There's something liberating about being haughty. Ask the master,
the guy whose picture would fit nicely next to "supercilious" in the
Oxford English Dictionary, Colin Firth.

"You can't imagine how it feels to have a director tell you, 'Be
really unsympathetic, unfunny and unsexy -- Go for it!" Firth said
from Perugia, Italy. "Trying to be loved is an awful lot of fatigue
for something that in the end is not terribly interesting."

Firth has never broken a sweat playing at being "sweet" on the
screen. For us to like him, as Mr. Darcy in the acclaimed 1995
miniseries Pride and Prejudice, or in such films as The Advocate
(1993), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and the new film, Bridget Jones's
Diary, the audience has to go to him, not the other way around.

 "He makes haughty so darned sexy," said his Bridget director
Sharon Maguire. "I remember when all of Britain was enthralled with
Pride and Prejudice, and watching him, the more haughty and aloof he
became, the more sexy he became. His stock went up and up."

 Firth, 40, may not be the most beloved actor in the movies these
days. But thanks to a career-defining turn as Mr. Darcy, a man of
frosty integrity who takes hours and hours of a mini-series to warm
up to Elizabeth Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) in Pride and Prejudice, he
gets another crack at Darcy, the same snob transported to modern-day
England. In Bridget, he plays a character he inspired.

  "It was impossible to think of anyone else playing Mark Darcy,
because Helen [Fielding, the author of the novel] wrote the character
while she was watching Colin Firth play Mr. Darcy on Pride and
Prejudice," said Maguire. "You just saw him being haughty, aloof,
standing on the periphery of rooms, always being the outsider,
wanting to be the insider. And no one does that better than Colin."

Fielding's ex-boyfriend, screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four
Weddings and a Funeral), adapted Bridget for the screen. He said that
Firth's face has been in the picture since "the publication party for
the book, where they had a cut-out of him as Mr. Darcy. Helen took it
and put it in the lobby of our office, and I had to walk past Colin
bloody Firth every day, with that smug, supercilious look on his
face, for three years."

After all that, "there was no way that I could not be a part of
it," Firth said with a laugh. "It's probably not quite as self-
reflective as Being John Malkovich, but when something has so much to
do with something you've done before, you just throw your hands up
and say, 'Right. I'm in.' The layers of irony are so deep that I
can't begin to fathom it."

The two Darcys are equal in haughtiness. But the modern one is
also a modern man in other respects.

"He got to be Mr. Darcy in silly reindeer sweater, with a snowman
tie," Maguire said. "He got to snog [kiss], and he got to wallop Hugh
Grant and he got to say the F-word. It was a tongue-in-cheek approach
to the character, which I loved."

Bridget not only borrows a character, but its entire plot from
Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's story of a sweet but socially
awkward young woman -- who fears spinsterhood, is drawn to a sexy
"bad" boy and repelled by the haughty "good" boy -- is the basic
framework of Bridget. When it came out in 1996, the Diary touched a
nerve and became a phenomenon.

All that was required to film it was to find the right Bridget,
whom the producers decided was American Renee Zellweger and the right
Daniel "Cleve" Cleaver, her "sexy bastard of a boss," as Maguire
described him (Hugh Grant). And Colin Firth.

And all it required from Firth was for the actor to get over the
sense of deja vu he had, every day on the set.

"Some of the time, I felt like I was ironically recycling
something I'd already done," Firth said. "The thing you have to do is
to try and suggest the same thing through a different convention.
It's not just the costumes that change. It's the prose. I don't have
those things that Mr. Darcy said so elegantly. You can't talk like
that.

"So I had to try to deliver the same idea of this rather elegant
mind without having much to say. And when I do talk, it is with a
very different, less eloquent vernacular. And it's hard to imagine
Mr. Darcy kicking and scratching like a little girl the way Darcy and
Cleaver go at it [in a fistfight] in this movie."

Looking at Bridget's complicated lineage, so much dependent on the
right actor playing Mr. Darcy in that original TV series, it is hard
to believe Firth almost didn't play him.

"One of the things that made me reluctant to do the first Darcy
was I was worried if he was playable or not," he said. "The way he's
written in the book; snobbish and aloof, is very much the way he is
seen from the female point of view. Eventually, we see him warm up,
but there is nothing in the text that tells you what makes the guy
tick. I wondered if he was too much of an image to really inhabit.

"But what convinced me was the realization that 'I'm free to be a
real jerk. I don't have to make anyone like me.' "

And the key to playing him comes not from Austen's novel, but from
a work by Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers.

"It is about American girls going to England to look for wealthy
husbands, and she writes of these girls being taught to be suspicious
of charming, likable men," Firth said. "Because in those days,
charming, likable men were only charming because they needed to be.
The guy with the money and the title doesn't need to be. The guy who
doesn't have those things, has to be charming. It's hard work."

But as aloof as Darcy is, he can spot a quality woman across a
crowded ballroom, even if she is spilling the punch, or dressed in a
most inappropriate bunny costume.

"I think that, quite bizarrely, that he sees someone a lot like
himself," Firth said of Darcy and Bridget. "She's socially ill at
ease. I think he also detects a wit and intelligence there. He sees a
fellow fish-out-of-water. He senses that she's as disgusted with this
suburban mediocrity as he is. He is paralyzed with discomfort in
social situations, and so is she. He deals with it by clamming up,
and she deals with it with pure verbal diarrhea. In a way, they're
two sides of the same coin."

And both Darcys react the same way when Bridget Jones or Elizabeth
Bennett falls for the wrong guy.

"The whole thing goes up a gear when he sees his arch-enemy
swooping in on her," Firth said. "He sees her in danger . . . He's
got a very old-fashioned protection instinct."

Dashing, cool, aloof, a guy who has made ladies swoon in two
versions of the same role might be someone worth emulating. But lest
you think that Darcy would make a great male role model, Firth wants
to set you straight.

"Funny thing, but that may be something that works better in the
19th century."

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