Colin Firth: Tommy Judd

Judd is an amalgam of two characters that playwright Julian Mitchell researched very thoroughly. One was Esmond Reilly who, at Wellington School, started a magazine that was subsequently banned.His second model was John Cranford, a committed communist, who maintained his convictions until his premature death in the Spanish Civil War. Like Romilly, who also died young in the Second World War, Judd is a doomed character, a boy whose intellect and strength of purpose combine to make him intimidating. Whereas Bennett gets by with charm and dash and wit, Judd faces up to his beloved bust of Lenin and makes no attempt to integrate himself with his peers, because sacrificing principle for popularity would be the ultimate anathema to him. 

I'd never have Judd's strength in terms of allowing himself to become a joke in order to publicise his convictions, said Colin. The way he sticks by these convictions all the time makes him unique. Most people don't have that kind of courage.They prefer to go along with the crowd. Judd wouldn't turn out to be a spy because he is a prosletiser. By fighting, doing something definite and physical, he takes the opposite course. He's not a victim of ambition. Whereas Bennett wants the comforts and benefits of social status, Judd is nauseated by the hypocrisy of it all.

Of Colin's four grandparents, three were methodist missionaries, so he has his own share of prosletising blood. However, he isn't tempted into Juddean zeal. "I went to an ordinary comprehensive school in Winchester by my own choice, and I reacted against what I saw as injustice, the way people were categorised very early on and put into roles before they had chance do develop and explore. Kids from middle class families were slotted into academic pursuits while those from less literate backgrounds did carpentry. I wasn't a Communist, and when I rebelled against those assumptions, it was more as Bennett would have done. I was scruffy, I was cocky and I was trouble, but I didn't go around voicing principles. I wasn't politically aware but that doesn't inhibit my performance. With acting, it's not how like the character you are that counts, but whether you have an instinctive understanding of how he'd behave."

Colin was born in 1960 into an academic family - his father is a history lecturer at King Alfred's College, in Winchester, his mother a lecturer on comparative religions at the Open University. Their son's desire to become an actor was formed at infant's school when he played Jack Frost in the Christmas pantomine, though he never expected to make a career in such a fundamentally unreliable profession. However, with the encouragement of his drama coach, the television writer Freda Kelsall, he persisted,though not without lingering doubts.

 "I chose the Drama Centre because it had a reputation as a hard school, and I thought my resolve should be tested. Either you bend under pressure or you respond to the challenge. I can be very lazy and complacent unless I'm pushed so I knew I'd be weeded out very quickly if I was making a mistake."

Instead he thrived on the six day a week schedule and rose to the top, taking the lead in a whole range of college productions, including the title parts in TARTUFFE, and KING LEAR as well as that fateful HAMLET. When the filming of ANOTHER COUNTRY was completed, he sloughed off the humanitarian idealism of Tommy Judd and resumed on stage as Guy Bennett until the play ended its West End run, a juxtaposition that gives weight to his contention that acting is a question of understanding rather than identification.

 Like Rupert Everett, Colin Firth is commendably balanced about his future after this meteoric start. "I don't know what to expect next because I've lost my bearings. My sense of ambition has been numbed completely. When I got the part in the film, I already had a job and I didn't know how to react. On stage, you function on adrenalin, but the medium of film is very bizarre. The energy is different because the work is so detailed, so subtle. All I know that I have to cope with what comes next in a very sober way and give myself a breathing space to sort things out."