United by the world of the music hall and a blossoming romance, singer Nancy Ellis and performer Richard Herncastle (Beatie Edney and Colin Firth) face the threat of the war in 'Lost Empires' on ITV. Photo by Stuart Darby.

- There it is... gone

Two young stars relive old times 

The romance and magic of the music hall are the stuff of 'Lost Empires' – ITV's seven-part dramatization of J.B.Priestley's celebrated novel. Two of the younger stars in the series, Beatie Edney and Colin Firth, talk to Cordell Marks about their own careers and the charcters they portray. 

[Beatie Edney section omitted] 

According to Colin Firth, the best moment for any actor is being offered the part. 'After that,' he says, 'it's downhill all the way.' Perhaps it is, but Firth's career goes ever upward and his role as Richard Herncastle, conjuror's assistant and general dogsbody in ITV's Lost Empires, will rocket him still higher.

He is 26 and decided 12 years ago that he would be an actor. His father lectures in history, his mother teaches English and comparative religions. 'They're eternal students,' says Firth. 'Me? I'm not, but I'd like to be. I suppose at the moment I'm a closet student. I could go on for hours about how much I hated school, but that's really why I decided on acting.

'There was this wonderful moment when I thought, "I've had enough of all this boredom." I loathed my secondary education and was desperately undisciplined. I remember a teacher saying to me. "You're just not interested, are you, boy?" And I thought, "Congratulations, you're absolutely right." Making the decision to become an actor was terribly liberating. There was an excuse after that to be bad at maths.'

He appeared in both the stage and film versions of Another Country (1984) and on television last year in ITV's Dutch Girls, and has recently completed a film for C4 in which he is a soldier back from the horrors of World War One. 'I've had amazing good fortune,' says Firth, but adds that becoming well-known has him rather fazed.

"There's some pressure on me these days to make out I'm more interesting than I really am. People keep asking me what my interests are and I feel I should say collecting stamps or train spotting. Anything. But it's my work that swallows me up. That's my interest. I like getting involved with the parts, researching all aspects of them.

"In Lost Empires I even learned to do a few magic tricks. I know how to do the Chinese Ring trick, where you pull metal rings through each other. And levitation, that was another illusion I learnt. We could have used trick photography, but it seemed right to do it properly, to make it magic. Actually, it doesn't do to look too deeply at how some of the illusions are created because, once you know the secret, they seem amazingly fatuous."

One confession he makes is that he is poor at handling money. "It's like magic," he says. "It disappears. I'm not a drinker, I'm trying hard not to be a smoker but the money... it goes. I think that being wealthy is a frame of mind and no matter what I do I'll never be wealthy. I haven't the right attitude."

It isn't something that will keep him awake at night. "I'm not a worrier. Worrying doesn't help. If I'm like Richard Herncastle at all, then I think there is a sharing of a certain amount of naïvety, and also of stubbornness. That can be destructive, but it can also be useful and I can be very stubborn when I have to be.

"I don't think I'm uptight like Richard, though. He's tense, isn't he? What I have is a lot of nervous energy that is likely to escape at any minute."

Tomorrow, says Colin Firth, he will be away from all this talk of himself and Lost Empires. "I don't enjoy going on about myself.' So where will he escape to? "America," he says. "A social visit. My sister married there recently and, because of work commitments, I wasn't able to attend her reception. So now I'm off to see her and her new husband. They don't know I'm coming. It's a surprise. I like producing surprises..." 
 

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