Proof good guys can finish first

'HAVE you seen Rock 'n' Roll, the Tom Stoppard play?" Colin Firth asks me.

I consider lying and saying that I have -- it's the second time he's asked if I've seen or read something, and I haven't in both cases -- but instead tell him the truth.

He proceeds to tell me a basic outline of the play, set in 1968, in which the Czech secret police have broken into the home of the protagonist, a politically dissident rock- music lover, and stolen his vinyl collection as a form of mental torture.

Colin Firth is a vinyl junkie, which is why we're talking about a Tom Stoppard play and not about his acting career, or his relationship with his father, or even his new movie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a big-screen adaptation of the memoir of British writer and poet Blake Morrison.

His collection, he says, is big. "It hasn't been expanded in many years, but it's big for where I stopped buying. It takes up a few shelves... and I've still got the turntable," he says, rather enthusiastically.

Despite being a lover of vintage vinyl, Firth has embraced modernity and now downloads most of his music -- mainly, he says, due to "laziness". However, the perfunctory nature of buying online has made the 47-year-old somewhat nostalgic for a different time.

"In some ways the download thing has driven me back to the hard-copy satisfaction," he says. "CDs never gave me that anyway. Every vinyl lover bangs on about the cover and the artwork and the gatefold and the inner sleeve, and I was a sucker for all of that. And CDs were crap."

His feelings of nostalgia may well have been added to by And When Did You Last See Your Father?. Firth plays Blake Morrison, in a film that looks at the writer's relationship with his domineering father, Arthur (played by Jim Broadbent).

Firth is one of three actors who play Morrison at various stages of the man's life. The poet is seen as a seven-year-old, a 17-year-old, and, Firth's interpretation, as an adult, who is trying to deal with all that's happened between himself and his father, now lying on his deathbed.

"I think I recognise myself more in the 17-year-old than in the older Morrison. Thinking that reading Dostoyevsky is going to get you laid, and that sort of thing. It's bedroom-bound angst-ful music listening and desperately self-conscious, wanting to curl up into a ball every time you get too much attention even though you're probably desperate for attention. I think that's very well drawn in this character and I feel a lot of that resonating."

However, Firth never had quite the tensions with his own father that Morrison apparently endured. Born in Hampshire, Firth moved to Nigeria as a child where his father -- a university history lecturer -- taught. The family returned to England when he was still a child, and then moved to St Louis, Missouri, for a year when he was 11, before returning to England.

Firth's tensions with his father, David, were out of the way by his mid-teens. Whatever tension there was, was "not because he was demonstrative" like Morrison's father.

"If anything he was slightly the opposite. He's a very considered, very modest person and a brilliant teacher. I wanted him to get unreasonable and passionate about things, but instead he was always wise and saw both sides of things. It drove me nuts, but I respect it a lot now."

Like Morrison, Firth took refuge in books and music throughout his late-teenage years, which may have had a formative effect (along with travel, he lists music and reading as the most important things in his life, outside of family and career), but they also may have contributed to him "blowing the whole A-level period completely".

Going to university was abandoned (a controversial decision, as both his parents were lecturers) and drama school beckoned. "Being an actor was enough to create ripples of alarm through my whole family because they'd never met an actor. Nobody had. It just wasn't the way things were done at all."

While the success he's had in acting should have been more than enough to convince Firth that missing university in favour of drama school was the right decision (his parents came to that conclusion long ago), he says that he struggled for years with his decision not to go to college.

"I carried a regret about not having gone to university for a very long time, partly because everyone else in my family did and it seemed odd not too. I was having the conversation past the age of 30 that maybe I should go and do an undergraduate course."

WHILE it's hard to imagine Firth pitching up to lectures with a schoolbag on his back, or drinking cheap pints in plastic cups while playing pool, he admits that the one bit of advice he gave Matthew Beard, his 18-year-old co-star, was "do university".

Firth is a father to three -- the eldest is William, 16, from a relationship with actress Meg Tilly. The younger children (Luca, 6, and Mateo, 4) are from his marriage to Italian producer Livia Giuggioli, whom he met on the set of Nostromo in 1996, and married a year later.

After seeing Morrison's frustration with his father in this movie, I ask Firth how he thinks his own children view him. He claims that, "they've been very generous so far. I've got a 16-year-old and I haven't read his reviews yet, and the little ones are too young to be that critical just yet. I think the jury's waiting." In terms of his career, he feels that he "landed on his feet" and has never suffered the hardships other actors face when starting out.

He does admit, however, that there are bad sides to the profession. The toughest time he can face in acting, he says, is "being stuck in a job you realise you've lost faith in. I can't name one, I won't name one, but that can happen. It's very rare. Whether you realise that you're not gelling with your colleagues, or whether you realise you don't trust the director and you just think 'this is going nowhere'. That is a horrendous experience. I mean, it's not fighting in the front line in a chemical war, but just within the terms of what I do that's as bad as I feel it gets.

"I think most people doing something risky in what we'd loosely call 'the creative zone' are probably on a pendulum between feeling very cocky and invincible and important, and being completely overwhelmed by it all. I suppose I've got a bit of that."

You get the impression that there's not much that Colin Firth doesn't know about, be it current affairs, politics, music, sport, art and, of course, movies. Yet he doesn't come across as cocky. Perhaps it's his self-deprecating humour, and mumbled comments he makes about himself under his breath, that are familiar to anyone who's seen him as Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary. Besides being effortlessly knowledgable, he is, as women are keen to point out, ruggedly handsome. He probably even enjoys long walks and cooking.

In addition, Firth is socially conscious and has campaigned to stop the deportation of a group of asylum seekers.

He also teamed up with his wife to produce a documentary for this year's London Film Festival about Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther who has spent 20 years on death row for murdering a policeman, a verdict that Abu-Jamal has never accepted.

In short, he appears impossibly well-rounded. One of life's good guys. Anand Tucker, the director of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, describes him as a "true movie star" and "an incredibly intelligent and decent human being". He also says that, "Colin's just a bloke. It was like hanging out with a mate." While shooting the film they went to a Magic Numbers gig together, which brings us neatly back to music.

I ask him about the band he was in when he was younger. He sighs slightly before saying: "I almost wish I'd never said it because it's just not worthy of mention, but, yeah, I did dabble in that." I ask him the band's name, to which he replies: "I can't remember." I ask him if he is sure and he says "yes" emphatically. But I don't believe him.

Music, however, remains a huge part of his life. His interest, he says, "kicked off with glam-rock when I was eight or nine years old. I had a bizarre man-crush on Marc Bolan. Then I discovered things like blues and American slave music. In terms of modern music my sensibilities are very much to do with American music really. It's still blues and country."

He was the singer in his mysterious band without a name, which I later find out was a Doors cover band. He's just finished shooting a film version of the Abba musical Mamma Mia, in which he will sing. He says, "It's not really the direction I had in mind". It's not exactly Jim Morrison, but there is no reason to doubt that he'll be able to pull it off.

• 'And When Did You Last See Your Father?' is in cinemas nationwide from October 5

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