Colin Firth (8 page)

Although he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, Robert felt he was sidelined by the army on his return home and treated as ‘an embarrassment’. In his book
When the Fighting is Over
,
he claimed he was given little help with his recovery and left off the invitation list to the Lord Mayor’s victory parade. After reading an article about Robert in
The Guardian
,
screenwriter Charles Wood met up with him and got to know him before writing the script for
Tumbledown.
After a deal with film producer David Puttnam fell through, the BBC agreed to take on the project with Richard Eyre as its director.

Now the search was on for the actor who could play the young ambitious soldier and the broken, disabled and bitter war veteran.

‘I met a number of the bright young actors who were, at the time, just out of drama school or university,’ remembers Richard Eyre. ‘Colin Firth, Hugh Grant and Kenneth Branagh were the most conspicuous of them and also Daniel Day-Lewis. Colin was the one who was absolutely perfect for the part because he’s brilliant at playing people who keep the lid on their emotions, who had a stiff upper lip but a very powerful life of the heart and life of the mind underneath all that, which is why he was so brilliant as Mr Darcy.’

Colin didn’t hesitate in accepting the role. It ticked all the boxes for a young actor eager to escape the pretty boy roles. It had action, drama and the chance to play a deep character struggling with real emotional and physical damage. And not a pair of white flannel trousers in sight. It also had a wonderful script.

‘
Tumbledown
was the most exciting film script to work on that I’ve ever had,’ he said later. ‘And Charles Wood is the most underrated screenwriter possibly in the world!’

In terms of motivation, this was a perfect role for the politically minded actor. While addressing the perceived injustices dealt out to a man who has fought for his country and sacrificed his future in the process, Colin was none the less aware that this story was not as black and white as it seemed.

The film, he told the
Chicago Tribune
, ‘is about the creation of a chocolate soldier, a man made to impress tourists outside Buckingham Palace, who turns into a psychotic beast during wartime, as any man must if he doesn’t run away. It’s not about the suffering war victim; it’s about a man who was the perpetrator of his own misfortune. He comes back furious and inglorious, minus 43 per cent of his brain, dribbling and incontinent. Instead of being lauded he’s relegated to the back of the church during the memorial service, finally given a medal and told to shut up.’

Colin’s first job was to get to know Robert Lawrence and they spent hours at his house talking about his front-line experiences as well as his feelings about paralysis and slow recovery. As a consultant, Robert was on set every day and was an invaluable help to Colin throughout the process. The two men became extremely close during a tough shoot which brought back some horrific memories for the Falklands vet. Typically, Colin worried about his new friend’s future.

‘At times it has been pleasant, at times very difficult,’ he said on location in London. ‘It might have been very tough having the real Robert by my side, but he was very helpful. I do worry, though, how Robert is going to get through all this. He has got to come home from the wars some time.’

Years later, when recording his interview on
Desert Island Discs
, Colin remembered the time spent with Robert with great affection.

‘A weird kind of merging took place,’ he said. ‘Robert referred to the character as “we”. He would look at the scripts and say “Scene 39. We’re fit in this scene.” He said to me, and this was very poignant, that it irrationally came as a shock to him to realize that at the end of the film he would still be paralysed. I would leap out of my wheelchair at the end of the day’s shoot and because I felt so connected to Robert it was an irony that wasn’t lost on me.’

Even before the film was finished, controversy over its portrayal of Lawrence’s story began to bubble up. The
Daily Mail
condemned it as ‘left-wing … subversive … anti-Establishment’ without seeing a single frame and many in the military hierarchy reacted with horror and suspicion. The BBC’s decision to screen the one-off drama, announced in April 1988, was immediately slammed by the Secretary of State for Defence, George Younger, who warned that the play was likely to cause ‘grave offence’ and declared he was ‘deeply unhappy’ with its format. And commander of the Scots Guards Lt-Col. Michael Whiteley wrote to Robert Lawrence and the BBC asking that a scene, which shows a young officer warning his comrade not to go on to the battlefield, be cut from the film.

In the same month, during a debate on the BBC in the House of Lords, Conservative peer Lord Annan condemned what he called ‘a tiny clique of producers and writers who produce programmes that consistently denigrate not just the policy of the Government but the authority of the state and our country’s foreign policy. Its objective is to cover these with slime.’

‘People who had not even seen it were objecting to the making of it on principle because they thought it would be a “pinko” diatribe,’ recalls Sir Richard Eyre. ‘I felt very much in the firing line when the film came out.’

The debate was still raging on the day of transmission on 31 May, when a meeting between lawyers representing the Scots Guards and the BBC prompted George Younger to intervene. The Guards had demanded a ‘public clarification’ that the scene involving the young officer was fictitious and, in response, the Ministry of Defence issued a statement, saying, ‘We have no objection whatsoever to the BBC staging a drama, but there are five seconds of film to which they have given the assertion it is fact when it is not.’ Mr Younger voiced concern that the public should know the film was not a documentary.

Four hours before the screening, the BBC agreed to cut a twelve-second sequence, which shows an unnamed officer telling Lawrence, ‘Don’t go on. If anyone makes you go on, shoot them.’ They had made the decision, they said, on ‘compassionate grounds’ and refused to comment on whether the scene was potentially libellous.

Labour waded into the row, with George Foulkes, a shadow foreign affairs spokesman and a critic of the Falklands War, calling the last-minute cut ‘very suspicious’ and blaming ‘sustained government pressure placed on the corporation over other programmes’.

Meanwhile, Colin was rather relishing the row. ‘
Tumbledown
caused a fantastic controversy in Britain,’ he recalled. ‘The cream of British reactionism came out in force before
Tumbledown
aired, demanding the film’s incineration,
repeating every slur you can think of. The Left didn’t like it either. There were front-page headlines for months. Then it went on the air and there was another three months of headlines. It was fun to be in the middle of it.’

Robert defended the script’s treatment of his life story but believes the outrage that it caused proved that the message was hitting home. ‘The point that was missed in all the furore is that
Tumbledown
is a dramatization,’ he said. ‘It depicts real events and the character has things in common with me – but he’s portrayed by Colin Firth … I think what all the fuss really proved is that we hit the nail on the head.’

But the publicity whipped up by the row had a positive effect too. The treatment of wounded soldiers was put in the spotlight and some of Robert’s former comrades were also encouraged to speak out in his defence. Labour MP Jack Ashley urged the Defence Secretary to establish an independent inquiry into the treatment of Falklands War veterans.

On the night, the drama was watched by a massive audience of 10.55 million and Colin’s portrayal of Robert was praised as a tour de force. Writing in
The Times
,
Martin Cropper called it ‘an
immaculate performance, a limping textbook of frustration, rage and grief tricked out with unshy gore-faking and a convincing menu of debilities’.

Sunday Times
critic Patrick Stoddart wrote, ‘It is another mark of Lawrence’s character that he accepted Colin Firth’s brutally honest playing of him as a man who might inspire admiration among his squaddies, but who is clearly a difficult human being to love. But then part of the brilliance of Firth’s performance was in demonstrating that heroism, grit and determination are not the sole property of nice guys.’

In fact, the only person unconvinced by the performance
appeared to be Colin himself. Calling it ‘straight drama school fare’, he claimed he was sick with disappointment when he watched the play.

‘Being honest, I didn’t think too much of my performance at the time,’ he told
Time Out
a decade later. ‘The thing that shocked me most about
Tumbledown
was I’d got so close to Robert. Here was a guy who was at my side through the whole shoot. And I thought, “I’m really like him.” I was imagining being him, and then when the thing came out and all those familiar facial gestures appeared, I was physically ill with disappointment. It took years to appreciate what I’d done.’

Despite his doubts, he picked up his first acting gong when he was awarded the Royal Television Society Best Actor award. He was also nominated for a Best Actor BAFTA and, while he missed out to
A Very British Coup
star Ray McAnally, he was delighted when
Tumbledown
picked up three awards, including Best Single Drama. It also changed the way casting directors looked at Colin, trusting him, at last, to be more than a pretty face.

‘Before that I was beginning to slip into a lot of callow youths. If I’ve got a rather neutral face, it doesn’t make much sense to put me in rather neutral roles.’

Learning more about the Falklands War sparked Colin’s interest in Argentina so he was intrigued when he was approached by producer Martin Donovan to star in a psychological thriller set in Buenos Aires. Like
Another Country
and
A Month in the Country
,
Apartment Zero
focused on the close relationship between two men. One is reclusive Argentinian movie fanatic Adrian, played by Colin, and the other his charming and slightly sinister American lodger Jack, played by Hart Bochner. The drama plays out in the dark and claustrophobic flat the men share as a series of brutal murders is sweeping through the city outside. At first, the script didn’t grab Colin.

‘After I’d read it once, I didn’t want to do it,’ Firth recalls. ‘I misread it as a B-movie thriller.’ But on understanding the movie’s political undertones as an allegory about the country’s dictatorship, he decided to go for the role.

Although he had seen Colin’s work and was behind his casting, Martin Donovan admits that others had reservations about his looks. ‘Everyone said Colin was too good-looking to play the lead,’ he said. As a socially inept loner, Adrian couldn’t be played by someone too attractive ‘because beautiful people have an advantage over the rest of humanity, an advantage Adrian does not have’.

Before
Tumbledown
Colin had begun to worry that Christopher Fettes’s warning over his matinée idol looks getting in the way of greatness was coming true. ‘In drama school I tended to get flamboyant characters, paranoids and psychos,’ he commented. ‘Since then, I’ve been astonished
to find myself playing naive, sensitive, romantic young chaps.’

Determined not to miss out on a part because of this very problem, he pulled out all the stops at his screen test to justify Martin’s faith in his abilities. ‘I nearly lost the role in
Apartment Zero
because I was told that I was too attractive,’ said a blushing Firth. ‘So I brought out my bag of tricks, which include smiling painfully and acting awkward in the film. Of course, I do worry that these mannerisms can be a crutch. They can really just be something to latch on to and lean on in a performance.’

Martin said Colin pulled a masterstroke when it came to the simple act of cracking a smile. ‘Colin thought that smiling would be painful for Adrian. Every time he smiles in the film, it’s almost a wince.’

Colin loved the role and relished the chance to be in something much darker than anything he’d played before. ‘I like playing strange characters,’ he told
Premiere
magazine. ‘Some people might say it has to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it’s a lot simpler than that: normal people just aren’t very interesting.’

Before arriving in Argentina, Colin read up on the country’s history and on the dictatorship which had finally been ousted a few years before. But working in the country, and talking to the people whose lives had been directly affected by the oppressive regime, had a much more powerful effect. It awakened a lifelong battle against human rights abuses and a need to speak out against injustice wherever it occurs.

‘You can’t live in Argentina and pretend you’re living in Surrey!’ he insisted. ‘I was treated by some people as if I’d
been a dangerous influence, but human rights are human rights, so I was outspoken and I really did upset a lot of people. Fuck it, I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut! Martin Donovan knew what was going on. This is actually what the film is about, the fact that the monster hasn’t gone away. The military are not there, but the spirit is still there – and it’s a monster.’

On his return he joined Amnesty International and has since been a passionate supporter of human rights organizations. In 2001, in an article printed in
The Observer
, he recounted how appalled he had been by the number of arrests and revealed that he had met torturers and torture victims while on set. One crew member was sacked after other workers recognized him as a former member of the intelligence service, which had used electrocution as a torture method.