(excerpt from article Treason of the Heart)

/../Last summer I trusted myself to British Rail and trained up from London to Oxford, with its dreaming spires and nightmare monasticism, where Another Country was being filmed, with the crumbling honey-toned Gothic of Oxford’s Brasenose College standing in for Eton. I came fresh from seeing the still-running stage play the previous night, where for the 600th-odd performance Guy Burgess (called Bennett in the play) was gadding about laying siege to his teenage Ganymedes, railing against the hypocrisies and hierarchies of Britain and finally turning in last-scene despair to Das Kapital. I went about the film location purveying my bewilderment as to how on earth they could turn this hothouse drama about the madness of the English public school system into a movie with globe appeal.

First I threw my bewilderment in the direction of the film’s star Rupert Everett, who had “originated” the Bennett role on the London stage in 1981. Lolling and Byronic, he was taking a breather under a stone archway while a long crocodile of Eton-clad boys-grey flannels, black tailcoats and toppers- went before the camera, marching across a quadrangle to the orders of director Marek Kanievska. Wrist-thick ca-bles snaked across the grass, towering arc lights strove to outshine the August sun, and tracking rails were being laid and re-laid by a perspiring crew who looked as if they were putting in time on the Burma Railway.

“I think Another Country will be a much better film, an even better film than it was a play,” says Everett in his throttled-velvet voice, unlolling from the archway as I extend my tape-recorder. “Marek and I see eye to eye about the character of Bennett, and how to rework the way I played him on stage in movie terms. Also I feel I know the character better than ever now. I did the play for nine months and all the continu-ity, and the contradictions are there in my head.”

“What first interested you about the role and the character of Bennett-Burgess?’ ’ I asked, quick as a flash. “He’s a very exciting, vibrant, dangerous character. A very quick-witted creature. At the beginning of the play Bennett has a great deal of potential, but he’s betrayed by himself, by his own nature. By himself and not by anyone else. And once that happens he turns, irrevocably, into something quite fright-ening, bitter and nasty. He’s got an acutely brilliant sense of humor about his surroundings, and it’s a tragic shame that he’s not strong enough to sustain that through what goes wrong with him. Because he makes a huge mistake. I mean, he really doesn’t judge things well, because from the moment he blackmails the prefects about, about..."

“About sleeping with just about everyone in the school,” I prompted.

“Yes. Once he does that, he’s really blown it for the rest of his life. It was such a stupid thing to do, really, because those schools and what happened there really determined the rest of your life. Especially Eton, especially in Burgess’s time the 1930s. They all went up to-gether, and then they ran the rest of the country together. So if you had done that act of blackmail at school, they’d re-member. So he’s blown it. All his dreams and ambitions. And that’s terri-fying. At the age of 16 or 17 he’s blown every chance of being a leader, which he could otherwise have been.”

A “gofer” came up to us and re-quested Everett’s attendance on the set as he was in the next shot. Off he went, and Everett’s co-star Colin Firth hoved into tape-recorder range across the sunstruck quadrangle. Firth plays Tommy Judd, Bennett’s Marxist schoolchum and eventual converter. “Judd’s a rebel against the system but he’s more open about it than Guy Bennett,” says Firth. “Bennett is underhand, he wants to take advantage of the comforts, and that’s really his undoing. Judd is more upfront, he’s a proselytizer. He could never have been a spy.

Does Judd in the movie, or whoever was his historical original, end up defect-ing to Moscow like Bennett? 

“No, I’m killed,” says Firth. “On my 21st birthday. In the Spanish Civil War. That’s what happened to the character Judd is based on, a man called John Cornford, who was a public schoolboy in the Thirties.” Judd is not, as the Variety review of Another Country had it, based on Burgess’s famous spy chum Donald Maclean, according to scriptwriter Julian Mitchell. He states that Judd is an amalgam of two people, the man Firth mentioned and Esmond Romilly, who later became a pilot and was killed in World War II. Both were public schoolboys and avowed communists.

Firth was whisked back into the movie make to rehearse a dialogue scene on a sunlit bench. As the schoolboy extras broke ranks and took a grate-ful rest from pounding the gravel, I scanned them for likely interview victims. One older boy, tall, blond, patri-cian-looking, stood out so starrishly from the rest that I thought 1 had spotted another one of the leads. I went up and quizzed him. No, he wasn’t one of the leads. What he was was Viscount Charles Alrhorp, Princess Diana’s brother, no less. The Viscount was lending the supporting cast a dash of incognito distinction and shuttling for the movie between Oxford and Althorpe Hall in [Northamptonshire], the family seat, which was being used as a second location for the film.

No sooner had I struck royalty, though, than tea and sticky buns engulfed the sward. Cast and crew turned their backs on work and interviewers, and a hundred raving schoolboy extras made short work of the patisserie...

[ed. original text had Althrope in Cambridgeshire]

The Face January 1986 The Brit Pack It was Gore Vidal who said, while ruminating on the subject of Britain's decline, "What are you going to do with a country whose only real export in the past thirty years has been actors?"  Step up production may have been the reply.  The Face took six of the best from the Class of 86 and arranged a summit.[for the record, the Brit Pack included Colin Firth, Paul McGann, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth] When he finally enters late in the day (Chaka Khan having given way to Anita Baker, the brie all but crawling off the table), Colin Firth, a tall, duffle-coated figure, is immediately co-opted into the group photo backline without the benefit of makeup or warm-up. Despite having met Roth two years ago under similar circumstances, Firth is clearly the outsider. He’s still wondering what exactly Hollywood is, having been treated to the whole ‘go West young actor’ routine following his debut in Another Country. Hollywood. however, doesn’t really interest the diffident, beautifully-spoken Londoner who has unintentionally “cornered the market in wet, sensitive, naive young chaps” and has just emerged “blinking in the light, like a  refugee” from a solid year’s work on just-screened Granada TV epic Lost Empires. This distance has caused Firth to question the very essence of acting, “putting on a frock and chasing around one’s ego”. He’s not sure he wants to be doing it when he’s 45.

“I don’t think any of the people here can do exactly what I or Tim (Roth) do and I don’t feel competitive, but I don’t feel intimidated either. Now Anthony Hopkins, that’s genius.”

That’s also the challenge. 
 

COLIN FIRTH AGE: 26 BORN: Hampshire RESIDENT: London TRAINING: The Drama Centre 1980-82 CV: Another Country (stage and film) The Lonely Road (Old Vic) Lost Empires; Dutch Girls (TV) NEXT PRESENTATION: A new film by Pat O’Connor provisionally titled Falling Man (title changed to A Month in the Country) FIVE YEAR PLAN: “To get out of stiff collars and flex some different muscles” CAR: Under instruction STARSIGN: Virgo