highlands of Scotland to shoot the low-budget British movie
My Life So Far
. Based on the memoirs of TV executive Denis Forman, and directed by
Chariots of Fire
helmsman Hugh Hudson, it is an affectionate portrayal of an eccentric upper-class family in 1920s Britain, seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old child.
Fraser Pettigrew is growing up on a wealthy Scottish estate run with an iron rod by his disciplinarian grandmother Gamma, played by Rosemary Harris and his beautiful mother, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Colin took on the playful role of Fraser’s eccentric and lovable father, Edward, an inventor who refuses to grow up. When Fraser’s wandering uncle returns to the estate with a captivating French fiancée in tow, both father and son find themselves disturbingly attracted to her.
‘There’s a high level of play about Edward,’ explained Colin. ‘He clearly has a love for his family, adores his life, thinks it’s paradise. But his folly threatens it all. And at times you think he’s unspeakable and lacks compassion. It’s a fine line to walk. You play some of these scenes and you wonder if there’s any redemption to him at all.’
Director Hugh Hudson claims that, in the role, Colin became as boyish as Robert Norman, the young lad playing his son. ‘Colin brought a sense of youth and impetuousness and delightful eccentricity to the role. He’s a very intelligent
man and that comes off on screen – but he also played the role as a child, which is what Edward is: a child at play in the adult world.’
During one scene, filmed at Ardkinglas House in the remote, heather-strewn hills of Argyll and Bute, Colin
runs alongside a loch, out on to a jetty and jumps into the freezing-cold water. The obvious comparisons to Darcy’s famous dip didn’t escape the crew and, after several minutes in the icy water, at a temperature of 4° Celsius, his usual sense of humour deserted him. As he emerged to a round of applause from the crew, one onlooker commented
‘You’ve earned your money today, Colin.’
‘Firth nods mutely,’ recorded an on-set visitor from the
LA Times
. ‘He’s been hearing about this scene all day in series of jokes from crew members. It’s not only that Firth would have to brave the bitter cold of the icy loch; the other source of mirth is that he became a major name in Britain partly as result of another scene in which he got soaked.’
At thirty-six, this was the first time Colin had played a father and his instant family came as something of a surprise. ‘You’d think that the first time you play a dad, you should start with an infant and then work up gradually, then play the father of a seven-year-old,’ he remarked. ‘I actually started off as the father of an actress who was twenty-one.’
Having returned to London, Colin was pleased to be able to pick up a prestigious, star-studded movie with Hollywood names and a brilliant script but which was to be filmed entirely in the UK.
• • •
Tom Stoppard’s brilliant script for
Shakespeare in Love
had
been knocking about since 1993, when Julia Roberts was cast. Daniel Day-Lewis had reportedly turned down the role of the Bard, and the project was shelved. By the time it got into the hands of Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, four years later, it was hot property. There was barely an actor in Britain who wasn’t begging for a role. Director John Madden, fresh from the triumph that was the royal drama
Mrs Brown
, was hooked by the script on page one. Gwyneth Paltrow’s planned hiatus from movies was delayed so that she could play Will’s love interest, Viola, and the most sought-after British actress of all time, Judi Dench, declared she
would take any part, ‘even someone slouching in a doorway’. She ended up winning an Academy Award for her role
as Queen Elizabeth I.
Ralph Fiennes’s younger brother Joseph bagged the plum role of Shakespeare, US star Ben Affleck played celebrated actor Ned Alleyn, and the rest of the cast included Tom Wilkinson, Simon Callow, Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Antony Sher. Colin played the Earl of Wessex, the pompous suitor to the free-spirited Viola, and his future
King’s Speech
co-star, Geoffrey Rush, played the owner of the theatre where the young Shakespeare put on his shows.
The film had the young writer struggling with his romantic masterpiece – entitled
Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate’s Daughter
– until he falls for the beautiful Viola, who is already pledged to another (Wessex). Viola, in a foretaste of
Twelfth Night
, dresses as a boy to star in Will’s great plays and becomes a friend and confidante of the playwright.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as John Webster and Christopher Marlowe, crop up in the film, the latter being played by Colin’s old adversary Rupert Everett. Luckily, their characters shared no discourse and the two actors did not meet on screen, or off, during the making of the movie.