by Roger Moore 
Orlando Sentinel 

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, 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, adapted "Bridget" for the screen. He said Firth's face has been in the picture since "the publication party for the book, where they had a cutout 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. "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 book touched a nerve and became a phenomenon. 

All that was required to film it was to find the right Bridget, who 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. 

All it required from Firth was for the actor to get over the sense of deja vu.

"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." 

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