Actor: Colin Firth 
by Louise Brearley

A year after his britches drove the nation to a frenzy in Pride And Prejudice, Mr. 
Darcy turns football-mad schoolteacher for Fever Pitch.

Colin Firth is used to causing a sensation. It started when he was five years old. Dressed for a school production of Jack Frost in white satin trousers, blue sash and polystyrene crown, Firth brought the house down. "I remember doing some sort of dance which amused everybody," he smiles. "And I remember getting a lot of praise. " Nothing, however, could have prepared him for Darcy-mania. At its height last summer, a car-load of Sunday Mirror journalists laid siege to Firth's Hackney flat, 
having spotted his girlfriend carrying in a vacuum cleaner. They refused to go away until he gave them a quote.

The furore caused by the BBC's Pride And Prejudice last year was attributed in some circles to a certain pair of britches and a soaked Colin Firth rising Adonis-like from a lake. As far as thousands of British females were concerned, Firth's brooding reinvention of Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy hit the (g-)spot. Women's Hour producers from Radio 4 plotted to get him on their show, for reasons they simply described as "lust".

When the national obsession first kicked in, its object was 5,000 miles away in Colombia, filming the recent BBC adaptation of Nostromo. "It was very peculiar, because it's not as if I had just appeared out of nowhere," Firth laughs, a touch ruefully. "The first I heard was from my mum on the phone. And I thought it was just mum exaggerating like only mothers can."

Then Pride And Prejudice went sky-high in America and its 35 year-old hero was deluged with attention. But Firth ignored seductive offers of roles in the likes of Beverly Hills Ninja and homed in instead on the lead in low-budget footie film Fever Pitch, and a small part as Kristin Scott Thomas's cuckolded husband in 12-times Oscar-nominated The English Patient.

Today Firth is eating lunch on a catering bus behind Highbury stadium, waiting to be called to the set of Fever Pitch, a fictionalised account of Nick Homby's best-selling memoir about life as an Arsenal- obsessed schoolteacher. Firth is convinced he looks like the writer, but the connection needs a considerable leap of faith. Where pretty-boy-next-door Firth is lofty and floppy-haired, Hornby is small of stature and quite bald.

Through the bus windows, the hallowed towers of Arsenal FC are swimming in the heat and Hornby's pate is shrimp-pink from the sun. "I've never been a football fan," ruminates Firth from behind an improbable molehill of finger food. "But I think what being a serious fanatic is all about is living for those moments of euphoria. In many ways Nick is writing about things I know very well: I am a thrill seeker. I'm just not looking as actively for the fix as I used to be. As my life has gone on I have tried to be less at the mercy of that sort of thing and invest more in things that are not as ephemeral."

If Firth seems wildly pragmatic about his It-Boy tag, it could be because he's been in the running for the big time before. In 1988 he won the title role in Milos Forman's Valmont, the $35 million Hollywood version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But it was John Malkovich's lizardly rum in the same role in Stephen Frears's version, Dangerous Liaisons, which caught the public imagination. "It felt a bit like walking into a room and telling a joke which everyone had just stopped laughing at," remembers Firth. 
"Whether you tell it better or not, it's not going to work. "Because my Valmont was not making boo-hiss faces, a lot of people didn't seem to think he was even a bad bloke," he continues. "But Forman didn't want any hint of malevolence. It was a nightmare: 15 takes because he still thought that I was saying the line as if I had some evil plan. When I first saw Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, I had developed a taste for a much more subtle approach, so it all seemed a bit like Dallas, a pantomime of grotesque villains. "

When filming on Valmont was over, Firth disappeared with his co-star Meg Tilly, the mother of his five-year-old son William, to the icy wilds of British Columbia. "I just thought, I'll see what happens when the film comes out," he explains. "And, of course, fuck all happened. In Hollywood you don't wait to see if it's a flop. I dunno whether I was afraid of the place or was too pompous to go and grovel to them. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I think I was probably a bit self-protective, a bit frightened of the magnitude of the whole thing."

The refusal to work the system left Firth back where he'd begun, turning in letter-perfect performances in small British movies from the communist schoolboy in 1984's Another Country through to the French medieval lawyer fighting parochial prejudice in 1993's The Hour Of The Pig - and on TV in roles like the paralysed Scots guard Robert Lawrence in the BBC's Falklands drama Tumbledown..

Firth speaks like an E.M. Forster-Evelyn Waugh hybrid brought up in a world of boys' dorms and cruel nicknames. But the public-school label is misleading. In fact, the grandson of Indian missionaries, he spent his childhood moving between Nigeria, St Lucia, Bath and Billericay with his father's peripatetic teaching job, finishing up at a Secondary Modern in Winchester where he skived constantly and talked "loik that".

"I detested school to an incredible extent," he says. "I loathed being told what to do by people I didn't respect. I didn't see why I should be thrown in with people who I hadn't chosen to be with. Around the age of 14 l just thought, Fuck this. Acting was just a big sort of bail-out, really. 1 wasn't getting a lot of praise for anything else at school. I guess I was more of a show-off than anyone else when it came to being on stage."

Firth has finished picking over his lunch. "I don't give a shit about fame," he says, suddenly serious. "I really don't. I haven't been thinking there is some next level that I have to get on which would make me happier. Other people have thought that for me."

• Fever Pitch is released in the UK on April 4; The English Patient is on release.