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Saturday Afternoon Fever 

Colin Firth talks about his role in the footie blockbuster Fever Pitch and dispels his public school image without even breaking a sweat.

 Colin Firth is one of the hottest actors in the country. He's no overnight sensation; rather his career has been built through hard work, putting in the hours. After making a splash starring opposite Rupert Everett in Another Country, he has starred in a series of films like Circle Of Friends, Tumbledown, The Hour Of the Pig, A Month In the Country and Valmont, which may have kept the debt collectors away from his door but haven't taxed box-office cash registers in a big way. 

Of course this all changed when Colin was cast as Darcy in the BBC's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Every television in the land was tuned in to watch this man steal the show. Forget the fact that his character has comparatively little screen time. His proud, brooding presence was so strong that we felt him even when he wasn't on the screen. 

Many an actor could have looked ridiculous trying to portray one of the sexiest male characters ever written. In fact Colin almost turned it down, and even some of his own family were against him taking the role. As anyone who has read Jane Austen's novel will have a very clear visual picture [hey, what other kind is there?] of how Mr Darcy should look, how can any actor possibly satisfy everyone's notion of one of English fiction's number one sex symbols? Colin had some help from the make-up department; they darkened his hair, and contacts were used to give his eyes a dark quality; but the most important qualities came from the actor himself--his talent (and the fact the he looked great on a horse). "I felt that finally, after a lot of wrangling about it, that I might be able to do it. I stopped engaging with how to make him a hero and I started seeing how emotionally disabled he is--that's what hooked me into it. That gave me something to go for." 

And boy, did it work. His Mr Darcy added a sensuality and animal appeal to what might have turned out to be just another stuffy BBC costume drama, making it one of the television events of the year. 

The huge success of Pride and Prejudice hasn't seemed to have affected Colin's day-to-day existence. He says that he's getting more work and it's easier to get a table in a restaurant, but otherwise he hasn't really noticed the effects on the general public. Ho hum. 

Now he's set to capitalise on his new high-profile with the lead in Fever Pitch, the screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling, soccer-and-angst confessional novel. Firth plays Hornby's role, a financially and emotionally down-at-heel comprehensive school teacher, renamed Paul for the big screen, who finds his stoic dedication to Arsenal FC provides the cement to hold his crumbling life together. Then along comes Sarah, another teacher, who challenges footie's grasp on his life. Pretty soon he is faced with a choice between cold terraces and warm bed--a choice he finds puzzlingly difficult to make. In his own way Paul is just as 'emotionally disabled' as Darcy. 

So why follow up success in Pride and Prejudice with a film about football? "Well, the book is different. It had nothing to do with being a school teacher and it's certainly not a love story or romantic comedy, whereas the film is. The book allowed me to take it much more seriously. The film felt lighter to me before I read the book. When I read the book it wasn't as light, there was a lot more meat on the bone. I never thought I could read a book about a football match and have my heart race, and his analysis about self-loathing and self-doubt and despair and his sense of humour, was so vivid in the book that you know it's good to have something inside, something that you want to carry into the story you're making." 

Do you relate personally to the self-loathing and despair in the book? "Yes, absolutely. It's just that in my terms they tend to be about different things than they would be for him, but I think it's always true if you're an actor. It's funny I often start a job thinking 'this is a big reach for me, this character is miles away from me. I'm really going to have to work on this.' I almost invariably find myself thinking at the end 'this is completely me.' " 

Students from Colin's year at drama school only have nice things to say about him. It appears even as a student he was warm--and liked. the only skeletons in this particular thesp's closet seem to be a fondness for beautiful, passionate, volatile leading ladies, one of whom did the cardinal sin of bruising young Colin's rather lovely face. Whatever could he have done? Passionate lovers' tiffs aside, it seems Colin made it through the Drama Centre (students refer to it as the Trauma Centre) relatively unscathed. In fact it seems the only eyebrow raised during his three years of training was when he was cast as Hamlet in Shakespeare's word-fest. But all doubts from fellow students were quashed when young Colin proved to be a surprisingly impressive Dane, so impressive in fact that his performance opened the door for him to be cast, while still a student, in the West End production of Another Country. 

"It came as an enormous surprise. I was priming myself for years of struggle just to get an audition for a repertory company. But I had an agent, I was employed, and I was a member of Equity all in a few months--I began that year not even knowing I was going to play Hamlet and I finished that year having done a film. It was a shock." 

The film of course was the screen version of Another Country alongside a pouting Rupert Everett. Colin's screen debut is still impressive to this day. He's so natural that it's as if he's not acting at all. 

"I have a sort of neutrality about my appearance and my background which is applicable in a lot of different directions. I'm just about educated enough, I'm just about well-spoken enough. I've got enough of a voice, I'm neutral enough looking, I can be good-looking enough, I can be unattractive enough. I'm in absolute pole position really, all of the advantages . . . there are no complaints here at all." 

Did he find himself getting typecast after making such a strong impact as the uncompromising, young, communist public schoolboy in Another Country? "I was given the sort of English public schoolboy stamp. It got me my first and second and third jobs. Very high-profile stuff. I was delighted to get them, and then there comes a point when you think 'but I can't keep doing this.' I'm not that--I'm not a public schoolboy, you know. I went to secondary school. I went to the worst type of English schools, and , uh, I didn't talk this way as a schoolboy--I spoke with my regional dialect. It's not what interests me ultimately. I didn't want to spend my entire life telling the stories of various English, privileged men--it's not me. So, yeah, there's always some categorising aimed at you but I can hardly say it's been a tremendous disadvantage. I have managed to fit a variety of roles." 

Around the age of five Colin discovered his love for acting in school plays and he continued to act when the opportunity arose throughout his childhood but, at the age of fourteen, he realised that this could be his life. 

"I suddenly had this sort of epiphany that I didn't have to do a job where I'd have to use Maths O-level. That I didn't have to spend my life doing that sort of work. That life wasn't always going to be like school, which I hated. It was my fear of life really, that life was like school. I was always going to have to get up in the morning facing something I didn't choose to do with people I didn't respect, and I felt that from the beginning to the end of school." 

He didn't rebel against school authority at school in a spectacular way; like most good-boy-at-heart rebels, he simply withdrew into a world of music, fantasy and playing hooky. 

"I was rather a hippy, passive type. I grew my hair extremely long, pierced my ears and, you know, just wore the wrong clothes." 

You find yourself getting slowly absorbed by the qualities which he so successfully brings to his characters: the quiet intensity, the little vulnerable boy trapped in the grown man's body. He's more of a loveable puppy than a shag demon; the floppy hair, the soft intense eyes, the lovely smooth voice all add up to the perfect person to cuddle up with in front of the fire on a cold night. I ask, have women (not just actresses) always fancied you? 

"Not really. I was at a boys' school most of my life for a start. I just didn't know any women through most of my teens. Later it was hard to relate to women. I was afraid of them. I thought they were another species at first. I thought there had to be a completely different approach with talking to a woman. I was very envious of the boys at school that did know girls of our own age and seemed to be able to talk with them without spluttering. I watched this incredible confidence from some of the others and uh, would imitate them and would end up sounding petulant and ridiculous and not impressing anybody. Then I was probably ludicrously polite and gentlemanly for a while. Which I think didn't go badly but it certainly was a while before I realised women were just human beings." 

Which suggests that Colin isn't so many miles away from Darcy after all.