I’ve sometimes wanted to play the village pervert in something and nobody wants me to do that,” says actor Colin Firth,  whose 1995 turn as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s Pride And Prejudice made him a reluctant idol for millions of women. While the series was melting hearts across the UK, Colin fled to Tunisia to shoot the Oscar-winning film The English Patient. “When I came back to London my hair… was extremely short and fair so I wasn’t recognised,” he says. “I remember sitting in a restaurant next to people talking about Mr.Darcy.”

Actually, it seemed the only person not talking about Colin was the press-shy actor himself. Six years later he was to play Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and once again his name was on everyone’s lips. Colin Firth was born on September 10, 1960, and spent his early days in Nigeria, where his parents David and Shirley were both teachers.“Flamboyance on one side and classically English reserve on the other,” is how he describes their influence. The family moved back to England but  relocated to America before Colin was a teenager. His childhood proved taxing as he never quite fitted in, even when the Firth brood once again crossed the Atlantic and settled in England. A determined Colin, who’d announced his desire to be an actor at 14, enrolled at drama school,  making do on a tight budget and living in a dilapidated London bedsit. 

He made his West End debut in Another Country during his last year at the Drama Centre and was cast in the film adaptation soon after. TV and stage roles, including a high-profile part in The Secret Garden, followed, as did critical accolades and unending devotion from legions of female fans. But to their dismay, Colin fell for American actress Meg Tilly and was off the market.

The two met on the set of 1989’s Valmont, the Milos Forman take on the famed Choderlos de Laclos novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and holed up in the Canadian backwoods for five years. “I made furniture,” recalls Colin of the time he spent in the forest while raising the couple's son William. Despite his own reclusive tendencies, however, the seclusion proved too much for Colin and the lovers eventually split amicably.

Colin later took up with his Pride co-star Jennifer Ehle, but while filming Nostromo in 1996, he fell in love with Livia Giuggioli, an Italian documentary maker who author Nick Hornby describes as “joke-perfect”- she’s got both a PhD and sultry looks. Colin and Livia wed on June 21,1997, and welcomed a son Luca in 2001.

“I feel much more settled and peaceful,” reports Colin on marriage. Once again, however, he shies away from discussing that side of his life. “It was love at first sight – or lust,” he says of Livia. “She is an Italian beauty and the smartest woman on the planet. And this is as far as we’re going in relation to my personal life! I’m no open book. There will never be a Colin Firth’s Diary!"

The inimitable Bridget Jones star Colin Firth has reason to celebrate after his wife gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. Little Matteo is Colin and Livia's second child together, as they already have a two-year-old called Luca. Colin had to miss the premiere of his new film, What A Girl Wants, so as to rush to his wife's bedside. And though he has yet to make any public statement about the new arrival, when he does, it's sure to be memorable.  When Luca arrived, Colin appeared on an American chat show and gushed over his new baby, albeit in somewhat unusual terms. "He looks a little bit like a turnip at the moment," said the 42-year-old. "But I mean a beautiful turnip - as root vegetables go... he's adorable!"  No doubt he and Olivia are feeling just as jubilant about the latest addition to their growing clan. Colin also has a 12-year-old son, Will, with actress Meg Tilly.

Colin wearing black jacket and gray t shirt, sits in front of pretty scroll-worked window with garden in background. (I is Interviewer.)

I: (standing in Times Square )…an alternative to Attack of the Clones. Instead of Yoda and CP30, this film offers moviegoers Oscar Wilde’s razor sharp wit and an illustrious cast that includes Colin Firth. He’s been telling Talking Movies more about his role in the film. 

(Clip from TIOBE)

In TIOBE Colin Firth is Jack Worthing, a man with romantic designs on a young woman called Gwendolyn. In this role, he is subjected to the withering questions of her imperious mother Lady Bracknell,played by Dame Judi Dench. 

(Clip of Colin and Judi)

Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play revolves around mistaken identities. Among other things, it takes aim at social pretence among the upper classes in Victorian Britain. It was subversive then and Firth thinks Wilde’s observations still have currency and remain subversive today.

(Clip of Reece)

Colin: I think that a lot of Oscar Wilde’s essential points of view would still be considered dangerous now. You know, he believed that aesthetics were more important than morality. That, uh, you know, he said quite explicitly, and he wasn’t being paradoxical here, he said that a sense of color was more important to him in development than a sense of right or wrong. And that’s not something a lot of people would want their teachers to tell their children. So I think that actually he still is…he does have an edge. 

I: The film’s cast is largely British, a notable exception the American actress Reece Witherspoon. Her inclusion is part of an effort to modernize its classic stage work and help it reach a young audience. But for Colin Firth it is another period drama, which brings back memories of his defining role as the brooding leading man Mr. Darcy in the TV series P&P. 

I to C: Because of some of the roles that you’ve done in the past, I suppose notably P&P, people often think of you as being this kind of smoldering handsome hunk. Has that been a help or a hindrance to the kind of roles that you’ve gotten? 

C: I don’t know. It’s probably…because you can’t know what would have been otherwise. Um, it’s helped me get more scripts sent to me where the requirement is for a smoldering person. And um it possibly has diverted my career away from things that might have been interesting otherwise. It’s really an impossible thing to judge. Um, I don’t regret anything. And in fact, uh, I’ve been quietly diversifying. I don’t think anyone’s particularly noticed, but I have been doing things which are different, uh, people tend to remember me for things which are similar to what’s gone before. It’s never really been my problem.

I: Firth, who is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of his generation, hasn’t made much headway in big mainstream studio films. He did enjoy a commercial success last year in the hit BJD. But a Hollywood profile has proved elusive.

I to C: You haven’t appeared in any big Hollywood movies and I’m not saying that by way of any criticism. Is that by design or because you just haven’t found the opportunities there or people have not come calling?

C: It’s a mixture of all those things. Um, it’s not really by design, unless one considers design as just omission, of not having gone to play the town and hunt it down. I could have done that, I suppose. I don’t know whether I would have been successful or not, but I didn’t do that. I wasn’t interested in doing that. Um, I enjoyed my life in England and what was happening for me there so I stuck with it.

I: Why is it then, do you think, that you don’t have marketability with Hollywood?

C: I have no idea. It’s..it’s..uh, it’s actually completely beyond almost anybody’s comprehension, these sorts of things. You could discuss it for hours. It’s not to do with conventional good looks, there are plenty of people out there who don’t have that and that’s always been the case. Um, it’s…some of them are extremely talented, some of them are not. Um, it’s a mystery. And a vast overwhelming majority of people who get into this profession don’t have it. In fact, an overwhelming majority of people in this profession don’t work at all. So I think, you know, the secret is to try to keep an interest in the…

(Another clip of TIOBE)

End of Interview.

© 2002 BBC

Colin wears navy blue shirt, top two buttons undone, dark gray slacks and black shoes. Same outfit as interview with Soledad O’Brien on weekend Today.

Katie: Colin Firth has been setting hearts aflutter in Great Britain since 1995 when he starred in the BBC production of P&P. Here in the States, American women are succumbing to his charms as well.
(BJD clip) He’s best known here as the seemingly reserved barrister who competes for the affection of Renee Zellweger in BJD. Now he’s part of an all-star cast in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy TIOBE.
(Clip of Colin saying line “How perfectly delightful”) 

Oh, how perfectly delightful. Hi Colin. How are you?

Colin: I’m well, thanks. How are you?

K: Nice to see you. So you know obviously this is as well known in Great Britain, TIOBE, as Gone With The Wind is in this country. I mean everybody is familar…familiar with Oscar Wilde’s play. Do you remember the first time you saw it?

C: I saw it as a teen-ager in a repertory theater in England. It was rather a stiff production and in the way you normally see Oscar Wilde  presented, which is actors composing their faces to look droll and playing to well-informed laughter and it’s actually, you know, you’re sitting there thinking, I’m supposed to find this funny. If I’m smart, I find it funny. But you’re slightly shut out. When I read it, I howled with laughter. So I always felt there was a slight discrepancy, you know.

K: So obviously when you set out to be a part of this movie, you wanted to capture the real essence of…of…of his work in a way that you felt hadn’t been done before.

C: Yes. It probably has been done before. Uh, I mean, I’m sure, you know, there have been wonderfully buoyant
productions, but I do think that it’s slightly burdened by its reputation and if you’re too in awe of that, you’re not going to have fun with it and you lose the point.

K: Well, you had a lot of fun with this movie and this role. Tell me a little bit about the character you play, Jack Worthing.

C: Well, he’s a character who’s expected to lead a rather dull life. He’s a paragon of society within his own community and he’s totally…

K: He takes himself quite seriously.

C: That’s right. Frightfully seriously. And in order to have fun he becomes somebody else. In fact, there’s a great paradox running through Oscar Wilde, that in order to be a bit yourself, you have to be duplicitous, as he had to be. So he invents an unruly brother and, uh, he goes to town and lets the unruly brother run up all the bills and seduce the women and then he goes back to being the bore again, you know.

K: And of course the unruly brother is Earnest and the alter ego creates all sorts of problems with him and therein lies sort of the com…comedic value of the piece, right?

C: Well, yes. And I think it…it operates on a lot of different levels. I…you know…uh, very crudely speaking, in a way, I think there…there are two ways in which the comedy works. One is the…the fellow who’s ahead of the game and who’s on the front foot and has all the jokes and witty lines and he makes the jokes. And the other one is the one who is the butt of the jokes. And I tend to get that role quite a lot. You know, where the joke is on me.

K: Right.

C: It’s not…it’s not my job to, uh, you know, to…to make anybody laugh with the witty lines. I just have to kind of…look silly.

K: You’re sort of the straight man.

C: Yeah.

K: And a lot of it is about the relationship you have with Rupert Everett’s character and he plays a character named Algie Montcreiff. And…and…and while it is a romance at times, it’s also about their interaction, isn’t it?

C:I think that’s the heart of the piece, is that relationship and, uh, Rupert and I…I…I watched the film last night, actually, and it suddenly occurred to me with horror that our relationship in real life is very like that I think. We’ve known each other for a very long time. And, uh, this great affection and enormous helping of overfamiliarity…you know…

K:Meanwhile, you woo, or someone woos you, named Gwendolyn…

C: That’s right.

K:…in the movie and that’s played by Frances O’Connor, who’s I think a great actor, by the way…

C: She is. She is.

K:…and, uh, in this scene, you have to convince her mother, who’s played by Dame Judi Dench, that that you are worthy of her daughter’s hand in marriage. Let’s take a quick look.

(Clip of Jack being questioned by Lady B)

K: Judi Dench is really funny in this because she is such a multi-layered character, isn’t she?

C: Absolutely.

K: Looks are very deceiving when it comes to her case.

C: Yes, well, I think she has given us one of the most unusual Lady Bracknells that I’ve ever seen, cause she’s normally played in a very declamatory style. Judi didn’t do that at all. She kind of came underneath it and, uh, the authority is so effortless.

K: Meanwhile, I understand that as you look toward your future, you may be working on a sequel to BJD? Is that true?

(C. heard sighing and clearing his throat.)

C: It’s in the air. I cannot confirm or deny anything I’m afraid. I’ve been scouring the gossip columns to find out if it’s true.

K: Really?

C: Yeah.

K: Would it interest you?

C: In the abstract, um, not particularly.

K: No?

C: No, I mean it would interest me if it’s a wonderful script. And the others want to do it. And you know it’s a great team. Um…

K: And as long as you don’t have to wear those heinous Christmas sweaters, right?

C: Yeah, well, we’d have to have a few things in the contract, I think.

K: Yeah. (laughing) Colin Firth, well your latest is TIOBE. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming by.

C: Great to be here. Thanks.

K: Nice to see you, Colin. We’ll be back in a moment. This is Today on NBC.

© 2002 NBC
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.