He quotes a theatre review of a few years before: “Colin Firth doesn’t have enough romantic charisma to light a 50-watt bulb.” And he was 33: “Too long in the tooth to play the romantic stuff. I thought this would be my last throw of the dice.” It’s a decade since Darcy, but women have not forgotten, and many fan sites celebrate a wet-shirted Colin. Such as firthfrenzy.com or firth.com, the latter a fastidious, stalkerish temple to their hero, who is respectfully referred to as ODB (Our Dear Boy). They send him edifying books as well as their panties: he is probably pursued by the most intelligent horny women in the world.
“I have no idea what Tom Cruise’s fans feel about him,” says Firth, uncomfortably. “There are some actors who, wherever they go, people show up because they think they are fantastic. Then there are slightly marginalised people who are like somebody’s secret. I feel like a second division football team that has this following who are more into it for the fellowship of each other.”
I ask if he’s ever “googled” himself for fun and he shudders. “That way lies madness. It would be horrendous to listen to people who don’t know you discuss you in this proprietorial way.”
Post-Darcy, most of his roles have had a similar dramatic arc: romantically hurt guy healed by new love, as in his last Hollywood vehicle, Hope Springs, a rom-com so silly and limp it appears on lists of worst movies ever. He has a sideline in cuckolds: uptight upper-class ones in The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love, or gloomy souls dumped for a more fun guy, as in Love Actually.
He is aware of his repertoire’s limitations: “I got a bit of a jolt in Girl with a Pearl Earring when the director said something about my brooding looks. And I thought, that wasn’t supposed to be a f****** brooding look!” But the darkness is all external. “I’m not a brooding person,” he insists. “But when it comes to things like music or literature I am drawn to the dark stuff. That’s what is most passionate, risky and interesting.” Trauma director Evans describes Firth as “the most even-keeled, amusing, easy-to-be-with person. I’ve never seen a dark side to him except on screen.”
Firth in person does convey an ease with himself, probably attributable to his solid family background. His parents, now around 70, are both academics, whose postings to America and Nigeria gave Firth, his younger brother and sister a peripatetic childhood. This bookish environment explains his fear of “char-monkey” vacuity and a tendency to intellectualise his roles. He spent hours studying Vermeer for Girl with a Pearl Earring, prompting Scarlett Johansson, who didn’t even read Tracy Chevalier’s book, to comment drily: “Colin probably thinks he painted all the paintings himself.”
It was also an ascetic and thrifty upbringing. “It annoyed me sometimes that they weren’t more avaricious. I would like to have had more gadgets in the house, more expensive toys.” The kind of childhood that makes him feel, even today, “conditioned to save silver foil because it used to be expensive”, is an excellent inoculation against the meretricious world of movies. Firth has never been enamoured of Hollywood, never chased it hard even after Bridget Jones’s Diary, his biggest box-office hit. “Los Angeles is such an untenable place to be,” he says. “People come home and go straight to their answering machines, obsess that they aren’t invited to some premiere. You laugh it off for a week or two, then you get sucked in.”
But neither is America always enamoured with Firth, often reading his English restraint as woodenness and preferring the more quicksilver charms of Hugh Grant. Although they seldom meet, there is an undeniable rivalry between the two, played out in their on-screen fist-fight in Bridget Jones, with a rematch in Edge of Reason, out later this year. Grant’s character - witty, sexy but heartless Daniel Cleaver - is the closest he has played to his real self. And there is much of the slightly pompous decency of Mark Darcy in Firth.
While Firth’s intensity means he is often cast as an artist (Trauma, Pearl Earring, Hope Springs) or writer (Love Actually) the spivvier, shallower Grant plays someone who sells books (Notting Hill, Bridget Jones) or paintings (Mickey Blue Eyes). At this, Firth gives a small, satisfied smile.
“Hugh is a brilliant raconteur, a very funny guy,” he says. “In the DVD commentary for Love Actually he takes the piss out of me relentlessly. He says, ‘In this scene they photographed him higher up to try and make him look thinner.’ Or, ‘What’s that rinse he’s using in his hair?’ It is very funny. The rights and clearances department at Universal sent me the tape; they thought I might sue. But if I don’t play the game it will seem rather petulant.”
But in the private sphere it is Grant who is cast in darkness while Firth basks in the sun. Grant has looked anchorless since he split with Liz Hurley, bouncing around the social pages, creating kiss-and-tells. Meanwhile, Firth seems profoundly happy with his Italian wife, Livia Giuggioli, 33, a TV producer he met on the set of Nostromo in 1997. Nick Hornby has described Livia - with her beauty, culinary skills and PhD - as “joke-perfect”. Her attitude to the cult of Darcy is amused bewilderment. They have two sons, Matteo, born last year, and three-year-old Luca, whose cute bilingualisms Firth proudly recounts. Italy, where he spends around three months a year, also gives Firth respite from the low-level but wearing hassle of fame.
Firth is keen to point out he has another son, Will, 13, by Meg Tilly, the Canadian actress he met filming Valmont in 1989. Firth moved to backwoods British Columbia for five years, at some price to his career, until the relationship finally broke down. After that, he spent stints as a single parent during Will’s long summer visits.
A solidness in his personal dealings has, he says, been his ballast against the instability of his profession. “My interpretation of growing up is mostly to do with a capacity to stick with something. Whether it is a professional project, a mission or a marriage.”
For the jaded fortysomething romantic lead, a rich home life is a grand compensation. It certainly stops any fears about losing your looks. I ask Firth if he worries about body-revealing bedroom scenes as he gets older. “I go for a run,” he shrugs. “I know that if I ate everything I wanted I’d turn into a blob and that’s age. But I could never take the time it would require to get my body up to Los Angeles standards. I would change profession first.”
Trauma is released on August 27
