He has swapped his riding crop for a ticket to Arsenal in has latest role, yet Mr Darcy still haunts Colin Firth.
Interview by Mary Riddell

From breeches to boxer shorts

How far can we get without a mention of Mr Darcy? I am bored with him. Colin Firth is no doubt also sick of the Moss Bros school of film criticism, in which success is ineluctably linked to the cut of one's breeches.

The answer is about two sentences. "I somehow feel I'll be pleasing nobody now," Firth says gloomily. "I've seen letters saying: Why is he doing a football film after Pride and Prejudice? Why can't he play Heathcliff? And then there will be some diehard Arsenal fans, asking: What's this snooty geezer doing representing us?"

Firth has notched up some work in the interim; notably the BBC dramatisation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, and The English Patient. But it is the contrast between the Darcy codpiece and the red boxer shorts (inscribed "Go! Go! Gunners") that he gets to wear in the film of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch which provides the interesting leap forward.

Firth does not object to being portrayed in every interview as a sort of defibrillator to the romantic heart of the 
nation. It is just that such treatment misrepresents him.

He is in costume; the baggy sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers of those who inhabited the Arsenal North Bank. Or, conversely, the social science staffrooms of the new universities of Middle England, whose culture Firth seems more to represent.

Left unchecked, he has a fine line in waffle of an opaquely post-modern nature. "There seems to be a colossal self-loathing in this country; a sort of collective identity crisis. It's strange how other cultures can mythologise their present and we can't."

Scarcely textbook stuff for your average soccer oik, but ­ as Firth will tell you ­ it is dangerous to see masculinity as a set of assumptions. "There's this idea that if you like football, you also like beer and grabbing women's breasts. If you like rugby, you also like Dire Straits and wine. And if you don't like either, you must be a pacifist vegetarian who is oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer."

The son of two university lecturers, Firth had "a lousy education" at an indifferent comprehensive and left drama school for a starring role in Another Country. "I just happened to have the right sort of appearance," he says.

In other words, the nascent Darcy was already being recognised. But although he continued to do fine work, his profile ­ before Pride and Prejudice ­ remained subterranean.

Early on, his life appeared to have achieved a sort of symmetry. A starring role, an affair (in several cases) with his leading lady, followed by a bolt away from any limelight that might ensue. After Milos Forman's Valmont, he departed with his co-star, Meg Tilly, to live in the Canadian backwoods and bring up their son, Will, who is now six.

Much later, the adulation inspired by Darcy was heightened by stories of his relationship with Jennifer Ehle. Though the inaccuracies of the reporting irritated Firth, he regards such liaisons as a sort of occupational hazard.

"People fall in love with the people they meet. It's as simple as that. I don't think that actors have a greater 
predilection for bonking each other than any other group. I just think that your life is in upheaval. You're taken away from your established roots and put in intimate circumstances with someone. I suppose it makes that sort of thing more possible. It certainly doesn't happen to me all the time."

Particularly now that he is in love with Livia Guiggioli, a 22-year-old English graduate, daughter of a Rome 
businessman and protected by Firth with the assiduousness of one who has seen his private life picked over too often before.

Firth's reluctance to discuss life beyond the film set has little to do with a superstar's preciousness. Rather, he seems to have difficulty adapting to an existence with few threads to hold it together. "It seems very glamorous sometimes. Everyone's keen to make you comfortable and you don't feel you have the right to suffer in any way. But I've been itinerant for a number of years ­ going from mini-universe to mini-universe.

"Making a film is so self-contained that very little else enters your consciousness. Then it's over, and the chances are that you will never again see people who have become your entire existence. A certain amount of consistency is essential to anyone, and I have found it difficult being without that as time goes on." 

Hence his protectiveness for his new girlfriend and the son he visits constantly in Los Angeles. Wasn't it a terrible wrench to leave him after he split up with Meg Tilly and returned to work in England? "I don't consider I have left him. I go away a lot, and I come back a lot. Of course, I wouldn't be seeing enough of him unless it was every day. And there are risks. There's a danger you become a sort of Santa Claus. You have to find enough normality as well ­ to give a child the chance to be bored with yo u, take you for granted and feel it's safe sometimes to reject you. I think about that a lot."

But then Firth thinks a lot about most things. I imagine that any interview with him follows a precise format. The polite, but wary, response to the questions. A quick sideswipe at the fabricators of the press. The bit with the tape recorder switched off, where he tells you how horrid it is to have one's love life laid bare. 

And then, as he gets to know you, a long and cosy ramble through the world according to Firth.

He truly does not care for his looks or allure. The impact of those are assured. Instead he is eager to present himself as a Left-leaning, anti-public school, socially egalitarian liberal who ponders deeply on all sorts of difficult matters. A multi-faceted cosmopolitan, equally at home in Rome or Hackney, where he keeps a small flat. Hence his impatience with the two-dimensional Darcy caricature. 

"All that smouldering. Lots of people told me not to do it and said everyone would get sick of me."

Of that, there is little risk. At the moment there is a surfeit of Firth. There is the acclaimed English Patient, in which he plays a pilot cuckolded by Kristin Scott Thomas, and Fever Pitch, in which he plays Paul Ashworth, a comprehensive school teacher with an Arsenal fixation. 

The part appeals to Firth as a suitable Darcy antidote. "It deals with all the contradictions about social perception. How can you occupy this man's world and have a relationship with a woman? How can you read Byron and follow Arsenal? Personalities are full of paradoxes and opposites."

Indeed. It does not seem kind to point out that the film contains so much Arsenal and so little Byron that one 
wonders how Ashworth's girlfriend, played by Ruth Gemmell, continues to tolerate such an inarticulate and 
monofocal yob.

Not that Fever Pitch fails. On the contrary, it succeeds quite well. But only because its female audience will suspend disbelief, gaze at the Firth legs (quite as irresistible in blue jeans as in breeches) and forgive any implausibilities.

Irritating as the Darcy hangover may be, it is not quite the headache it seems. 

© Copyright of The Times 1997