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Colin Firth on Bridget,
Battles and that Bitchy Hugh Grant
After playing characters
named Darcy, first in the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
then in 2001's Bridget Jones's Diary, Colin Firth found that the public's
perception of him had changed. The 44-year-old actor had been transformed
from a respected, serious actor into a dashing, international heartthrob.
It's a position Firth is not altogether comfortable with, which is why
he followed romantic roles in Love Actually and Girl With a Pearl Earring
with Trauma, a psychological chiller in which he plays a coma survivor
haunted by visions of his dead wife.
Yet the lure of the
romantic comedy is hard to deny, and Firth returns this fall in Bridget
Jones: The Edge of Reason as Mark Darcy, the human rights lawyer beau of
Bridget (Renee Zellweger). "It's what happens after happily ever after,"
Firth says.
Having won Bridget's
heart from the dastardly Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), Darcy discovers the
course of true love doesn't necessarily run smoothly. "She finds the the
fact he is so emotionally constipated frustrating, and that snowballs,"
says Firth. "She starts to get insecure that she doesn't fit into his world,
and she gets jealous of other women." When their relationship founders,
Cleaver makes his move and the two men again come to blows. "It has the
air of an inevitable ritual," Firth says. "They fight like a couple of
girls. Once the gloves come off, they're two pathetic, rather sissy, frightened, |
angry yuppies."
Offscreen, Firth and
Grant also share a good-natured rivalry. Just listen to the latter's commentary
on the Love Actually DVD: "He's has a go at me from the beginning to the
end," Firth says, "so much so that the legal department at Universal sent
me a copy just in case I wanted to nix anything. He basically sighs or
snores whenever I appear on the scene, makes comments about how the actress
is having to do all the work, or how I must be using a rinse to color my
hair, or being photographed cleverly to make my jawline look better. I
like to think of it as a Bette Davis-Joan Crawford sort of thing."
Photography by Catherine
Ledner@Raffles L'Ermitage, Beverly Hills
Copyright
© 2004 Premiere US
Reproduced
with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution
is prohibited without permission.
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