Colin Firth

After completing 10 films in the past two years, Colin Firth is taking a rest. He talks to Peter Wilson about his astonishingly varied career and why he hates playing the romantic lead

Mr Darcy has had enough. Twelve-and-a-half years after Colin Firth burned himself into millions of female memories as Jane Austen's moody hero Fitzwilliam Darcy, he wants a rest from acting. "I just think I'd like to do other things for a while," he says.

Given that his breakthrough moment came when he emerged from a lake in a wet shirt in the TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, Firth could have been washed up by the time he reached his current age of 47. In fact, he has just been through the busiest period of his career, and after finishing 10 films in two years, he is worried about burning out.

"I've just now decided that I'm going to stop working for a while," he says. "I'd like to not act for a little while, and it would be very, very nice to take a long breather."

Sitting in the lounge of his local members-only club in Chiswick, west London, Firth is musing on how to manage a career over the long haul. "A year off would be great," he says, "but it probably won't last that long. It's precautionary really—it's trying to know when it's time to let things go fallow for a bit before you carry on.

"I spoke to Christopher Walken about it once. I said that sometimes I want a year off, and he said: 'That's nonsense. Someone's going to give you a year off when you're not looking for it, man.' So maybe I'm being a bit precious, but I think it's important to just sit back and get that spark back. I don't want to have a year just sitting around on my arse."

Instead, he says he might read, pursue a latent interest in writing, help out at the environmental-technology shop he owns in Chiswick with his wife Livia Giuggioli, an Italian documentary maker, and her brother Nicola, and spend more time with their children, Luca, seven, and Matteo, four.

"It is very difficult to talk about acting in a way that doesn't make you sound like a prat so most people, quite wisely, don't even go there," he says. "Writers and artists can get away with an awful lot in deconstructing their craft, but actors just sound like overweening luvvies. Maybe we are, but nevertheless there is a process. It doesn't all just come for nothing and it can be quite turbulent at times. I think it's just that human nature needs to rest and replenish itself, in whatever job you've got."

Firth was certainly the best-looking guy in the lounge of his club on the day we met, but his features and figure have naturally softened and there is a fair bit of grey in his stubble. But he has never been just a handsome face.

A leading stage actor at Drama Centre London in his early 20s, Firth was told by the principal, Christopher Fettes, that as long as he was not typecast for his matinee-idol looks, he had the potential to become the next Paul Scofield, one of the greatest English actors of all time. Firth has since worked with Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole, but he says Scofield, who died in March, "was at the very top for me".

"He was the man who opened my eyes to acting when I was about 13 or 14," says Firth. "When I saw him in A Man for All Seasons, I re-thought what acting was. I realised it's not just about exciting behaviour and changing your accent and your walk. I saw this quiet integrity and I thought that it is such a paradox because acting is acting, so it is false, but I was seeing something so completely true."

Even without the acting ambitions, the young Firth was never headed for academia. Three of his grandparents were missionaries—Firth spent his first four years in Nigeria—and his parents were both academics, but it was clear Firth wouldn't follow in their path.

He says he still has a report card in which a teacher explained his exam score of three per cent: "The teacher wrote: 'I originally awarded Colin two per cent for writing my name at the top, and two per cent for writing his name. I'm afraid I had to subtract one point for misspelling my name.'"

Firth accepts that he is unlikely ever to shake off the Darcy character, but he happily acknowledges how much the role has given him, including the luxury of taking time off. As a result, he tends to embrace Darcy's legacy rather than worrying about being typecast.

In the two Bridget Jones films, he went along with a string of in-jokes about the character, playing a love interest called Mark Darcy and splashing around in a fountain in a wet shirt while fighting Hugh Grant.

In the recent teen comedy St Trinian's, he once again wades out of a lake in a wet shirt and is humped on the leg by a dog called Mr Darcy.
Firth's latest films have been remarkably diverse. At the popular end of the range has been the St Trinian's remake with Rupert Everett, the Abba musical Mamma Mia! and Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol, which is being made with animation technology.

But in the same two years, he has completed several thoughtful and relatively low-budget dramas, including Genova, directed by Michael Winterbottom, Then She Found Me, in which he stars with Helen Hunt, and And When Did You Last See Your Father?, alongside Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson. At the same time, he has been working as executive producer on a documentary his wife is making about a man on death row in Philadelphia.

"The light-entertainment stuff that I've done simply has a higher profile than my more serious work," he says. "But I've always been drawn to more complex character roles."

In fact, the romantic hero is his least favourite role. "The more appealing the character is, the more I shy away from it," he says. "I really don't believe I ever belonged in romantic roles. When Darcy came along, I thought it was weird that they were asking me to play a romantic role at 35.

"I certainly didn't play him as some greatly admirable figure. He is the biggest bastard. That was the way into him for me. I turned down the role for months and it was actually a friend of mine who said: 'I think you should do it because you are such a shit. You are the most unpleasant person acting in England.'

"In the book, he is an extremely disagreeable man. He doesn't have the demeanour of the good chap—it is the demeanour of an aloof, priggish, judgmental, harsh, selfish man. That was the angle I went for. I found that the softening of Darcy was the most difficult stuff to do. It was far more fun to scowl and look out of the windows and sneer at people. It is a character role—he only features in about 10 to 15 per cent of the footage time in the series. He is sort of off to the side, and so that is very, very different from playing a proper central romantic hero."

Firth said he was happier playing an even less attractive character—the snide Lord Wessex in 1998's Shakespeare in Love. "I love that character," he says. "It's one of the performances I am most proud of, in anything I have done. I pulled that one off. But it is almost anti-comedy; he is the antithesis of everything that is charming and wonderful about that film. If it's a film about wit and poetry, he has none. If it's a film about joy and romance, he has none. Everything the film celebrates, he lacks. I wince at most of my work, but that one, I think I nailed it."

The next time Firth hits our screens, he'll be playing Helen Hunt's less-than-ideal romantic interest in Then She Found Me, Hunt's directing debut. Firth plays a middle-aged single father, who is close to cracking under the pressure of raising his two children. "He's not everyone's dream man; his temperament is very uneven," Firth says with relish.
None of the main cast members are under the age of 40. Bette Midler puts in her first substantial performance for three years and Matthew Broderick is reliably strong, while Salman Rushdie, of all people, plays a minor part as a gynaecologist.

Charging headfirst into middle-aged angst with issues such as the death of parents, wilting romance, betrayal, infertility and adoption, the film is striking for the fact that Hunt, 44, and Firth actually look their ages. The fact that Hunt, in particular, was allowed to look like a woman of her age makes this a rare Hollywood offering. Much more typical was her 1997 Oscar-winning romantic comedy As Good as it Gets, filmed when she was 33 and her co-star, Jack Nicholson, was 60.

"Helen could have had all the make-up artists and soft filters, and I think it is a real testament to her that she didn't," says Firth. "She said to me: 'I am not going to order you, but I don't want make-up.' So we agreed right there."

The film would not have been shot with such realism without a person of Hunt's stature working as director, co-writer and executive producer, as well as star. "It was very hard to get this film made on the terms that it was made—it doesn't have the elements that make an easy pitch," says Firth.

"It is an honest, accessible, intelligent look at the life of a woman of that age. I think if Helen had made any compromises, she would have undermined the film. I like that it owns up to the imperfections of people. There are no heroes or villains in the film. Anybody who seems to be a hero, something in the film subverts that, and anyone who seems to be a villain likewise. It is full of contradictions."

Firth is uncomfortable talking about his personal life, but he admits he did have some understanding of his character's parenting pressures through his own experience after his split in the early 1990s with Canadian actress Meg Tilly, mother of his first child Will, who is now 17.

"I was a single father for a period when I was breaking up with Will's mum," he says, "so I do know what it's like to be a dad in the wake of a break-up. I can't audit how stressed I was, but I do know it can feel like a tremendous pressure."

His next film, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, will also appeal to older viewers. It centres on Firth's character preparing for his father's death, "and that is not a big thing for teenagers to relate to because you are immortal when you are about 16," he says. "This is about dying and facing up to it. It's about your own mortality and your relationship with your father.

"It deals very intelligently with a lot of the grey areas involved in relationships and family, and how fractured we all are. It doesn't allow for easy resolution—it's not a comfort film—but as you get a bit older, you realise life is like that."