Actor Colin Firth turns all angst-ridden for his latest film, 'Trauma'. But don't worry, writes Donald Clarke, there's another 'Bridget Jones' on the way.
Until quite recently an amusing feud has been running between Colin Firth and his fellow actor, Rupert Everett. The two discovered a mutual animus in the early 1980s when they starred together in the stage production of Julian Mitchell's play, Another Country. No particular incident seems to have sparked off the squabbling (we can, you'll agree, probably rule out competing interests in a woman as a potential cause); they just seemed to wind each other up the wrong way.
"We love each other now," Firth explains. "But it is plain that we didn't get on when we first worked together and I think that was my fault because I was just so boring. Rupert needs to be amused at all times. Earnestness doesn't go down well with him. He found my politics very tedious. He said, I think, that I was like some ghastly, guitar-strumming redbrick socialist."
There still is something a little boring about Colin Firth. Ever since (yes, here it comes) he emerged, dripping as much with lo-cal testosterone as with anything else, out of the lake in Andrew Davis's 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, many women have insisted on boring their male friends about the depths they take to be hidden beneath his slightly blank persona. Those depths really are awfully well hidden, some of us replied.
In his romantic comedies - Bridget Jones's Diary, Hope Springs and Love Actually - Firth has used his cool distance to convey a slightly gruffer form of shyness to that peddled by Hugh Grant. In Firth's new film, the barely coherent, but beautifully made Trauma, the reserve comes to signal, grief, despair and, quite possibly, dementia. Marc Evans's film follows the attempts of a sensitive man to come to terms with the death of his wife in a car accident. Mena Suvari may play a figment of his imagination. The hero may have stalked a murdered rock star. The rock star and the wife might be the same person . . . Oh, I don't know.
"Well there is a problem when you make a film like this. You are trying to unsettle and confuse people. But exactly how far can you go with that?" he says. "I can understand that some people will come out of the film and say that they just don't enjoy being messed with like that. But I love Mulholland Drive, for example, where David Lynch was prepared to really play with the narrative."
Mean and grumpy, with a scarred, messed up face, this is a different Firth to the cuddlier version generally offered. With this film and his surly Vermeer in last year's Girl With a Pearl Earring, has there been a conscious decision to take darker roles?
"Oh yes. Not to prove anything to anybody. But just because I don't look upon my career as a continuous line. I know that my instincts will incline towards something I haven't done recently. And anybody who is in any egotistical pursuit will have a dark side. I do love films that make people laugh, but those films started to feel out of keeping with me. It didn't feel honest. I am infinitely more comfortable in Trauma territory than I am in romantic comedy territory."
It should be pointed out that, while he does not illuminate the room with energy, Firth is not at all boring in person. Taller than you might expect, a little thinner than he has sometimes seemed, he is articulate, quietly humorous and keen to indulge in lengthy bouts of self deprecation. He also seems to have a very keen talent for analysing the absurdities of fame.
I had read somewhere that he had talked to so many journalists about his role as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice that he now found it hard to distinguish between the performance itself and his subsequent musings on it.
"Yes, the real thing stopped having all meaning," he says. "It is like when you say the same word over and over again it loses all meaning. I no longer think of it as this job that I did. It is now this recurring question that I am asked."
Yet, he did agree to appear as Mark Darcy, a lawyer who reminds the heroine of the TV Darcy, in 2001's hugely successful film version of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary.
"Well, I did it partly because of what I just said. I was breathing life back into it. If you can't beat them join them. It was an intriguing phenomenon: I was in this series which then found its way into a piece of popular fiction. The only thing that has been annoying about the Darcy thing is that, no matter what I say, people won't accept that I don't find any of it annoying. It is all interesting."
COLIN FIRTH WAS born in Hampshire in 1960 to parents who were both academics. He spent some of his early life in Nigeria before returning to England, where he attended a comprehensive in Winchester. He was not a successful student and, because he could think of nothing better to do with himself, ended up studying acting at the Drama Centre in London.
"I didn't even get a maths O-level, so working in the bank was out. I wasn't going to go into the armed forces. Politics was just too painful. I am just listing arbitrary possibilities to prove that I don't think I would have been good at anything else at all," he laughs.
It all seemed to fall into place quite quickly. In 1983, while still at drama school, he was cast as the lead in the stage version of Another Country. The film version (in which he played a slightly smaller role) followed a year later. There have been ups and downs, but he has worked fairly consistently ever since.
"It was indecently easy really," he says, sounding slightly guilty. "The catch has got to come someday. There have been a series of apparent big breaks and every time they come along I think: 'I thought I already had my break'."
Maybe the problem I have with Colin Firth the actor is something to do with the mellow decency of Colin Firth the man. I may not wish to be on the next bar stool when, say, Russell Crowe launches into one of his tirades, but that sort of bolshie energy is very useful for a screen actor. Maybe if Firth was more of a jerk - not, we should make clear to all Australian law firms, that Crowe is any such thing - he might be a little more interesting.
He is characteristically pleasant about his ex-girlfriend, Meg Tilly, with whom he has a son. "I shouldn't really say any more about it, but we have remained on very good terms." And he can be very amusing about his efforts to make friends with the family of his Italian wife, Livia Giuggioli. After seven years together he admits that only recently has he felt able to speak the language without embarrassment.
I wonder if his segment of Love Actually, in which a writer and his Portuguese maid fall in love despite the fact that neither speaks the other's language, reminded him of his current home life in any way.
"It has echoes of it," he laughs. "The whole business of the opportunity to learn a language becoming part of courtship. And, of course, it is such an attractive language and an attractive place. In a lot of other countries it would not have been so pleasant." And has he learned to cook the food? "You know what? I cook less now, because I am so intimidated by being surrounded by such cooking genius. I am very cautious about putting in my own contribution."
LIVING PARTLY IN Italy, partly in London, he seems to have happened upon a pretty jolly existence. He has two children with Livia and makes sure he sees his other son frequently.
But given that he has said he is more comfortable appearing in darker films such as Trauma rather than romantic comedies, does this say anything about his current state of mind?
"If I was really genuinely tortured soul I wouldn't be able to stand a film like Trauma. My life is enormously satisfying, mostly because of my relationships with my family. I am not an easy person to live with. Anybody who has to plunge himself into a new environment every day and has the anxieties and the disappointments that actors have is also going to have a fair measure of egotism and neurosis. ButI have a pretty good technique for coming back smiling about it all."
Firth will be back in romantic comedy mode later this year when the sequel to Bridget Jones (about which he is sworn to secrecy) arrives in cinemas and, unless some freak virus wipes out all the world's single women, it will give him another hit. Will he then finally feel confident about the security of his career prospects? Will he no longer be waiting for the catch to come?
"You can't make that assumption ever," he says. "You know that you have probably got some credit for a few more years. I don't think about it very much to be honest. I suppose even if everything you do from now on is a disaster people are still going to hire you for the novelty factor."
Like William Shatner? "If you like," he laughs.
Trauma is on general release