Biography

No man will express the slightest interest, but every woman's eyes will brighten, a coy smile of delight will appear on her lips and her head will revolve as close to 360 degrees as is possible. Just in case it's him - THE Mr. Darcy.

There is, you see, only one Mr. Darcy. No modern woman has created her own version from the pages of Jane Austen's classic Pride And Prejudice. Neither will she recall the legions of actors who have made the role their own down the years. No, there's only one, with his naturally curly brown locks and searching look, his seemingly cruel aloofness disguising a heart brimming with sensitivity, his body buff as you like as he rises from the sparkling waters of that famous lake. That's Darcy, that's Colin Firth, a man beside whom most women find Brad Pitt about as sexy as his namesake Ingrid.

Now, most actors would despise this kind of attention. They'd find it demeaning, belittling their efforts at thespianism. But Colin Firth is different. He never complains because he understands what Darcy has given him. Having toiled for a decade and a half on stage and screen, having reached the heights of Hollywood starring roles then fallen swiftly backwards, he appreciates a success that means he never wants for work, that allows him to continue in his usual experimental vein. Absolute proof of this came when he played Bridget Jones's love/hate interest Mark Darcy (the fictional Jones worships Firth). He played the typecasting game, because he knew he would win it. Colin, though most are not aware of it, has been around the block.

Returning to England with a new sister in tow (Kate, later a voice coach - a brother Jonathan, also an actor would arrive in 1967), the family spent periods out in Essex, in Billericay and Brentwood, before taking off for a year in St Louis when Colin was 12. Shirley had grown up in America and knew the place well, but Colin had a hard time. Back in England he'd been a bit of an outsider. His parents had never allowed the children to watch the "vulgar" new ITV channel, separating him from his classmates. He'd been taken by Marc Bolan and T.Rex on Top Of The Pops and tried learning guitar, but gave up when he discovered lessons would involve Kumbaya and Lord Of The Dance rather than Children Of The Revolution. Instead he used acting as an artistic outlet. Having debuted as Jack Frost in a play at infant school, he now took classes each Saturday.

No artistic or cultural divide from his school-mates, though, could prepare him for life in the States. Here, he's said, he felt like he'd stepped out of Just William while his new peers were just back from Woodstock. He was an unhappy geek amongst hairy rockers, he felt displaced and small, and reacted by becoming rude and defensive.

Back in England again, the family settled in Winchester, David becoming a history lecturer at King Alfred's College while Shirley lectured in comparative religion at the Open University. Colin, meanwhile, attended the local comprehensive. Life did not improve. He was a troubled teen, scruffy and cocky, and often railing against a middle class whose children progressed via academia while the working class were pushed towards carpentry and other manual skills. That his parents were both lecturers didn't seem to change his views (one supposes that just made him feel guilty), but then aren't most revolutions started by intellectuals? Winchester itself did not help. In the Seventies it was a seething cauldron of squaddies, hard lads and public schoolboys - there was nowhere for angry young Colin to fit in.

Times grew a tad easier at Barton Peveril 6th Form College, in nearby Eastleigh. Here Colin could sport long hair, beads and orange flares and listen to his beloved Prog Rock - Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. The arrival of punk left him unmoved, he was comfortable as an elegantly wasted freedom fighter. His school-work, however, as is usually the case when long hair and beads enter the equation, went down the pan. Some forward momentum was necessary.

Having declared at the age of 14 that he wished to become an actor, his possibilities were somewhat limited. At 18 he decided to dump college and took off to London where he joined the National Youth Theatre. It didn't send him shooting up through the ranks, he got no further than "third fairy on the left", but he was keen and once his run was done he would stay on at the theatre, sitting in a little cubbyhole answering the phone for the rich and famous. Often, he's said, he was "alone in the building, alone in London".

But he was in the building, with all its contacts and rumours of job-openings, and before long Colin had signed on as a tea-boy in the wardrobe department at Laurence Olivier's National Theatre. This in turn led to an idea - if he was to be good, he had better learn his craft. He enrolled at the London Drama Centre on Prince Of Wales Road in London's Chalk Farm area. This was a hi-octane learning establishment, drawing heavily on the theories of Stanislavsky and thus combining a Russian emotional freedom with a serious Jewish introspection. Firth knew it would be tough, that's why he chose it, but having learned "the reality of the inner world" under coach Freda Kelsall (a TV writer), he soon excelled. Studying 6 days a week for 3 years, he won the lead in the likes of Tartuffe, King Lear and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, often being asked to play flamboyant types, either paranoid or psychotic. His Hamlet was the stuff of college legend, and headmaster Christopher Fettes told him that he could be the next Paul Schofield. The principal did add a very prescient proviso, though. He said Firth should beware the effect of his matinee idol looks. Even then, Mr Darcy lurked within.

Firth's burgeoning reputation led to instant stage success. His Hamlet having been spotted by talent scouts, he was chosen to replace Daniel Day-Lewis as the lead, Guy Bennett, in the hit West End run of Another Country (Day-Lewis in turn having replaced Rupert Everett who'd brought the play to the West End alongside Kenneth Branagh). So, by June, 1983, he was blowing them away at the Queen's Theatre as the outspokenly homosexual public schoolboy Bennett, battling to find a place outside a stuffy tradition that won't accept him and eventually finding it in the world of espionage - the play being based on the real life tale of Guy Burgess and his treacherous cabal.

At one point, Everett himself took in a performance and was so impressed that he suggested Firth might be perfect as his foil in the upcoming movie version, Everett having already signed on to play Bennett. So there Colin was, making his big screen debut as Tommy Judd, an uncompromisingly principled young man who despises the hypocrisy of the system and embraces Communism openly - he could never sink to spying, could he? And once again he was a success, the character being pretty close to his teenage self back in Winchester. Everett, though, disliked him, finding him too intense, no fun to be around, "a ghastly redbrick socialist" - much as you'd expect from a student of Stanislavsky. Everett, of course, went on to star in Bob Dylan's Hearts Of Fire and be Madonna's best friend.

Firth, meanwhile, returned to play Bennett once more at the Queen's, then moved on to a classy CBS TV production of Camille, alongside the likes of John Gielgud, Ben Kingsley and Billie Whitelaw. Greta Scaachi starred as the beautiful Parisian courtesan of the title, Colin playing the rich and elegant Armand Duval, who falls for Camille and continues their affair even though he knows the scandal will ruin him. It was all looking good.

But Colin was not the type to race after fame., He knew he was still learning and so took off for the far from glamorous surrounds of the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, to play in The Doctor's Dilemma. The next year, 1985, would see him onstage at the Old Vic, as Felix in The Lonely Road. Onscreen there'd be 1919, a psychological drama involving two patients of Sigmund Freud who meet 50 years after their treatment, their stories being told in flashback. In keeping with his former headmaster's words, Colin would play the young Paul Schofield, a youth tortured by his love for his own sister. There'd also be Dutch Girls, where Firth was a member of a schoolboy hockey team playing a tournament in Holland and far more interested in young ladies than the game. He'd be joined in this by James Wilby (a co-star in the stage version of Another Country), Timothy Spall and, as a prostitute who rips the boys off, Ingmar Bergman's daughter.

Much of the next year was taken up with a single project, a huge 7-part miniseries based on JB Priestley's Lost Empires, set around the beginning of WW1 and paralleling the fall of Britain's empire and its music hall tradition. Colin starred as Richard Herncastle, a tongue-tied Yorkshire lad who gets a job as assistant to his magician uncle, dressed in Arabian Nights costumes and helping out in vanishing tricks - Laurence Olivier playing a dreadful comedian who's always on the same bill. Come 1914, conscription begins and Colin is forced to consider an altogether different form of disappearance, but ends up in France anyway, his education being completed amidst the horrors of the Great War.

1987 was another busy year. Firth stuck with Lost Empires director Alan Grint to play the older version of sickly heir Colin Craven in The Secret Garden. Then there was a brief sojourn in Hollywood filming an F. Scott Fitzgerald tale for TV, Colin playing a posh Brit director forced to work with "difficult" screenwriter Christopher Lloyd. Next, after performing in Desire Under The Elms at the Greenwich Theatre, came his second British film classic (after Another Country), A Month In The Country. Directed by Pat O'Connor, this saw him revisit WW1, or rather its immediate aftermath. As a shell-shocked vet in 1919, he works at restoring an ancient mural in an old church, at the same time restoring himself. Meanwhile, mystery is added by Kenneth Branagh (as said, another to benefit from Another Country) who's digging just outside the graveyard. It was all very British, very Arthurian in its quest for truth and decency.

The next year brought something very different in Apartment Zero. This saw Colin as a repressed and needy cine-club owner in Buenos Aires, whose mother is wasting away in an asylum and whose neighbours make him paranoid - despite one very pretty one being evidently keen to go out with him. He's lonely and in constant existential crisis and, in search of company, takes in confident, good-looking lodger Hans Bochner - a move that proves less than fruitful when Bochner starts befriending all his neighbours. With a series of political killings taking place outside this claustrophobic little world, Apartment Zero was strange, often gruesome stuff, not unlike Fellini. And it was the first sign that Firth was willing to ditch his matinee idol image in order to challenge himself as an actor.

Yet he still did have those looks and he couldn't turn down every opportunity to use them. So when Oscar winning director Milos Forman offered him the title role in Valmont, an earthy, physical take on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he had to take it. Michelle Pfeiffer was offered the part of the Marquise de Merteuil, but opted instead to play Madame de Tourvel in a rival production, to be named Dangerous Liaisons, Annette Bening stepping into the part as Firth's co-conspirator. Lustful, manipulative aristocrats in 18th Century France, they would toy with the affections and bodies of others, until real emotions leads to the downfall of them both.

Budgeted at $35 million, much of the money being spent on sumptuous sets, Valmont was an excellent production, but was beaten to the punch by Dangerous Liaisons. With John Malkovich and Glenn Close both remarkably devious in the leads, and with Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves providing starry support, this was a superior exercise in sexual mind-games and, released several months before Valmont, gave its competitor little chance of success.

For Firth this was not quite the disappointment it might have been as he immediately found himself at the centre of the huge controversy surrounding the screening in the UK of Tumbledown. Directed by Richard Eyre, this saw him as Robert Lawrence, a Royal Scots Guard paralysed by a bullet in the brain during the Falklands War, who returns to the UK to find the conflict's dead are being celebrated but the wounded utterly ignored. Angry at this injustice and at his inglorious fate, he fights his corner, only to be tossed a medal and told to shut up.

The film was an important work, and did much to force the government to reconsider its treatment of war victims. But Firth himself was disappointed. Despite having been BAFTA-nominated and lauded to the rafters for his performance, he felt he had not got inside the skin of the real Robert Lawrence. It was only later that he'd recognise the quality of his efforts.

Now, rather than using Valmont to secure a Hollywood career, Colin shied away from fame once more. In fact he turned down many Hollywood meetings (later he would explain this was out of "snobbery and fear"). First, having literally begged for the role, he co-starred alongside Peter O'Toole in Wings Of Fame. A comedy-satire of overblown film-making that also investigated the nature of fame and happiness, this saw O'Toole as a famous actor who has stolen credit for a book by the struggling Firth. For this Firth shoots him dead, then is killed himself, both of them ending up in an afterlife hotel reserved for people still famous among the living. When your name is forgotten, out you go, so Firth, as a minor celebrity killer, does not have long to sort things out.

Next came Femme Fatale which saw him as a botanist and painter in LA. Falling for and marrying freaky Lisa Zane, he's much perturbed when she leaves him and, with the help of an artist friend (played by Zane's brother Billy), follows her through an art underground riddled with drugs and perviness. There'd be yet more wacky artiness in Out Of The Blue, where Colin played a wannabe film-maker who can only relate to the world through the lens of a camera. Unable to separate art from life he tries to control his existence by organising a series of "spontaneous" events around him, and somehow draws Catherine Zeta-Jones into his web of silliness.

Also in 1991, Colin would appear onstage at the Comedy Theatre as Aston in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, but he would not be seen again for two full years. It wasn't the failure of his recent movies that provoked this (though he had disliked Femme Fatale so much he warned the public against seeing it). Rather he was now in an intense relationship with actress Meg Tilly, who he'd met when she played Madame de Tourvel in Valmont and with whom he'd had a son, Will, born in 1990. Having been Oscar nominated in 1985 for Agnes Of God, Tilly had achieved a level of fame with which she was deeply unhappy. So, having hooked up with the equally retiring Firth, she took him off to a cabin in British Columbia where they would make furniture and, well, there wasn't much else to do. Indeed sometimes the snow drifted so deep they couldn't even get out the front door for a walk.

It was a rough place, wholly isolated, with nothing much between the couple's cabin and the Arctic Circle. After two years, Firth began to feel the pressure. Desperate to escape these claustrophobic surrounds, to stay connected to the thespian world he loved, he sent his CV to several Vancouver theatres, even offering to do workshops for kids. He got no reply. Eventually, after two years in the wilderness, his relationship with Tilly came to an end.

Naturally, all momentum in his career was now lost. Not that this particularly bothered him as more interesting roles were generally to be found in lower-budget pieces. In 1993, he returned to the stage, taking the lead in Chatsky at London's Almeida, then played John McCarthy in the TV movie Hostages, concerning the kidnap victims of Hezbollah in Beirut in 1986. He followed this with The Hour Of The Pig, playing Richard Coutois, a Parisian lawyer in mediaeval France who moves to a small village where he falls for a gypsy girl and ends up defending her against charges of witchcraft - her, some rats and a pig. Well, it was France, after all.

Now came another "erotic thriller" of the Femme Fatale ilk, Playmaker. Here Jennifer Rubin was an aspiring actress who seeks tuition from eccentric, mindgame-playing coach Colin. He guarantees her success, as long as she goes along with his unpleasant regime of seduction and treachery. Both leads played it well, but the screenplay was poor, leading Firth to again warn off potential viewers. It had been a conveniently short shoot, he said, and he'd needed the money.

Along with Playmaker, 1994 brought two British TV productions in Master Of The Moor and The Deep Blue Sea. The former, based on a Ruth Rendell novel, saw Firth as a creepy denizen of Dartmoor who becomes a suspect in the serial murder of blonde women. The latter, a BBC presentation of the Terence Ratigan play, directed by Karel Reisz, saw Penelope Wilton leave her comfortable marriage for charming but inconstant flying ace Colin who, of course, dumps her for the chance of new adventures. This was an excellent part for Firth who managed to bring genuine depth to the no-good cad Freddie Page.

He did much the same in his next feature, Circle Of Friends, adapted from the Maeve Binchy novel and directed by Pat O'Connor, with whom he'd earlier worked on A Month In The Country. This 50s-set drama followed the lives and loves of three Irish girls, one of whom, a purposefully glamorous Saffron Burrows, sets her sights on Colin, heir to much family land. He seems to reciprocate her feelings but, as pressure comes to marry into money, he turns into a right bounder. The movie was very well received and provided a breakthrough for Minnie Driver, who'd played alongside Firth in Chatsky and been recommended by him to O'Connor.

And now it happened. Ever since Another Country Firth had been inundated with scripts involving public school types and beastly aristocrats. This had not been easy for the former Winchester hippy who'd railed against such social privileges. So when he was offered the part of Fitzwilliam D'Arcy in a miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice it seemed tiresomely predictable. This was surely the kind of role Christopher Fettes was warning him about all those years before. He turned it down. Several times.

But then he reconsidered. After all, what was wrong with mainstream acclaim? Why be snobby and elitist if it was just going to bring you films like Femme Fatale and Playmaker? He decided to do it and, in his quietly tumultuous affair with Jennifer Ehle's Elizabeth Bennet, seized the hearts of millions. He certainly seized the heart of Ehle, with whom he enjoyed a brief relationship. But what would those millions have thought had they known it was not Firth diving into the lake in that famous scene, but a stunt double (apparently insurers were concerned about Weil's Disease, sometimes caught from rats' urine in the water)? Well, obviously they would have cared not a jot. It was Darcy coming OUT of the water that counted, not Darcy going in.

As might have been predicted, Firth did not seek to bolster his new-found sex symbol image, though he was secretly relieved to have taken that dreaded step into the mainstream. There was one interesting trip to Hollywood at the behest of Steven Spielberg but, after listening to the great mogul chatting for some considerable time, he realised the meeting was just that - an informal chat. Instead he used his status (Pride and Prejudice saw him BAFTA-nominated for the second time) to win the more interesting roles for which he'd trained so hard at the London Drama Centre. First came a BBC adaptation of the DH Lawrence play The Widowing Of Mrs Holroyd. Here he was a drunken beast of a miner who's wished dead by his wife Zoe Wannamaker and is killed in an accident at the pit. But he's not, we're shown by another sensitive Firth performance, just a beast. He's wracked by a belief that his wife thinks him beneath her, but cannot articulate his fear.

1996 brought two major period dramas. The first, the multi-Oscar-winning wartime drama The English Patient, saw him as the evasive, troubled but good-natured and adoring pilot husband of Kristin Scott-Thomas who, having proved a disappointment to her, is then tortured by her affair with a mysterious Ralph Fiennes. He then moved on to a TV miniseries of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo where, now married to Kristin's sister Serena Scott-Thomas, he inherits a silver mine in South America only for his possession to be threatened by civil war.

Having been pretend-married to these two glamorous sisters, he now got hitched in real life. On the set of Nostromo he met Italian documentary film producer Livia Guiggioli. The couple would be married in Tuscany in 1997, accompanied by a plethora of paparazzi, and produce two sons, Luca and Mateo. Much of Firth's time would henceforth be spent either in Rome with his new family, or in Los Angeles with son Will (Meg Tilly having also tired of the outback).

Colin Firth and Livia Guiggioli

Film-wise, he now moved back closer to the present day with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, playing a scruffy teacher obsessed with Arsenal, an obsession that severely tests his relationship with Ruth Gemmell. Firth would later contribute a short story, The Department Of Nothing, to Hornby's Speaking With The Angel collection for the TreeHouse Trust, in aid of autistic children. Written from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy, it was his first published work, though he'd been honing his skills for many years.

He followed Fever Pitch with A Thousand Acres, a return to Hollywood that saw him at last work with his lost Valmont co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. A reworking of King Lear, this saw ageing farmer Jason Robards attempt to split his spread between quarrelling daughters Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Colin playing a handsome neighbour who seduces both Pfeiffer and Lange, splitting their marriages in the process - in short, another total cad. Then again, none of the men had any redeeming features in this film, it was that kind of movie.

He moved on to another Oscar-fest with Shakespeare In Love, as the odious Lord Wessex, a man keen to marry Gwyneth Paltrow's Viola in order to get his hands on her dad's money. But Joseph Fiennes' William Shakespeare is also after her, and finds time amidst his struggle with Rupert Everett's Marlowe to win her hand - the second time Firth had been cuckolded onscreen by a Fiennes.

Colin now entered the most prolific period of his career, with 1999 bringing no less than 5 appearances. In Hugh Hudson's My Life So Far he played an inventor and scientist in 1920s Scotland who, though apparently happily married, reveals a romantic but unpleasantly selfish side as he battles with his own young son for the affections of his uncle's wife, Irene Jacob. Next came The Secret Laughter Of Women, an odd romantic comedy where he played an ex-pat in the south of France who struggles with a priest and a community he does not understand over a young Nigerian single mother.

Having been punched out by Rowan Atkinson when he played Shakespeare in the special edition of Blackadder shown in the Millennium Dome, and turned up as the father of the two kids nannied by Jodhi May in The Turn Of The Screw, he moved on to Donovan Quick, a kind of update of Don Quixote. Here he was a stranger in town, attempting to atone for past sins by helping out down-on-her-luck Katy Murphy and starting a bus service to rival the local meanie's Windmill Transport.

Having seen in the new millennium with two stints in Three Days Of Rain at the Donmar Warehouse, Firth next showed in Noel Coward's Relative Values, where countess Julie Andrews' son brings home starlet Jeanne Tripplehorn, who's horrified to discover the family maid is her sister. Colin stood out as the camp and foppish cousin, an amused observer of this social chaos.

And then back came Mr Darcy. One of the women who had thrilled to Colin's performance was writer Helen Fielding, and her hit novel Bridget Jones's Diary was loosely based on that Austen production. And who better to play Bridget's Mark Darcy than Darcy himself? Exhibiting an enviable good humour about it all, in stepped Colin, torturing Renee Zellweger with his pride and prejudice and scrapping hilariously with Hugh Grant. Another huge hit was had, and another BAFTA nomination received.

His next effort could not have been more different. Re-teaming with his A Month In The Country co-star Kenneth Branagh, he now appeared in Conspiracy, about the Wannsee Conference where the Nazis organised the extermination of the Jews. Alongside Branagh's Heydrich and Stanley Tucci's Eichmann, Firth was superb as Dr Wilhelm Stuckhart, the brilliant bureaucrat arguing for mass sterilisation, and was Emmy-nominated for his work.

Now came Londinium, a comedy concerning itself with compatibility and fidelity, where Colin was a TV producer on a show starring his needy, manipulative American wife Mariel Hemingway. She falls for the scriptwriter, he grows closer to the make-up girl (Irene Jacob once more), and there is much confusion, much of it due to Firth's hilarious habit of downing pints at record speed and inviting people outside "to let off a little steam" - that is, punch them out with exquisite comic timing. Really, his decimation of Jack Dee and others was side-splitting. And there'd be more confusion in his next big screen release, The Importance Of Being Earnest, which saw him co-headline yet again with Rupert Everett as the sly pair pursue the hands of Frances O'Connor and Reese Witherspoon. A caustic Lady Bracknell was provided by Judi Dench, an Oscar-winning Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare In Love.

2003 would bring yet another reunion in Hope Springs, written by Charles Webb, author of The Graduate. Here Colin played an artist who, thinking he's been dumped by girlfriend Minnie Driver, shifts to New England where he's refreshed by a cast of quirky characters, including brassy motel owner Mary Steenburgen. Having fallen for simple homegirl Heather Graham he has his life turned upside down once more when the devious Driver arrives, asking what the hell he thinks he's up to.

The same year brought the extremely lightweight What A Girl Wants where an American teen (Amanda Bynes, star of the hit Amanda Show) discovers her birth father is Colin's Sir Henry Dashwood, owner of much of inner London. Will her natural sweetness and irrepressible good humour break through his cold English reserve, or will he have her put in the stocks then deported? Far more worthwhile was Girl With A Pearl Earring, where Firth played a brooding Johannes Vermeer, finding a muse in new servant Scarlett Johansson. But while Firth is dealing on an aesthetic level, his sponsor Tom Wilkinson is after some hot muse-nookie. It was a beautiful piece, its look heavily influenced by Vermeer's work, the kind of movie Colin had always been seeking.

He ended 2003 with a bang, reuniting with Hugh Grant in Richard Curtis's Love Actually. This was a kind-hearted melange of 10 different love stories, Colin appearing as a writer who catches his girlfriend in bed with his brother (he gives good grief, does Colin) and flees to the south of France, where he falls for his Portuguese housekeeper, seeking love across the language barrier. It was, naturally, an enormo-hit.

2004 would be equally busy. First would come Trauma, a psycho-thriller that saw him awake from a coma to find his wife is dead. Moving home, he's befriended by new neighbour Mena Suvari, but then begins to have visions of his wife that push him towards breakdown. Following this was the Bridget Jones sequel, The Edge Of Reason, from which Colin shied away till Richard Curtis rewrote the script. Starting some four weeks after the original ended, it saw Bridget already uncomfortable with her darling Mr D'Arcy, after discovering he's a Tory and a repressed, public school, underpants-folding Tory to boot. She leaves him, thereby launching another confrontation between Colin and his reprobate rival, Hugh Grant.

2005 would begin with what appeared to be a step backwards. In Nanny McPhee, adapted by Emma Thompson from Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda books, he played the recently widowed father of seven unruly kids, who eventually hires Thompson's magical governess. It was a role he could have performed in his sleep. Far more challenging would be Where The Truth Lies, directed by maverick Atom Egoyan and written by Rupert Holmes, a musician who'd hit big with the incredibly irritating Escape (The Pina Colada Song). Digging into the dark underbelly of fame, this saw Firth and Kevin Bacon as a Fifties double act, much like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who split following the discovery of a dead girl in their hotel room. Fast forward to the Seventies, when journalist Alison Lohman arrives to uncover a dreadful secret story of treachery and lust. As the Martin figure, Colin would be expected to sing, charm and play the straight-man, probably his toughest assignment yet.

And in the pipeline was another major test, Toyer, to be adapted from Gardner McKay's lauded novel and directed by Brian De Palma. This would see Colin as a manipulative maniac who wins the trust of young women and then keeps them in a state of terrified subjugation by means of mind-control and powerful drugs. Juliette Binoche would play the neurologist who treats the women and attempts to form a psychological profile of the beast. It would be a mighty step for Colin, but he'd have to wait as De Palma struggled to first deliver his take on James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia.

Colin Firth is pretty much where he wants to be. Having ridden the D'Arcy storm, he can now play with the character, use it to score the parts that interest him. It remains to be seen whether he'll yet become the new Paul Schofield but, given his progress through a topsy-turvy career, you wouldn't bet against it.

All credits go to Dominic Wills