Colin Firth (6 page)

Having been part of the process at its outset, and surrounded by friends who had worked with him since the play’s first outing in Greenwich, Rupert Everett was keen to stamp his authority on the set and was soon ruling the roost. Unfortunately for Colin, the flamboyant star took against him, labelling him ‘ghastly’ and ‘boring’.

In his autobiography,
Red Carpets and Banana Skins
, public schoolboy Everett admitted that he had initially fancied his co-star but he and Piers, who played Jim Menzies in the play and film, soon dismissed Colin as a ‘grim
Guardian
reader in sandals’.

‘He produced a guitar and began to sing protest songs between scenes,’ wrote Rupert. ‘“There are limits,” said my friend Piers Flint-Shipman when “Lemon Tree, Very Pretty” began. Colin was visibly pained by our superficiality.’

Secondary-modern kid Colin, who came from a very different background to the pair, was an earnest, politically minded young man at the other end of the scale from the frivolous attention-seeking star. ‘Colin was very red-brick university, strumming a guitar,’ Everett recalls. ‘I remember him saying once that if he earned any money he was going to give it to the Communist party or something like that, and I was way in the other direction. He wasn’t really much fun. We were at the end of the working-class revolution in the theatre at that time, that
Look Back in Anger
generation. English theatre was still very politically motivated when I
started out, and it attracted a very politically motivated type of person. Colin was the kind of emblem for Redgraveism, and I didn’t fit into that and I didn’t like that whole Royal Court, RSC kind of right-on “kill ’em with art” vibe.’

Colin has since disputed Rupert’s version of events, claiming he never wore sandals and that he doesn’t remember bringing a guitar on to set either. Certainly, he says, he never learned to play the 1960s folk song, which compares love to the pretty but bitter fruit of the lemon tree.

‘I did bring a copy of
The Guardian
, so I suppose the essence of Rupert’s version is sort of true,’ he told the
Sunday Telegraph
. ‘It was a grisly experience – he was so badly behaved, and had the most powerful bullying technique, which was that he shimmied on to the set, and everyone promptly fell in love with him, so it was awful to be subsequently excluded by him.

‘One was very easily seduced by Rupert. And he was much more worldly than me – I thought I was sophisticated, until I met him.’

And Rupert concedes that his youthful self was less than charitable to the inexperienced Hampshire lad. ‘I’m sure I was just as nightmarish as he was, you know,’ he has said. ‘And
Another Country
was kind of my gig – I’d done the play, the producers were my friends, and I was probably a bit cocky in those days, you know, especially towards Colin.’

Colin agrees that ‘Rupert got on with very few people. He found us all ghastly, naive and bourgeois.’ But he
admits there were faults on both sides. ‘Basically I was unbelievably dull. And Rupert, well, among his virtues was not tolerance of earnestly dull people, so it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven at that time. We were both ghastly in our different ways.’

Rupert’s obvious disdain made the set an uncomfortable place for Colin, and the Russian spy drama sparked a cold war between the two rising stars that would last for nearly twenty years. But the dynamic between them worked well on screen. The disaffected schoolboys of the film, although friends, are wildly different characters. Guy is a flamboyant, pleasure-seeking extrovert who enjoys the privileges his upbringing affords and is hungry for more. Tommy Judd, closer to Colin’s personality at the time, is an intense, banner-waving Marxist who sees the public school and its hierarchy as a ‘system of oppression’.

Contrary to popular belief, Judd is not based entirely on Guy Burgess’s friend and accomplice Donald MacLean, but on an amalgam of one Esmond Reilly, a Wellington School boy whose left-wing magazine was banned, and John Carnford, a Communist killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Judd is ridiculed and ostracized for his views, and Colin admired the character’s conviction to his cause. ‘I’d never have Judd’s strength in terms of allowing himself to become a joke in order to publicize his convictions,’ he said. ‘The way he sticks by these convictions all the time makes him unique. Most people don’t have that kind of courage. They prefer to go along with the crowd.’

While sharing the earnestness of Judd, Colin claimed he was more in the mould of Bennett when it came to his own reaction against perceived injustices in the system and Montgomery of Alamein.

‘Kids from middle-class families were slotted into academic pursuits while those from less literate backgrounds did carpentry. I wasn’t a Communist, and when I rebelled against those assumptions, it was more as Bennett would have done. I was scruffy, I was cocky and I was trouble, but I didn’t go around voicing principles.’

As well as launching Colin on to the film scene,
Another Country
afforded him a taste of the high life to come. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1984 and won the coveted award for the Best Artistic Contribution. At twenty-four, Colin was walking down the red carpet at one of the most prestigious events in the film calendar and being fêted by all those around him. Everyone except, of course, Rupert. The leading man, claimed Colin later, refused to speak at the press conference for the movie because of his co-star’s presence.

While it was his first foray into the trappings of stardom, the young actor didn’t exactly shrug off his earnest image with his reaction. While his hedonistic and well-connected co-star was, no doubt, enjoying the parties and people that Cannes’s famous Croisette offers festival-goers, Colin took the luxuries bestowed on him with a large pinch of salt.

‘It’s a shock how quickly you take things for granted,’ he said. ‘How after three days of limousines, big dinners and photographs in Cannes, it stops being interesting. I certainly feel that as an actor, you have to ask yourself every day why the hell you do it.’

Although he later admitted that sudden fame ‘blew me away’, Colin appeared sanguine about his uncertain future at the time and ready to roll with the punches. He had expected to pay his dues on leaving drama school and work his way up from the walk-on part, and his dream had been to start his own theatre company, but
Another Country
had already lifted him to another dimension and he confessed, rather plaintively, that ‘I’ve lost my bearings’.

‘My sense of ambition has been numbed completely,’ he said. ‘When I got the part in the film, I already had a job
and I didn’t know how to react. On stage, you function on adrenalin, but the medium of film is very bizarre. The energy is different because the work is so detailed, so subtle. All I know is that I have to cope with what comes next in a very sober way and give myself a breathing space to sort things out.’

While it must have felt like doors were opening in every direction, it would be a while before he would get another breakthrough role. In the meantime, he was never one to rest on his laurels, taking a variety of stage and screen roles including a tiny part as a young policeman in the screen actor’s rite of passage,
Crown Court
. Directly after
Another Country
wrapped, he resumed the Bennett role to complete the West End run. And in August 1983 he auditioned for the lead role of Armand in a TV adaptation of
Camille.
The costume drama, based on Alexander Dumas’s novel, is the story of a young, wealthy man whose love for a courtesan threatens to bring shame on the family. After his father begs her to leave Armand, she reluctantly agrees, only to rekindle the relationship when poverty and ill health threaten to ruin her.

Despite his good looks, the American producers originally felt that Colin wasn’t romantic enough for the part. Called in for a screen test, he swayed them by sniffing a rose throughout the entire performance.

The drama was to be filmed as part of a series called
Hallmark Hall of Fame
, and the lead character of Marguerite was played by a then unknown Greta Scacchi. Colin spent September in Paris filming with a cast of greats including John Gielgud, Denholm Elliot, Ben Kingsley and Billie Whitelaw. At twenty-three, it was a young actor’s dream come true.

His next job may have seemed like coming back down to earth with a bump. In the summer of 1984 he was starring in
The Doctor’s Dilemma
at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, Kent. The George Bernard Shaw play, written in 1906, centres on a physician who has a cure for tuberculosis but can only afford to administer one dose. He has to choose between a fellow doctor and a talented but amoral artist, Louis Dubedat, played by Colin. The doctor’s dilemma is further complicated by the fact that he is in love with Dubedat’s wife, and his motives are therefore clouded.

While it may not have been the most glamorous of settings after a summer filming in Paris, the play boasted a solid cast, including Patrick Cargill, Tom Baker and Gayle Hunnicutt.

The same summer brought another film role that instantly fulfilled one of Colin’s wildest ambitions – a chance to work with his hero, Paul Scofield. Shot almost entirely inside,
1919
is the story of a meeting of two of Sigmund Freud’s former patients, fifty years on. Colin was to play the young version of Paul Scofield’s character, who is tortured by his love for his own sister. ‘My whole part consists of lying on a couch talking about my bowels,’ he told
Company
magazine. ‘I loved every minute of it.’

The film attracted a very small, art-house audience and Colin’s screen time was not substantial, but he was happy to work in the shadow of the man whose brilliant performances had convinced him to pursue an acting career. ‘I was star-struck and absolutely in awe of him but he was incredibly kind to me,’ he said.

Next was a romp in Amsterdam in the TV movie
Dutch Girls
in which Colin was once more in school uniform. A teenage hockey team are sent on tour in Holland to represent
their school, but find the girls a lot more interesting than the windmills, tulips or, indeed, the hockey. The promising group of youngsters who made up the team included
Another Country
compatriot James Wilby, the extremely funny Timothy Spall, and one Daniel Chatto, who was later to wed Sarah Armstrong-Jones and become Princess Margaret’s son-in-law. Colin’s character, Neil Truelove, is a typical public schoolboy on the verge of sexual awakening when he meets the beautiful Romelia, played by Gusta Gerritsen. Too shy to kiss her on the first date, the smitten teen finds romance doesn’t come easy.

Coming from a boys’ school himself, Colin identified with the timid, awkward approach of Truelove. ‘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 I 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 realized women was just human beings.’

Although happy to be working, Colin worried that he was being typecast in the white-flannel mould.

‘I was given the sort of English public schoolboy stamp,’ he told
Attitude
magazine in 1987. ‘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. 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.’

In the midst of all this frenzied activity, Colin suffered a setback that was something of a hangover from his early dreams of rock stardom. Strenuous singing with his teenage band had left him with a weak larynx and he suffered an inconvenient bout of laryngitis which left him unable speak any louder than a whisper for a few months. In keeping with his training from the Drama Centre, the normally verbose actor had to use fewer words and more eloquent facial expressions. ‘I would avoid bars and restaurants because I couldn’t project above the level of the room,’ he says. ‘I started to strategize my way around my failure to communicate. I said things differently than the way I would choose to say them. And I remember thinking: “I don’t have my personality. If I can’t say it this way, who am I then?”’ Even so, it was to prove good training ground for his most famously taciturn character, Mr Darcy, some ten years later.

Fully recovered, Colin returned to the stage to star opposite Anthony Hopkins in Schnitzler’s
The Lonely Way
in 1985
.
Translated and directed by drama school mentor Christopher Fettes, the play opened at Guildford’s prestigious Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and transferred in February to London’s Old Vic. It’s the story of an ageing artist, played by Hopkins, who craves a relationship with the son who has been brought up as another man’s child. Colin played the twenty-three-year-old Felix, who is oblivious of his
true parentage.

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