 Long viewed as a master of the stiff-upper-lip, a polished light-comic
leading man and - thanks to his Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995) - an
upper-class sex-god, Colin Firth has quietly built up a portfolio of much wider
range, which finally led to definitive recognition with A Single Man (d. Tom
Ford, 2009) and The King's Speech (d. Tom Hooper, 2010) as the actor turned 50.
Born on 10 September 1960 in Grayshott, Hampshire, he spent his early
childhood in Nigeria, where his parents were teachers, and a year in America in
1972, before the family returned to settle in the UK. Undistinguished at school,
he decided to pursue acting and took odd jobs at the National Youth Theatre and
National Theatre prior to studying at the London Drama Centre.
His break came in 1983, when he was cast as a homosexual
public-schoolboy-turned-spy in Another Country, a stage play based on the
real-life story of Guy Burgess, then as that character's Marxist best friend in
the film version the following year (d. Marek Kanievska).
War traumas dominated his early career. In 1986 he starred with Laurence
Olivier in the acclaimed miniseries Lost Empires (ITV), based on JB Priestley's
novel about a travelling magic show on the eve of World War One. He played a
shell-shocked WWI veteran in A Month in the Country (d. Pat O'Connor, 1987) and
earned a BAFTA nomination for his performance as a terribly injured soldier
returning from the Falklands in Richard Eyre's Tumbledown (BBC, tx. 31/5/1988).
Then came a couple of sociopaths: a repressed cinema-owner in Buenos Aires in
Apartment Zero (d. Martin Donovan, 1988) and the Machiavellian seducer in
Valmont (France/UK, d. Milos Forman, 1989), the latter an adaptation of
Dangerous Liaisons that was pre-empted and overshadowed by Stephen Frears' rival
version. After it, Firth went to live with his Valmont co-star, Meg Tilley, in
rural British Columbia; their son was born in 1990 and Firth's acting career
dwindled until the couple split up in 1993.
After a supporting role in Circle of Friends (US/UK, d. O'Connor, 1995),
Firth made a spectacular comeback as Fitzwilliam Darcy - a role he initially
declined - in Pride and Prejudice. The actor lent Darcy complex shades of
coldness, even caddishness, in the early episodes that went largely unremarked
at the time by his international legions of new female fans but earned him
another BAFTA nomination.
This ushered in a period of great productivity. After a rare working-class
role as a drunken miner in an adaptation of DH Lawrence's The Widowing of Mrs
Holroyd (BBC, tx. 14/10/1995), Firth played an aristocratic mine-owner in South
America in Nostromo (BBC, 1997), a quietly seething cuckolded husband in The
English Patient (US, d. Anthony Minghella, 1996) and Nick Hornby's
football-obsessed alter ego in the film of the latter's autobiographical novel,
Fever Pitch (d. David Evans, 1997).
After two more moneyed bounders, in A Thousand Acres (US, 1997) and
Shakespeare in Love (US, d. John Madden, 1998), he was a visionary,
self-absorbed patriarch in My Life So Far (US/UK, d. Hugh Hudson, 1999), a
charming wastrel in Noel Coward's Relative Values (UK/US, d. Eric Styles, 2002)
and a latter-day Don Quixote in Donovan Quick (BBC, tx. 28/12/2000).
Despite this diverse line-up, Firth continued to be dogged by D'Arcy, but
sportingly accepted the role of Mark Darcy, a character 'inspired' by Jane
Austen's hero, in the film of Bridget Jones's Diary (US/France/UK, d. Sharon
Maguire, 2001). His reward was a third BAFTA nomination for his droll
performance as the stuffy human rights lawyer.
He was one of the Nazis debating the Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference in
Conspiracy (BBC, tx. 19/5/2001), John Worthing, the decorous bachelor with a
rackety double life, in The Importance of Being Earnest (UK/US, d. Oliver
Parker, 2002) and the brooding artist Johannes Vermeer in Girl With A Pearl
Earring (UK/Luxembourg, d. Peter Webber, 2003). There followed a string of
uneven comedies, among them Love Actually (UK/US, d. Richard Curtis, 2003),
Nanny McPhee (UK/US, d. Kirk Jones, 2005), St Trinian's (d. Parker/Barnaby
Thompson, 2007), Then She Found Me (US, 2007) and Mamma Mia! (US/Germany/UK, d.
Phyllida Lloyd, 2008).
Firth acquitted himself well in these, but also found meatier roles. He was
memorable as a sleazy, bisexual nightclub entertainer in Atom Egoyan's cerebral
murder thriller Where the Truth Lies (Canada/UK, 2005). He played a merchant
banker with violent tendencies in Harold Pinter's Celebration (More 4, tx.
26/2/2007), a writer confronting his dying father in And When Did You Last See
Your Father? (UK/Eire, d. Anand Tucker, 2007), a bereaved father in Genova
(UK/Cayman Islands, d. Michael Winterbottom, 2008) and the degenerate Lord Henry
Wotton in Dorian Gray (UK/Cayman Islands, d. Parker, 2009).
Towards the end of the decade, Firth at last found two roles which perfectly
fitted his capacity to convey intense yet mute emotion. In A Single Man he was a
secretly gay British college professor in Los Angeles mourning the death of his
long-term lover, while The King's Speech cast him as the stammering misfit
monarch George VI. They earned Firth an Academy Award nomination and the Oscar
itself respectively.
In 1997 Firth married the Italian producer-director Livia Giuggioli, with
whom he had two more sons. He is a long-standing campaigner for the rights of
asylum seekers and tribal peoples and was awarded a CBE in June 2011.
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
