Authors: Alison Maloney
‘Colin Firth makes a distant, smouldering Vermeer,’ commented the
Daily Express
. ‘Judy Parfitt captures the steel and cunning of his wily mother, but it is a luminous Johansson who steals the acting honours once again. She has little to say but her delicate features and expressive eyes speak volumes as she conveys the emotions of her character. It is a truly great performance.’
‘Scarlett Johansson’s central performance is a revelation,’ declared
Screen Daily
.
And Peter Bradshaw in
The Guardian,
after describing one longshot of Scarlett as ‘swooningly beautiful’, concluded, ‘
Girl With a Pearl Earring
at times surrounds itself with an art-gallery hush, but it is just so ambitious, and intriguing, and beautiful, you will find yourself immobile in front of its canvas, drinking in the details.’
Leaving Luxembourg and Vermeer behind him, Colin had more than art on his mind and 2003 was shaping up to be a big year for him. In January Renée Zellweger announced that she was ready to start eating pizza again in order to reprise her role in
Bridget Jones 2
, meaning filming could start in the
autumn, and he had four films due for release throughout the year. Foremost in his mind, as ever, was spending time at home. And the contented family man would soon have another reason to smile. At the beginning of the year, Livia announced she was expecting another baby.
W
ITH
THREE
LIGHT
comedies due to hit the cinema screens in 2003, Colin decided to revisit the darker side he’d embraced in previous works such as
Apartment Zero
. He teamed up with horror director Marc Evans, whom he had worked with on the TV drama
Master of the Moor
, for an even more sinister tale entitled
Trauma
. Ben lives in a creepy former hospital in Hackney and awakens from a coma after a car crash that killed his wife, unable to cope with the grief. Suffering from hallucinations and visions of his dead wife, his apparent descent into madness separates him from a world obsessed with the recent death of a well-known pop star and, at the same time, implicates him in her murder.
The bleak subject matter came as a welcome relief from comedy.
‘Comedy’s really depressing, actually!’ he insisted at a press conference. ‘I think it causes a huge amount of anxiety. It’s gone into popular mythology how miserable comedians so often are. I can’t explain it all, except it’s extremely difficult and getting it wrong is horrendous. You very rarely miss by a bit with comedy. If you miss you’ve fallen off the high-wire and you’re left looking like an idiot. Somehow you’ve got a lot more play with drama. All your angst can go into your work and you go home with a smile on your face!’
He credited his happy home life, and Livia’s endless tolerance, for his ability to take on the darker, more disturbing roles. ‘If I was really a genuinely tortured soul I wouldn’t be able to stand a film like
Trauma
,’ he said. ‘My life is enormously satisfying, mostly because of my relationships with my family. I am not an easy person to live with. Anybody who has to plunge himself into a new environment every day and has the anxieties and the disappointments that actors have is also going to have a fair measure of egotism and neurosis. But I have a pretty good technique for coming back smiling about it all.’
The movie shot in the spring in the Isle of Man and in London, where the Gothic Victorian Grade I-listed St Pancras Chambers provided a creepy backdrop. ‘It’s doing all the work today as far as I’m concerned,’ Colin said. As well as ghostly, abandoned buildings, Colin had to cope with an army of ants and an enormous spider, which he places in co-star Mena Suvari’s mouth. Mena later revealed she had a ‘mouth double’ for the disturbing scene.
‘I guess I could have done it, but I did my share,’ she said. ‘The spider actually touched my lips and got very close to being in my mouth.’ Mena was also covered in ants, which took a week to be washed out of her hair!
Colin suffered no phobias over his creepy-crawly co-stars and joked, ‘I’ll take the ants and the spiders over the stalkers! But I have the usual healthy preference not to be covered in ants. What would frighten me most about the themes in this film, though, is the loneliness. That’s what I found horrific,’ he told the press conference. And he revealed that his arachnid friends turned up again the following year, when he filmed
Nanny McPhee.
‘The spider makes an appearance for very different reasons,’ he explained. ‘She’s not in it actually – her sister is. But she was there in the same box. And we had to start all over again really. She didn’t remember who I was, and although I’m not arachnophobic, I’m not in a great hurry to pick them up. So while I’d got over it that one day, we weren’t able to pick up where we left off.’
Trauma
was not to be Colin’s finest hour, in terms of reception, with Jonathan Ross announcing it as ‘the worst film I’ve seen all year’ on its 2004 release, while Philip French of
The Observer
advised, ‘Send Firth a get-well-soon card and avoid the film.’
But Colin had always had the ability to move on immediately after a movie role, detaching himself from the end product as soon as his job was done. Marc Evans noted in his online diary that, while reports of heinous UK reviews were flooding over to Canada where he was attending the Toronto Film Festival, he was losing his sense of humour. ‘Luckily for me Colin Firth has arrived in town with his intact (I thought actors were meant to be the neurotic ones, not directors!?).’
‘I’ve been deformed by the rhythms that acting gives you, which make you fickle,’ Colin told
The Times
. ‘You give yourself to a job for three months as if nothing else in the
world exists. And then you drop it like a stone. As a director, you have to make that investment over a couple of years; I don’t know if I’ve got it in me.
‘The trouble is most of us choose what we want to do when we are very young, and if it goes well your success can tie you to it. I sometimes feel I’m stuck in a profession only a fourteen-year-old would choose. Even though I love it.’
In August 2003, as
What a Girl Wants
premiered in London, Colin had moved on to something altogether more important. The devoted dad had to miss the red carpet event to be by his wife’s bedside for the birth of his third son, Matteo. Once again, Colin was present at the birth, but he wasn’t sure the experience was right for every new dad. ‘It was amazing,’ he said to the
Daily Mail
. ‘It was brave of me, actually, I have to say. I’d begun to think that things had evolved to the point where it’s now de rigueur for the father to be present at the birth, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily a good thing for everyone at all.
‘I think a lot of women don’t want to be worrying that their husbands are going to faint. I found the whole birth absolutely wonderful, but I think if you’re the sort of person who can’t bear it and you get queasy and terribly nervous, you’re not going to be any comfort to your wife. So best to stay away.’
Three years later, at the launch of cousin Liz Fraser’s book
The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide
, Colin conceded that he may not have been a great help at the births, even though he was willing. ‘I was there for all three of my children but I don’t think I was of any use at all,’ he said. ‘I think some men just get in the way and might need more attention than the mother. At one time it was illegal for dads to be present – one chap chained himself to his wife in San Francisco just so he could be at the birth – but there’s a lot to be said for pacing up and down outside with a big fat cigar.’
But Colin was delighted with the newest addition to the male-dominated Firth clan. ‘It’s great, wonderful, I couldn’t be happier,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where we’re going to stop, but there are definitely times when one two-year-old can be quite enough!’
With a teenager, a toddler and a newborn, Colin had his work cut out as a dad but, at the age of forty-two, his priorities had inevitably shifted. His career would have to take second place to his family. ‘Fatherhood is a more important challenge, and it runs far deeper into what I care about most,’ he reflected to the
Daily Mail
. ‘If I had to do without acting, I’d survive. But I simply couldn’t do without my kids. And dealing with dirty nappies definitely keeps your feet firmly planted on the ground.’
To ensure the children grew up completely bilingual, Colin spoke to them in English and Livia in Italian. But with bases in three countries, Colin was still undecided about the best place for his two youngest to grow up. Attracted by the culture and lifestyle of Italy, he still put much store by the English education system and was aware that, while travel was inevitable in an actor’s life, his work was more often based in the UK than in Italy.
‘I think I probably will bring my kids up here, although I’ve got questions over whether it will be better for them,’ he told the
Irish Times
. ‘It might be better because I don’t know if I’m going to earn a living for anybody if I move to Italy, but as far as how I want them to grow up goes – which culture, which school and so on – I’m very attracted to Italy from that point of view.’
He ruled out moving the entire family to LA, despite
Will staying there. ‘I’d never move there – but not because I don’t like it. I do, and I go there fairly often to visit my eldest son. It’s more that I thrive on London. I love the city and it gives me so much stimulation, so a great deal would have to change in my life.’
Even so, the attention he received in the UK often made the actor uncomfortable. Away from the screen, Colin rarely sought the limelight and was constantly surprised by the public’s reaction to him when he was going about the most mundane tasks.
‘There I am in the supermarket queue with my basket, I see people looking at me and then they just start to laugh,’ he marvelled. ‘There was this bloke who actually got on his mobile. I could hear him saying, “Yeah, and he’s got toilet rolls.” What do they think I do?’
With the birth of his third child, Colin felt older and wiser. He had finally grown up, his career was on a successful trajectory and he was hugely contented with his home life. He was also more able to cope with the responsibility and lack of selfishness that comes with fatherhood the second time around.
‘It’s hard work but it is fantastic, particularly being a bit older now,’ he told the
Sunday Independent
(Ireland). ‘I feel halfway to being a granddad really, which in a way is a nice thing because granddads are always kinder and more twinklier than dads.
‘It’s exhausting. The moment you walk out of the house and leave that noise behind you is just fantastic. But, paradoxically, you find yourself missing them desperately within half an hour. It’s weird.’
His children, he maintained, had taught him a lot about life. ‘It’s probably to do with committing yourself to
something you can’t undo – like having a child,’ he said to the
Daily Mail.
‘I’m learning so much about myself through that, and I’m finding out that I’m not who I thought I was. Having a relationship with someone cannot be an egotistical process if it’s to survive. Children and marriage: nothing comes close to that.’
Coming from a solid family background himself, Colin recognized that his willingness to settle down was the final sign of accepting adulthood. ‘My interpretation of growing up is mostly to do with a capacity to stick with something,’ he pondered. ‘Whether it is a professional project, a mission or a marriage.’
After a wonderful summer in Italy, with twelve-year-old Will, two-year-old Luca and the newborn Matteo, Colin and Livia returned to the UK for the autumn shoot of
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
After nearly two years of talks, the cast were finally swayed by a script which was tweaked by Adam Brooks, after contributions from Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis. Colin had been on the verge of turning it down, seeing the sequel as something akin to the King’s shilling. ‘There was such inevitability about it. I felt I was recruited more than cast,’ he said. ‘But my scepticism evaporated on the first script read-through. I’m quite good at convincing myself each time that it’s the first time I’ve ever acted.’
The minute the cast were signed up, speculation over the famous Colin Firth interview conducted by Bridget in book number two was rife. There were rumours that George Clooney would have to become the object of the singleton’s starry lust and, therefore, the subject of her airheaded interrogation.
‘We knew we couldn’t use Colin in the film playing both
Darcy and himself. It would have stopped the emotional flow of the movie,’ explained director Beeban Kidron. We considered other British celebrities … but none seemed to have the same kind of fan cachet as Colin for
Pride and Prejudice
.’ In fact, the whole scene was cut and, instead, Renée’s Bridget interviewed the real Colin, late one night when most of the crew had gone home, as a DVD extra.
One of the most popular scenes of the first film had been a rather polite punch-up between Hugh Grant’s love-rat Daniel Cleaver and Colin’s solid sensible Mark Darcy. The scuffle took place in a restaurant, where they apologized for ruining some meals and even stopped midway to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a diner, before smashing through a plate-glass window on to the street.