Colin Firth (7 page)

Keen to learn from the best, Colin was excited about working with great actors like Anthony Hopkins and treated each new job as an opportunity to hone his craft.

In his book
The Half
, a study of actors and actresses in the thirty minutes before they go on stage, theatrical photographer Simon Annand recalled: ‘He was starring with Anthony Hopkins, who was just back from America. I think Firth had been in a couple of things, including
Another Country
. He wasn’t exactly new to the stage, but being at the Old Vic and with Anthony Hopkins, he regarded every day as like a masterclass. You could tell even then that he was a star. He had a charisma about him.’

Colin was fascinated by his Welsh co-star and commented, ‘I learned so much from him. He gave me everything, he listened intensely, and yet it was him everyone looked at.’

He had been working non-stop since leaving drama school and had enjoyed an enviable variety of roles and legendary co-stars. But he realized the fragility of the business.
‘Jobs float around like bubbles,’ he remarked. ‘They might pop any minute.’

Yet Colin’s next offer was so substantial he baulked at the commitment.
Lost Empires
was a seven-part TV series set in the music halls of Britain, and would take a year to film. Worried it would take him away from other potential projects for too long, Colin was on the verge of turning it down when he read the original novel by J.B. Priestley, and found he couldn’t stop reading.

‘
Lost Empires
took a solid year,’ he told the
LA Times
in 1987. ‘Not on and off – more like, on and on. I’d never toured in a repertory company, so making this was a little like rep for me – and also a little like a life sentence.’

Then there was the small matter of the ‘supporting’ cast, a daunting list that included Laurence Olivier, Pamela Stephenson and Brian Glover. ‘It’s an impressive line-up,’ admits Colin. ‘So I had quite a turn when I read something about me heading the cast.’

Producer June Howson, who chose him from 150 hopefuls at the auditions, was grateful he changed his mind. ‘I knew Colin was right as soon as he read it for me,’ she says. ‘He has a commanding quality.’

Playing a young Yorkshire lad taken on to tour the halls as an assistant to his magician uncle, Colin could at least ditch the cut-glass accent that had landed him the upper-class tag in previous roles. His character, Richard Herncastle, is a wide-eyed innocent in a stereotypical flat cap who is intrigued and informed by the colourful and eccentric folk he meets while endlessly touring the Empire theatres with his uncle’s famous vanishing act. The year is 1913 and the looming war means magician’s assistant Richard may perform a vanishing act of his own. The falling popularity of the halls has led to desperation and paranoia among the entertainers, including one brief but memorable turn by Laurence Olivier as a comedian who has lost his audience and is now losing his marbles. Surrounded by flamboyant characters, Colin found it hard to make the central character of Richard stand out.

‘Herncastle was a tough nut to crack,’ he said. ‘Playing Hamlet was easier. With Hamlet there are all sorts of opportunities to be funny, exciting, dramatic. But Richard is the narrator, the observer. He’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland. You can’t make her exciting, either. You just have to give him as much shape and depth as you possibly can.’

Much of the year was spent in Manchester where Alan Grint, the series’ director, lived. With a budget of £3.4 million, less than £500,000 for each hourly episode, there was not a great deal of cash to spare on hotel bills, location costs and overnight allowances, so he decided to stay as close to home as possible. Even the First World War trenches were not far away.

‘Luckily enough, there are still plenty of cinemas around the north-west which used to be main circuit theatres, and since they started conserving these places a few years back you can generally find a hall in reasonable nick,’ Alan explained. ‘As for the scenes in the trenches, we went to a place near Alderley Edge in Cheshire and got the local farmers to dig us some trenches with their tractors.’

The character’s most interesting moments include his relationships with four different women in the company, from his uncle’s mistreated mistress to a worldly-wise comic’s assistant intent on bedding him.

Although there was no big romance in Colin’s life at the time, the twenty-six-year-old had long since lost his shyness around the opposite sex. Richard, he declared to the
LA Times
, ‘hasn’t a clue about women. I have a certain amount of confidence in the sound of my own voice. I don’t melt and blush very easily.’

The miniseries was a moderate hit on its release in 1986 and was nominated for six BAFTA awards, although Colin himself missed out on a nomination. Sir Laurence was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actor gong at the Emmys the following year, when the series was screened in the States.

As
Lost Empires
sent young Richard off to the unknown territories of the First World War, Colin’s next big role would bring him home from it. Three years on from
Another Country
,
Colin was about to get his next ‘big break’ as a returning soldier struggling to come to terms with his experiences in the trenches in
A Month in the Country.

C
olin was cast alongsite another rising star in
A Month in the Country
, Kenneth Branagh, whom he had first met during the West End run of
Another Country
. Set in Yorkshire during an idyllic summer just after the Great War, it is the story of two young men traumatized by their experiences in the trenches. Colin’s Tom Birkin, who is working to restore a fresco in the village church and living in the belfry, has been left with a neurotic stammer, providing an early foretaste of Colin’s Oscar-winning performance to come. Kenneth’s character James Moon is a decorated soldier whose mental scars are buried deeper in his psyche. As the pair grow closer, Birkin falls for the unattainable and beautiful vicar’s wife, played by Natasha Richardson, and Moon falls for the equally unattainable Birkin.

Director Pat O’Connor had tried to get the project off the ground in the spring, with Kenneth already on board, but the money had fallen through. When he finally got the
financing in place and secured Colin for the August shoot, Kenneth was attempting to raise some cash for his stage production of
Romeo and Juliet
, which was set to coincide with the filming dates.

The director was determined to hold on to his two leads so he compressed Kenneth’s scenes to reduce the days he would be needed on set, and arranged for him to leave the shoot at four o’clock in the afternoon and to be driven back to London to perform at the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith. Then he rang Kenneth’s agent, Pat Marmont, with the new offer.

‘I asked Pat what the money was like,’ recalled Kenneth in his autobiography. ‘She told me, and I thought of the budget for
Romeo and Juliet
. Tell them I’ll ride to the set on a bike, just send the cheque …’

Getting up at the crack of dawn, after treading the boards the night before, was not an easy task but Kenneth found his co-star more than willing to help. ‘The 6 a.m. drive to location for filming was tough,’ he wrote. ‘Pat O’Connor and Colin Firth, who played the leading role in
A Month in the Country
, made the filming itself most fulfilling. Colin is a supremely generous actor and he was very kind when it came to allowing my shots to be taken first in order to let me get to the theatre at the end of the day.’

Before taking on the role of Birkin, Colin immersed himself in extensive research, studying poems, letters, diaries and first-hand accounts from veterans of the First World War. ‘The trauma of a man who has been through the battles of Ypres is quite inconceivable to anyone who was not himself “over there”, let alone to an Englishman of my generation (twenty-six),’ he wrote in a
Harpers & Queen
article in May 1987. ‘So I was dealing with something quite outside my ken.’

He added that he was so engrossed in the character and the research that it came as a shock when he was finally on set, among the props and cameras, and realized he had a job to do ‘with practical limitations and all the usual absurdities: cardboard gravestones, a mute violin, a genuine medieval wall-painting covered over to make way for the pretend one, all being treated with great professional sobriety’.

The production had thirty-one days of shooting, throughout the whole of August 1986, and a budget of £1 million. Buckinghamshire stood in for Yorkshire for most of the shoot and it was essential for the effectiveness of the plot that the dark drama of the soul was played out in brilliant sunshine. But the film-makers weren’t banking on the vagaries of the English weather.

‘The shooting started with remarkable abruptness on the first day. And so did a cataract of obstacles,’ wrote Colin. ‘The sort of frustrations we endured are commonplace to the point of cliché, but ours were remarkable for the relentlessness and uncanny precision. One of the first scenes we shot consisted of me standing outside the church bawling, “God! What God? There is no God!” At that moment the heavens opened and unleashed the rainiest August of the decade onto the entire shoot. The hot, hazy summer, quite indispensable to the story, had to be fought for between gaps in the clouds.’

With limited time and budget, Pat O’Connor and cinematographer Ken MacMillan had their work cut out to make their long, hot summer materialize on celluloid. At a screening of the restored film in 2010, Colin still had the weather on his mind. ‘It did rain every day,’ he told the audience. ‘My abiding memory is of Ken MacMillan looking to the sky and saying, “OK. If you roll the camera now, you’ve got a 45-second take because there’s a gap in the clouds.” Most of the film was shot like that while we were in Buckinghamshire pretending it was Yorkshire. We only went to Yorkshire for three days, when we needed the rain for a scene when I arrive on the train and march across the fields in the rain. We got blazing sunshine! We had to bring out the rain machine. It was irony upon irony really.

‘I just remember the pressure we were under,’ he says. ‘Ken had to be gone at four o’clock every afternoon to go on stage, the kids could only work certain hours, because that’s the law. There’s a paradox here because we also had to allow the thing to unfold at a pace which wasn’t hasty, so as to maintain the soul of the story, under circumstances when you’re packing up most of the time.’

One aspect of the film that Colin enjoyed immensely was the well-written script by Simon Gray, which in turn was sensitively directed by Pat O’Connor. The emphasis on how difficult it is to verbalize feelings in the wake of trauma, particularly for the First World War generation, suited his ability to portray internal struggles without words.

‘These people are unable to reach each other,’ he says. ‘There’s all the torment that affects survivors of war in an incredibly intense way so it’s about these people’s inability to reach each other, whether it’s within a marriage or a friendship. Words are not sufficient for what is really going on with anybody. And I think Simon Gray captured that perfectly.

‘Great film writing is so much to do with silence, what isn’t said, the empty silences. Pat is a man who is not afraid to work with silence and it’s a gift for an actor. I have always relished the opportunity to work with stillness and silence and I’ve worked with some wonderful directors but surprisingly few of them have the confidence to allow that.’

Irish director Pat said the shoot was ‘one of the happiest times of my life’ and added that ‘Colin was already a great actor then. He was so perfect in getting those nuances, the power and the undercurrents of loss and loneliness and lost opportunity.’

The critics, on the whole, agreed.
Sunday Times
writer Iain Johnstone declared, ‘Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh in the leading roles are splendid.’ And in the States the two young leads were making waves too. The
LA Times
noted the actors were ‘able to suggest the nervous intimacy, the homoerotic shadows that hover over the two. And they’re the centerpiece of a pristine cast.’ And the
New York Times
commented, ‘The sense of unfulfilled desire and incommunicable sorrow give
A Month in the Country
great pathos.’

The film did reasonably well at the box office, playing in London for nearly six months at various screens, and also established a small fan base in the States.

•  •  •  

Staying with the theme of warfare and its aftermath, Colin was about to make a huge impact by playing another veteran soldier from a very different era.
Tumbledown
, a brutal BBC drama based on the real experiences of an officer in the Scots Guards during and after the Falklands conflict, was set to cause a controversy that would go all the way up to the Ministry of Defence and even the House of Lords.

On 14 June 1982 Lt Robert Lawrence, then just twenty-one, led two platoons of the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards against Argentinian troops in the battle of Tumbledown Hill. In a bloody and terrifying skirmish, Robert shot fourteen enemy soldiers before storming the Argentinian defences
and killing three more with a broken bayonet. As he walked, victorious, away from the carnage, he was hit by a high-velocity bullet, fired by a sniper, which destroyed almost half his brain and left him in a wheelchair. An hour and a half later the conflict ended.