Firth Coming 

In the autumn of 1995, on the set of TEP, Colin Firth was extremely bewildered by the news from home. After 15 years in theater, television, and movies, after having been dismissed when he played a flamboyantly successful seducer in a hugely expensive film (Valmont), he was told that his performance as Mr. Darcy in P&P had caused a sexual upheaval of volcanic intensity. Dozens of newspaper articles analyzed Mr. Darcy's appeal, babies were named after him, and the BBC even auctioned his frilly shirt for charity, inviting women to take "a last look at the shirt they longed to undo." "I can't understand it," he said, genuinely puzzled. "I've never tried harder not to be sexy in my life."

In Scotland now, making a World of Moss[later retitled My Life so Far], Firth is very friendly but a bit on edge. The movie is behind schedule, a nuisance since he had arranged to go on a trip in 2 days' time, which he has decided to make anyway. "I've been a bit distracted sorting things out and packing up," he explains. He is in a cream shirt and trousers, looking dream-factory fresh, but Makeup has spied some microscopic failing, and saying, "They're just going to tweak me," he slips away. "I'm not the Brideshead Brit I seem," he continues on his return. "I'm a Scots eccentric." He's a blindingly clean eccentric, though, especially considering all the dogs and doves and small children hanging around. Rosemary Harris plays his mother-in-law in this family saga--ironic in view of past speculation that she might take on that role in real life, too. (Firth's romance with her daughter, Jennifer Ehle, his costar in P&P, preceded his attachment to Livia Giuggioli, whom he married this past June in Italy.)

Firth will be seen this month, however, in a much bigger movie, an adaptation of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning 1991 novel, ATA. It's bigger not only in physical scope, as suggested by its title, but in the range of emotions and the names of its leading actresses. Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange play the married sisters who, while fighting off a challenge to their ownership of a farm, have affairs with the same man. Firth plays Jess Clark, a Vietnam draft evader who, in 1979, has come home to Iowa after 13 years of wandering, seemingly freedom-loving but actually manipulative and vain. But Firth, of course, could not condemn the character if he was to get inside his skin.

In this case, says Firth, he was reminded of a friend who, like Jess, had lost his mother early. "He needed to make every woman fall in love with him. He would cry with all of them and announce every time, 'That's the first time I've cried since my mother died.' I don't believe that was cynical. He was licking his wounds with every woman he met." The Don Juan impulse was familiar to him, Firth says, from the insecurity of so many actors about their maleness. "A lot of actors feel defensive about acting not being a masculine occupation. They take the attitude 'Yes, I'm an actor, but I'm an actor who punches people. I'm not one of those nancy actors.'" When Jess pours on the sensitivity with both women, "you might see that as his narcissism, but I see it as his pride in his sensitivity. He needs to convince himself that he is sensitive. I don't believe it's cynical. He actually appealed to me the most when he became violent, because that is when he is most honest."

Firth's looks and manners are less boyish than they were two years ago, his words more carefully chosen. "Did I really say I tried not to be sexy?" he asks, laughing with embarrassment at how conceited he must have sounded. He didn't actually--I had misunderstood that he was interested in conveying that Mr. Darcy was an emotional cripple. "The other characters complain that he is cold, that he's not at all charming, but of course he doesn't have to be." (Certainly not, considering the awe with which the upper classes are regarded. As a friend of mine once put it, "If an Englishman makes you a cup of tea, he's considered charming. If he asks someone else to make you the tea, he's effortlessly charming.") Indeed, with people constantly wanting something from him, Mr. Darcy has to protect himself with a reserve that stifles him when he falls in love with Elizabeth. "When I go on from a part," says Firth, "it's as if I've covered it with layers of earth. But I kept feeling haunted by Mr. Darcy. He was like some dead Siamese twin that I was carrying around with me--sorry, that is a really horrible image, but someone I know did see that in India. It's odd; I often think, This part is going to be a reach--this could in no way describe me--but I end up realizing it is like me."

"That's because I'm watching what I say." Firth, however, can almost get away with a 4-letter word like that, given the persona he has established in his best roles. Jess Clark fits in well with the series of wounded innocents, bewildered and enraged, he has played over the years--most recently, of course, the cuckolded husband in TEP. As Valmont, the practiced, heartless destroyer of women, he was not convincing, but the film did result in an affair with Meg Tilly, his retreat to the backwoods of Canada for several years (little but woods and grizzly bears from us to the Arctic Circle"), and a son, Will, now six. Will lives with Tilly and her new husband in California, but Firth remains keenly interested in his upbringing and sees him whenever possible. "Since I felt my childhood was being spoiled when I was at school, I worry about who Will's teachers are going to be. But I don't feel a need for him to cultivate any particular thing. I used to imagine I was infinitely liberal about children. I couldn't understand parents giving children a hard time about whether your hair was long, whether you pierced your ears, whether you were gay or straight. Though I have to admit, if my son wanted to be a soldier I'd have a problem with that. Still, I think a lot of misery is caused by expectations."