The real Colin Firth: "I am rougher round the edges than Darcy"

Colin Firth, famous as television's Mr Darcy, is back on the London stage in a play that makes him think about his own past, he tells Kate Bassett.

COLIN FIRTH, the actor formerly known as Mr Darcy in the BBC's lauded Pride and Prejudice, is attempting to dim the lights. He is standing before me in a quiet recess of the Donmar Warehouse, the West End theatre where he is appearing in Richard Greenberg's hit play Three Days of Rain. He is doggedly poking his finger into a live lamp socket and I'm wishing I'd never suggested that its beam was a bit interrogatory.

When he finally re-angles the bulb and sits, in any case, some way off in a shadowy corner, I consider I'd best not start in with questions about his noted habit of retreating from the limelight.

Instead I ask him about Three Days, which has returned for a second run (ending on January 22), after its sell-out first outing in March. Why did he choose to play two contrasting roles in this small-scale American play, including Walker, an unhappy neurotic? Firth responds with marked frankness. "The original fortnight run," he says, "was so brief that the risk of going on with new material was reduced."

He is also down-to-earth about his Boxing Day appearance on ITV in a new dramatisation of The Turn of the Screw. He plays the children's guardian in Henry James's classic, adapted by Nick Dear. "My part," he says, "involved one day's filming - so why not?"

Despite such pragmatism, he is also expansive on the high artistic calibre of both projects. He remarks of Three Days, "Though it didn't reveal itself to me completely in the initial readings, now I think it's a really major work."

Walker's obsession, following the death of his famous architect father, with his legacy has particularly struck home. "I won't," he says, "go into details, but my mother and father have been delving into their family histories, and each generation looks for clues about themselves in their parents." He notes his own united contrasting traits: "Flamboyance on one side and classically English reserve on the other."

Did Firth, 39, also want to play the modern-day, often comical Walker to avoid being typecast as an intense English gent? That image has, after all, hovered around him ever since he left London's Drama Centre to star in Julian Mitchell's Another Country as the double agent Bennett in the stage production, then his fiery, Trotskyite, public-school chum, Judd, in the film of 1983."No," Firth insists, "I feel very separate from that perceived image."

Countering the plummy stage and screen roles and his clubbable manner, Firth actually went to a tough, "really nasty" school in the US - his parents travelled as teachers - and a comprehensive in Winchester. He is Left-wing, actively campaigning for Survival International and against the detention of asylum-seekers. Tugging at his baggy jumper, he shrugs off Mr Darcy's finesse. "Anyone who spent any time with me," he says, "would swiftly find I was rougher round the edges than him."

When Pride and Prejudice was first broadcast in 1994, it seemed that Britain's entire female population was longingly focused on the smouldering Firth and his electrifyingly tight breeches. Yet, he comments mildly, "I can't say I've been mobbed. At that time I was mostly in Tunisia filming The English Patient and in Italy" - the native country of his soon-to-be wife, producer Livia Guiggiolo. "When I did come back to London," Firth recalls, "my hair as the pilot cuckolded by Kristin Scott Thomas was extremely short and fair, so I wasn't recognised. I remember sitting in a Soho restaurant next to people talking about Mr Darcy."

"Those who do approach me because of Pride and Prejudice," he goes on, "tend to assume that a gracious formality is expected. The only hysterical moment I've had was recently when some girls recognised me in the supermarket and started to shriek, but that was from Fever Pitch." His role as Nick Hornby's Arsenal-obsessed hero in the 1996 film of Fever Pitch has also made him casually matey with football fans in his local pubs in Islington, near Arsenal's home ground.

So on the issue of flamboyance versus reserve, Firth the actor is not wholly averse to attention or publicity. He indeed declares that he is "happy to plug all the work I've done this year". That includes two forthcoming films: Londinium, a comedy about media types spouse-swopping, and Noël Coward's Relative Values with Sophie Thompson and Stephen Fry.

Furthermore, he recalls being no shrinking violet - at 14, "announcing to everybody I was going at act because, besides getting me out of classroom pressures, I liked the storytelling and the praise I got." On the other hand, Firth the man certainly likes his privacy. After making the Milos Forman movie Valmont in the late Eighties, he headed off to the Canadian backwoods for five years with his co-star, Meg Tilly, and their son.

"We lived in a log cabin surrounded by forest so dense that there was hardly any light. It was my foray into being the honest woodsman type. I made furniture."

He eventually split from Tilly - as he did from Jennifer Ehle, after their love affair during the making of Pride and Prejudice. But he remains devotedly protective of his son. "He's nine now, but I'm trying to back off talking about him. I will say we do make it work decently, because everyone has been patient and mature about it."

On whether he and Livia plan to have children, he says only, "Pass." Ultimately, Firth suggests that his work is, in fact, fundamentally about self-revelation and he says that, playing the vulnerable and increasingly unlovable Walker, he feels intensely exposed. 

Elusiveness crops up again, from a slightly different angle, when I ask if his peripatetic early years - which took him to Nigeria as well as the States - inform the course his life has taken. "Yes, I think so. It's kept me unstable, hovering, never making fixed assumptions about identity," says Firth. "It's probably fed into my sympathy for asylum-seekers. I am now more settled in England with Livia than I've ever been. But I will have to keep travelling."

Like the restlessly wandering Walker, he has also started pounding the pavements before and after performances. "Livia sometimes says it's like living with different people," Firth exclaims. I'm lucky I got him to sit down at all.
 

© Copyright of The Daily Telegraph 1999