"I'm like a glutton...anything I can lay my hands on from the moment I know I'm doing a job."

"I have a certain amount of confidence in the sound of my own voice.

I don' t melt and blush very easily."

"They're not bombarding me with offers although the ones that have come along have been too preposterous to contemplate, so it's not as if I spend every day resisting $20 million paycheques."

"I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously."

St. Louis was the "most hideous memory" in Firth's childhood because "I was a precocious brat with grass-stained knees who was too proud to be silent."

"My education was deeply stifling. Nothing that I had experienced in the classroom has

had anything to do with life. At that age your entire being is invaded by your sexual consciousness, and all you're getting is algebra and French! I'm delightfully happy as an adult, but I was not very happy as a child. I'm very suspicious of people who romanticize their childhood."

""I sat in a tiny cubbyhole taking calls to and from quite famous people, alone in the building and alone in London."

He avoided cracking up by winning a job as tea-maker in the wardrobe department of Olivier's National Theatre.

"In drama school (London's Drama Centre) I tended to get flamboyant characters, paranoids and psychos. Since then, I've been astonished to find myself playing naive, sensitive, romantic young chaps."

"I think I'm getting a bit old for that stuff now, aren't I? I suppose that because of the profession I'm in, I do get a certain amount of attention that I probably would not get if I had not been known. I certainly wouldn't get the attention I get if I hadn't been on screen."

"My wife is very useful at helping me keep my feet on the ground.

She sees me in the morning, so it destroys the illusion.”

I'd die for any of my family. I can't say that I'd relish the prospect of doing so. But if it came down to it, the alternative would be unbearable, wouldn't it."

"People ask me if I have some deep-rooted psychological problem that att racts me to screwed-up characters! But it's quite simply that they're easy to play. You see, playing deeply-disturbed neurotics is such a laugh!"

"I'm earning a lot. I'm now earning what film actors earn, rather than the minute amounts I was earning a few years back. But I'm terrible with money. Most probably, it'll disappear and I won't even know where it went."

"I nearly lost the role in Apartment Zero because I was told that I was too attractive," said Firth, obviously embarrassed. "So I brought out my bag of tricks, which include smiling painfully and acting awkward in the film. Of course, I do worry that these mannerisms can be a crutch. They can really just be something to latch on to and lean on in a performance."

"I knew I wasn't going to be taken seriously if I went in there trying to act the part of a Latin Lover. And Milos was asking why everyone was so serious - why make seduction such a heavy business? It was a trap everyone had fallen into, that to play the philandered, they should smoulder. [Valmont]"

"I don't think I'm a steamy sexpot sort of bloke, I don't have the eyebrows. For me, the idea of Valmont the seducer was the claw in the velvet glove. It was about duplicity and cunning, which was the same as Forman's intention."

"I have found it very difficult to do a love scene with an actress that I'm involved with. That was particularly the case with Meg (Tilly); we found it very, very hard to make use of our relationship on the screen. You can feel invaded, you know, with half the crew around. The last thing you're going to do is giggle and do the take so many times you get bruised lips."

"I don't like sex scenes you know. In fact, I hate them. There is nothing worse than watching bums going up and down on screen. It's unnecessary and awful for the audience to watch."

"I laughed when I read that it because I didn't hear Tom say that. If he said it I blocked it out. What I remember is pure honey. Tom bathed me in charm, saying, 'You are looking great, absolutely. But you would look better if you were in better shape. I'll get you a trainer and I will pay for it."

"Listen, the first role I ever played was a gay man, and it started my career. I played one in 'Mamma Mia' and somewhere else I have forgotten. I will play anything if the character is interesting. I am not going to base it on what the sexuality is."

When Colin Firth was an fledgling actor in his early 20s, he had nothing but disdain for the Oscars. "I thought they were unhealthy and bad for the profession. I'm just not as earnest about things like that anymore. It's not like I made some great U-turn. I didn't. But I am now a compromised middle-age man."

"Forget "trying" to be sexy. That's just gruesome."

"Well it doesn't exactly have a ring to it, does it? It's more the sort of name you'd give to your goldfish for a joke." [about his first name]

"For a while I felt I had to be excessively modest so people didn't think I was above them. I forgot to return a phone call and now it was because I was thought arrogant, not because I was scatty and always had been. Then I realised nothing had changed. I was working, that's all there was to it."

"Wherever I am, people always say, 'You're always away.' You feel like the invisible man. I'm never here, I'm never there, So where am I?"

One of my dreams actually came true because I got to ride a horse through a South American town, ride through the old Spanish quarter caked in dirt, filthy, matted, holding a gun, with Ennio Morricone blasting out in the background and the town burning."

They gave me a quite uncontrollable horse the first day, a mustang or something, and I was thrown for the first time in my life - and I pride myself on being quite good...

"'And there's a scene where I'm being garroted - do you know what garroting is? There's a metal collar to strangle me around my neck and someone yelled an instruction which I didn't understand. My hands are tied behind my back and I don't speak Spanish to tell them I'm REALLY being strangled and to stop. And yet we finished on schedule and it looks great."

"I was about to send this when a man came to repair my fridge ...... I don't know what's best for me so I would like to thank the fridge guy"

"I'm not very hopeful, I'm afraid, it's just nice to get the nomination, frankly."

"An encounter with Tom Ford is to come away feeling resuscitated, a little more worldly, better groomed, more fragrant, and more nominated than one has ever been before."

"My grandmother did a lot of amateur acting. And I liked performing - it got me a lot of attention. But it didn't immediately enter into my head that I'd actually try it as a career. All I knew about it was that it was impossible and no one gets any work"

"But as I got older I realized that, if I wouldn't have chosen acting, I might have ended up in prison. They would have arrested me for being smelly and pathetic and on the streets."

 "I don't want to pretend it was this thing I had to do. I didn't hear a voice coming from the North Star saying, 'You must act.'"

"I often play very nice people, and I have to say, it's really nice to play someone who isn't so nice. Nice people are boring, usually, but playing someone with a little edge is really fun. It's intriguing".

"Romantic leads are rather featureless. There's nothing to really sink your teeth into as an actor and tear out. I supposed (Bridget Jones') Darcy has a pompous side, but he seems to have become the romantic ideal quite by accident, I don't quite understand that, really."

"Tom (Ford) and I took a huge risk on each other. It was a huge leap of faith, because there was no guarantee any of it would work. Tom was a first-time director, and I got to watch him become a filmmaker, but we both walked into it knowing we weren't

doing it for the money."

"There are certain times in one's career when you take a role out of necessity. You just need a job. That's a very real concern for almost every actor. But the luxury of being employed on a regular basis is you can afford to, you know, evaluate each project and what it means to you,"

"One of the things I've always been taught as a drama student was not to play the emotion.That doesn't mean to say you don't express it, you don't have it, you don't find it.The emotion is the obstacle. The person doesn't want to be unhappy, and the unhappiness is the obstacle that gets in the way."

"I'm attracted to frightening women. I married one. She's bright, ruthless and efficient, knows me too well and is always a step ahead."

"When Will found out I was doing a Christmas Carol he was astonished I wasn't playing Scrooge. He couldn't believe I was playing a happy character."

"The funny thing is that when I finally read A Christmas Carol, which was around the time we made the film, I had this feeling that I hadn’t actually ever read it before and yet I knew everything about it.”

“The internet throws things up. I don’t go on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) very often, but in the past I have been connected to projects that I had no idea about!”

 "The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think."

"I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird."

"Forget "trying" to be sexy. That's just gruesome."

"If I want my career to go on, I'm going to have to find some more Fiennes brothers! However, any similarity between them basically stops at their last name. I was in no way reminded of Ralph by working with Joe. I got on fantastically with both of them. I have huge admiration for them as actors but I couldn't compare them."

"Well it doesn't exactly have a ring to it, does it? Colin is more the sort of name you'd give to your goldfish for a joke."

"I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better or a lot worse, depending on how I want it to look."

"The first actor who really blew me away was Paul Scofield in [the movie] A Man for All Seasons (1966). I'd never seen such integrity in acting, and it struck me as a fascinating paradox because acting is artifice. It can be argued to be entirely false.

I thought, how can an actor suggest such truth?"

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

Every single film since ["Pride and Prejudice" (1995)] there's been a scene where someone goes, "Well I think you've just killed Mr Darcy". But he is a figure that won't die. He is wandering somewhere. I can't control him. I tried to play with it in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). I've never resented it: if it wasn't for him I might be languishing, but part of me thinks I should do this postmodern thing, change my name by deed poll to Mr Darcy. Then people can come up to me and say, 'But you are not Mr Darcy' which would be different. I dare say it will be my saving grace when the only employment available to me is opening supermarkets dressed in breeches and a wig."

I feel quite strongly about anti-Americanism. I share people's grievances about the current Administration but I remember my father and I watching the Watergate hearings. Here was a country arraigning its own leaders. America has a fantastic history of dissent (2007).

I find I'm increasingly lusted after by people beyond pensionable age. I was told of a woman in hospital, diagnosed with high blood pressure, who was told not to watch any more "Pride and Prejudice" (1995). She was 103."

 "If you are the kind of person who always wanted to see middle aged men in tight spandex trying to sing, then Mamma Mia: the Movie is the film for you."

"You know, the first thing we did was to record our songs, because you pre-record before you shoot the film. And then you have to shoot it live, which a lot of it was, and it was the fearsome Benny and Björn of Abba, and they were notorious hard customers, and they booked me three days in the studio to sing a three-minute song. So my mind was reeling with images of myself, you know, floods of Ambian-fueled tears, while I was being shouted out in Swedish by bearded men. But, fortunately, when I met them, they were friendly. There was something in their friendliness that had a reserve to it. I thought, "I'm going to be friendly as long as I'm not crappy". And then half an hour later, they were actually OK. Pierce Brosnan and Stellan walked in and I looked at their faces, I was staring into a vortex of fear, both of them in spirals. And nothing bonds you more than blind terror really. Within a few more minutes, the three of us were like The Andrews Sisters around the mike, you know."

"Actors are basically drag queens. People will tell you they act because they want to heal mankind or, you know, explore the nature of the human psyche. Yes, maybe. But basically we just want to put on a frock and dance."

"I'm like a glutton...anything I can lay my hands on from the moment I know I'm doing a job."

"Your face is supposed to move if you're going to act. Why on earth would you take a violin and make the strings so that they don't vibrate? Injecting something in to your face so it's paralysed, or cutting bits of it up so that you take any signs of life out of it is catastrophic if you're going to express yourself in any way at all."

"I've got nothing against being adored, actors do need to be praised. But do I want everyone in a restaurant to know me? Absolutely not."

"People think earning $20 million is better, but how many castles can you live in? How many cars can you drive? Excessive ambition can destroy the good stuff."