"Interviews with Colin Firth 2001 archive"

"Bridget Jones Star's Secrets Revealed! Mr. Darcy Has Never Read the Diaries" by Roger Friedman

Fox News, 18 April 2001

Colin Firth has never read Bridget Jones's Diary. Well, he has, sort of.

"I've read every word of those books," Firth declared to me over a very funny and agreeable lunch Tuesday at Gabriel's restaurant in New York. Firth is most forthcoming, and not the stuffed shirt he usually plays on screen. In other words, it is acting after all.

But more about not really reading the books upon which the hit movie in which he co-stars are based.

"I have read them," he insisted. "Just not in the conventional order. I confess that I did not start at page 1 and end at page 300. But I can honestly say that I've looked through that book enough. And the order in which I read it ended up as a beautifully impressionistic literary work!"

Yes, there was much laughter when this was revealed. "So I've read both books. And there's even more of me in the second book."

In other words, he skimmed Helen Fielding's two novels that are the basis for the hit Sharon Maguire film which also features Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant.

This despite the fact that Firth himself is a character in the novels. Readers of the bestsellers know that Bridget is obsessed with the actor because he played Mr. Darcy in the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice which we saw on A&E here in the States.

"Helen Fielding herself tends to call me 'Mr. Darcy' very often. And I'm starting to feel that I am fictional, that I'm loosely based on a real guy named Colin Firth. But my name is Darcy and I am fictional."

If it makes you feel better, Firth — the son of a history professor — didn't read Jane Austen until he was in that film.

These revelations and many others were discovered during a wide-ranging interview. For one: the very British Firth actually attended a year of junior high school in a St. Louis, Missouri suburb. For another: his beloved mother was born in Iowa and did not see England until she was 18. Ditto for his dad, who was born in India.

So you see, it's all done with smoke and mirrors.

Firth appears in films like Bridget Jones, The English Patient, and Apartment Zero wearing his trademark suit and tie. So I was a little taken aback when he appeared in Gabriel's wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and leather jacket.

I wasn't sure this was the real Colin Firth, the guy who considers America a foreign country, was rejected by Steven Spielberg for Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and has a 10 year old son with actress Meg Tilly, with whom he starred in Valmont. (Tilly is now married to Columbia Pictures honcho John Calley.)

But it is. Two weeks ago, Firth had a second son, by wife Livia Giuggioli, born in Italy. Because of that, he missed the American premieres of the Bridget Jones.

But he was impressed that Universal Pictures, which distributes Bridget overseas, flew him in from Rome to London for the U.K. premiere. "It was a spectacular moment for me. I've never seen a film company get so behind a movie." In the U.S., equally enthusiastic Miramax is distributing Bridget.

And it's not like Firth didn't want to talk about the film, which is a phenomenon in the U.K. and should hit No. 1 in wider release this weekend in this country.

But first he's got a dirty joke for me: "A man comes home and finds a movie star in bed with his wife. He says, outraged. 'What are you doing?' The movie star replies: 'I've got a film coming out this week, and I've just signed to do another.'"

So you can see Firth has a slightly jaundiced view of Hollywood, although he says he wouldn't mind being in a big-budget action film.

"I'd like to do studio films," he said, "as long as I don't have to live in L.A."

He's paid his dues, even if they were maybe a little less than others'. As a struggling acting student he got a job, circa 1981, dressing up as Indiana Jones and walking the streets of London.

"I had the hat, the jacket, and the rope," he recalled. "And for some reason, people thought I was Harrison Ford. I was signing autographs all the time. Of course it could have been worse. First they wanted me to dress up as Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans!"

As for his co-stars, Firth says the whole issue of Renée Zellweger gaining and losing weight to play Bridget is rubbish. "She's a really lovely girl. I think she looked great in the movie. She could afford a few more pounds, frankly!"

And Hugh Grant? "I knew him a little before we made the movie. He's a rather debonair gentleman, with a little devilishness, which means he's never boring."

When I mentioned that Grant seems upset that audiences are pegging his caddish character in Bridget as the real Hugh Grant, Firth stepped in: "I don't know if he's upset about that. I'm not commenting on his sexual habits. I know nothing about them. But I think the demeanor we see in the film is more like him. In fact, he's been going around saying he's sick of playing the nice guy."

Firth's next role is in The Importance of Being Earnest - which will be his sixth or seventh Miramax film. And then? A return to the stage with Hamlet, in a production directed by his acting-school mentor, which will debut in London next winter. (cancelled by Firth)

And now that we know he collected Cardinals souvenirs when he was 13 years old, we like him even more

"Twice Shy" by Susie Steiner

Guardian Unlimited, 31 March 2001

Colin Firth was a reluctant heart-throb as the haughty but lovestruck Darcy in Pride And Prejudice six years ago. There were, he felt, more rigorous, less conspicuous roles to take on. So why risk diving into the same pool again, playing a postmodernised Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary, asks Susie Steiner.

Colin Firth says everything is all right. Really, it's fine - as if someone just bumped the back of his Volkswagen. "I don't mind it at all." He's talking a bit like Gareth Southgate does when the subject of penalties crops up.

"I think I've been saying all the time: 'It's all right. It's fine.' How convincing can you be when you say, 'I'm not het up'?"

The thing Firth is fine about (so we can all stop feeling guilty) is being a Sex God. He doesn't mind the tight breeches thing, or having to talk in detail about That Pond Scene for the past six years, or knowing that millions of women fantasise about the way his wet shirt clung to his chest, or the way his bushy sideburns fluttered outside Pemberley. "If I spent 20 years training to be an astronaut, the headlines would still say Darcy Lands On Mars!," he says, laughing. But, to be honest, he looks pissed off.

It really is six years since Firth was Mr Darcy in the television adaptation of Pride And Prejudice (indeed, he is probably the only person to whom it feels like six years). More than 13 million of us were glued to the BBC on those autumnal Sunday evenings, and the way Firth glowered and brooded, and looked intense, hurt, horny and, at times, as if someone had just farted. . . well, it was all too much.

By the time he blurted out to Miss Bennet, "My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you," millions had welled up into one collective wobbly bottom lip.

Six years on, Firth is far removed from that small series. He is living in an Islington town house with his Italian wife, Livia Giuggiolo, 31. Their wedding, in 1997, was a blow to women everywhere, and now - I'm sorry to break this to you - Firth is excitedly awaiting the birth of their first child together (he has a son by a previous marriage), due any day now. If he fails to show up for any of the glitzy premieres for his latest film, Bridget Jones's Diary, it's because he is preoccupied with other things in a maternity ward. "I'm absolutely over the moon. It's about to pop, and no one has sussed it," he says, revelling in the way he and his wife have ducked the tabloids. "Ever since I met Livy, people have been speculating that she's pregnant and it's never been true. Now she's enormous and she's been in public but, weirdly, people stopped pursuing it."

It is unlikely, then, that they'll be inviting Hello! into their "fabulous home". Firth is a reluctant star, to say the least. His career, he admits, has had "no clear trajectory": he loathes publicity and seems to fluctuate wildly in his work, between prominence and obscurity. More than anything, for so prolific an actor (at only 40, he has more than 30 films to his name), Firth has had a singular difficulty in being anyone other than Darcy in the nation's consciousness.

Since Pride And Prejudice, he has appeared in high-profile productions such as Shakespeare In Love and The English Patient, but these supporting roles rendered him strangely forgettable. Another Country, with Rupert Everett, kick-started his career in 1984, and he achieved national prominence five years later in BBC1's controversial Falklands drama, Tumbledown. But his CV is peppered with questionable choices, such as My Life So Far, a rambling, directionless period piece, the likeable but amateurish Secret Laughter Of Women, and the absurdly hammy Relative Values.

There are overlooked successes as well, such as his small but flawless role in A Thousand Acres, with Michelle Pfeiffer. Most people, however, would name him in Fever Pitch, the 1996 adaptation of Nick Hornby's book about football obsession that may have appealed to Firth as very unDarcyish but that owed much to the repressed-with-a-lot-going-on-beneath-the-surface Englishman that he plays so well.

Essentially, though, tell anyone you're meeting Colin Firth and the response is the same: "Ooooh, Darcy. Lovely." And what's wrong with being famous for something you were good in? Nothing, except

Firth has a certain contempt for Darcy, his silly, heart-throb younger twin. The older, more serious Firth has stretched himself in far bigger roles: "Pride And Prejudice wasn't the most rigorous or challenging thing I've done," he says. He told one interviewer he would "not do that again. No, I'd be bored shitless." He tells me that Darcy "was somebody else's party. I'm still trying to think it all through." It brought him fame for something he wasn't quite proud of: a sudden, bright, intrusive spell as public property.

The global love affair with Pride And Prejudice (it was huge in the US) brought with it persistent press attention, not least when it emerged that he had been romantically involved with his leading lady, Jennifer Ehle. "They only discovered it after it was over. Livy and I had started up a serious relationship for quite some time. They get your number and phone up, pretending to be BT, then ask, 'Are you and your leading lady in love?' You let them write about it, and all this invented stuff comes out. It's astounding, breathtaking, what gets invented."

Firth gets panicky about the paraphernalia of stardom: he may be a contemporary of Hugh Grant and Ralph Fiennes, groomed to be the foppish love interest, but his ambivalence shows. Too reticent, too twitchy. And perhaps we love him all the more for it.

Given all this, his latest career move seems decidedly odd. Firth is Mr Darcy again, except this time he's a big, celluloid, tear-jerking Mr Darcy; a larger-than-life Darcy, shunted forward with all the might of Universal Pictures and Miramax. He plays an ironic spoof of himself as the brooding romantic lead, Mark Darcy, in Bridget Jones's Diary, tipped to be one of the biggest films of the year. This is Darcy with bells on.

The film, which opens in Britain and the US in two weeks, has all the shameless, blockbuster-manufacturing of Notting Hill and Four Weddings And A Funeral, and is based on Helen Fielding's bestselling novel about the loneliness, anxiety and aspirations of the urban, single thirtysomething female. Richard Curtis and Fielding have come up with a galloping script. Hugh Grant gets top billing as the rakish seducer Daniel Cleaver, despite playing a secondary character to Firth's (he's a bigger star, so has to be on the poster). There's even the requisite US lead, Renee Zellweger, as Bridget herself (brace yourself for some rictus English vowels, somewhere between Dick van Dyke and Camilla Parker Bowles).

But there are a few imaginative twists, too, in the big-screen debut of director Sharon Maguire, a documentary-maker who is close to Fielding and was one of the models for Bridget's friend, Shazzer. In one scene, a soirée held by the publishers where Bridget works, there are cameos by Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, Alain de Botton and Jeffrey Archer, all as themselves.

And, in the midst of it all, is Firth, our national treasure, as faithful to his character in the book as it is possible to be, in part because Firth is Mark Darcy. It is the book that is faithful to him: Fielding was as captivated with Pride And Prejudice as everyone else, and was instrumental, via her Bridget Jones newspaper column, in establishing Firth in female folklore. She created the character Mark Darcy to become Bridget's paramour: a brooding, diffident human rights lawyer who stands silently beside bookshelves a lot and has trouble expressing himself. The novel, which sold 4 million copies worldwide (1.5 million of them in the UK), was a loose reworking of Pride And Prejudice in much the same way that the film Clueless reworked Emma.

Bridget is a spirited, more accident-prone Elizabeth Bennet. Her mother, a shrill and tactless suburban housewife, is as mortifyingly vulgar as Austen's Mrs Bennet. There is no eloping Lydia; instead, Bridget herself falls prey to her flirtatious boss, Daniel Cleaver (aka, George Wickham). She is naive, and believes Cleaver's smears against Mark Darcy, wrongly turning against him just as he is warming to her. Darcy appears in turn awkward, supercilious, arrogant but eventually kind and, ultimately, Bridget's rescuer.

The casting directors must have needed only one number when casting Darcy. Early in the book, Bridget makes her first observations about him at a Christmas turkey curry buffet held by mutual friends: "The rich, divorced-by-cruel-wife Mark - quite tall - was standing with his back to the room, scrutinising the contents of the Alconburys' bookshelves: mainly leather-bound series of books about the Third Reich . . . It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy' and banging your head against a tree." It's pure Firth. At least, it's pure Firth-as-Mr-Darcy. The man standing by the bookshelves definitely has curly hair, dark eyes, a slightly down-turned mouth and a look of childish vulnerability on his face. And he definitely takes himself too seriously.

We meet for the first time in a private drawing room at a London hotel, all leather armchairs, halogen downlighters and bowls of lilies. We sit at either end of a vast white sofa, in front of a fake log fire, engulfed in tension. I ask how he feels about the film, about the hoohah that is about to burst all around him. "I'm not confident about the film," he says bluntly. "I've no reason to be confident about the film. We all did our best."

Did he enjoy making it? "Yee-es." That's a no then. "I found it intriguing that this thing seemed to be reflecting back on itself. I was aware of it when making the decision and thinking, 'Is this going to make things worse?' If the film's a success, then I'll be back in it again - and, yes, I've thought about that. If it makes me more of a household name than Darcy did, then I don't know how I'll deal with it. But it might just go away."

Go away? He's already "back in it". Earlier, when he walked into the foyer, he looked sheepish, embarrassed by the small circus whipping up around him. He had come from a photo-shoot at a women's magazine where he had to be "styled". When posing, he was asked to look "more gangster", but didn't know how, so they suggested he look at his cuffs. "I don't mind it," he mutters, "but I feel a bit silly."

Firth has talked often about looking ordinary, about having a malleable face that is easily transformed by make-up and expression. He is one of those celebrities you have to stare at good and hard to be sure it's him. I can't remember exactly what Colin Firth was wearing on that first meeting: something dark and jeansy, in a sort of sixth-form teacher way.

Remember, he may have smouldered as Darcy, but he was suitably lumpen as the woman-averse fan in Fever Pitch and innocently plump in The English Patient. (Though many asked who on earth would leave him for Ralph Fiennes?) His opening gag in Bridget Jones centres on exactly this cuddly-uncle-versus-sex-symbol split. Darcy stands alone beside some French windows at the buffet. The camera pans down to show him wearing an absurd reindeer sweater of the Christmas present variety.

Cut to our second meeting, a week later at his local watering hole, the Almeida Theatre bar, in Islington, and it's a different story. He wears a leather jacket, he seems slim and tousled. He laughs a lot; his cheeks dimple. We talk about ordinary things: giving up smoking, when to have children, favourite books. He is warm and open and, frankly, to die for. It strikes me that this was part of the strength of the original Darcy, and other parts Firth has done well: he emits a slow-burning magnetism that reveals itself in stages.

Not a Brad Pitt rush-to-the-head, rather a repressed, diffident warm-up. This may be as much of an acting achievement as anything else, no less powerful because it comes naturally to him. When I suggest that Darcy was a triumph in this sense, he takes umbrage: "Whatever achievement was there, I prefer to think of it as an acting one." It seems he is forever fending off accusations of sexiness.

There must be something about being a pin-up that jars with Firth's schoolish upbringing. His parents, retired teachers, are staunchly leftwing, well-travelled and concerned about the social issues of the day. His mother completed her PhD six years ago and has long fought for the rights of asylum seekers imprisoned in the UK. His brother, six years younger, is also an actor, and his sister, two years younger, is a speech trainer: "We're not close-knit: months can go by without hearing from each other, but there aren't any feuds."

Firth was born in Nigeria, where his parents were teaching. Some have commented on his faintly colonial speech, but I find him accentless. Every now and then, a strange, wide vowel crops up, but it could as easily be American as Winchester, where the family later settled. His memories of Africa are scant, but in them he seems a rather vulnerable child: "I can remember very clearly my father driving to work in a Beetle. There was a dirt road that went perpendicular to the house and I would watch him go. I could still see him when he parked the car outside the school - it wasn't far, but an unpleasant walk in the African sun. He was a little dot. And I remember thinking: 'What's he got better to do there than hanging around with me?' "

There are other sensory memories, of the house or a toy, "and an African boy who I spent a lot of time with, called Godfrey, and him trying to persuade me to come round to his place, and me being scared to go". It's a vulnerability often visible on the adult Firth's face - a sort of troubled, slightly teary look, that makes him look nowhere near 40. After Africa, there was a long spell in England, where fitting in at school was a problem. Like many middle-class parents, the Firths had an aversion to television's vulgar newcomer, ITV, and the children were not allowed to watch it. They found it difficult, as a result, to join in some of the playground banter.

As an adolescent, Firth and his family spent a year in St Louis, where his parents were on a teaching exchange. Fitting in at a US school was even worse: Firth described himself as the English geek among throngs of earring-wearing, long-haired rockers. At least, so the mythology goes.

"I find myself volunteering a lament for my school days, and I've never done that," he says. "It starts to look as if Colin Firth wants to talk about his school days, and it's just bullshit. You know, we all have our memories and our own version of history which helps us explain ourselves, but we don't all get asked about it. It does put you in a strange relationship with it, because a sort of mythology that you've created about yourself to yourself grows up, and it's compounded by having it put in print. I didn't like school - I don't really want to weave yet another quote about that."

It's hard to imagine Firth on a movie junket, where stars are installed in a suite and journalists queue to question them for a maximum of around seven minutes, timed by a PR with a stopwatch. He is singularly unable to sugar himself with frothy chatter and would be far happier sitting in an armchair, harrumphing over the papers. "If I could distinguish myself at those parties and chat shows, it might be easier," he once lamented.

Soon after Pride And Prejudice, he was called by Spielberg's "people", and had a meeting in Hollywood with the man himself. "It was weird to find that someone who is such an enormous figure in the business was so chatty and informal and unassuming. He had his feet up, and was wearing a baseball cap and sipping a McDonald's Coke." I imagine Firth didn't do a very hard sell. "He didn't invite me to do his films."

Firth has no particular allegiance to low-budget British films - he would love to do a Hollywood blockbuster, he says, but good scripts are thin on the ground. The problem with today's films lies not in production, but in the writing. Couple that with his natural uncertainty (he turned down Pride And Prejudice several times), and the halting aspect to his career starts to make sense. He has described himself as a "passive resister", and agrees there is something particular in him that makes him retreat. "I think it's a survival instinct, putting the brakes on, not wanting things to get out of control. There's an adage about the fear of success being as great as the fear of failure. I think most people have that, and I don't think it's entirely self-destructive or unhealthy. It may be that you really can get into dangerous territory - the normal things in my life are very important to me".

"It's not just that the threat of egomania and narcissism are always looming [though I suspect they always are], it's just that the things I value happen to be much more to do with the things that everyone else values: friends and family and having a life. I like the real world, I like going to the supermarket. I don't want to drift so far from that that I have a life of bodyguards and a house on Mulholland Drive.

"I'm scared of setting myself up in frightening projects, but I don't think I'm controlled by that fear. I usually take it on. I think it's more to do with the profile and the trappings than the fear of extending myself."

He took retreating to an extreme in the late 80s, when he disappeared into the wilds of Canada. In 1988, while making Valmont, a totally ignored version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he fell in love with another co-star, Meg Tilly. They had a son, Will, now 10, and lived a reclusive life in British Columbia, where he did nothing but change nappies for a couple of years. There were times when it snowed so hard, they couldn't even go out for a walk.

"I wouldn't recommend it as a career move." The relationship with Tilly petered out in 1993, but they remain on good terms. "My son is triple national," he says proudly. "My son is born Canadian, took American citizenship quite recently, but he's also English. Because of the complications of my life, any free time goes to him. I fly to see him [in California] whenever I have a moment. That's the only place where I really hang out."

After Pride And Prejudice, he met Livia, a producer's assistant, on the set of Nostromo in another remote setting, South America. She had no idea who he was. "I remember saying to Livia and her family in Italy, 'You know, I'm a heart-throb.' And they all threw their hands up and said, 'Get outta here.' Someone sent some tapes of the series to Italy and they didn't get it. They don't find reserved very sexy. They watched it and said, 'So, do people in England find John Major sexy?' "

Livia lived in Rome throughout their courtship, but still suffered the indignity of having her family telephoned by the Express. "People might think it a bit precious to be bothered," he says earnestly. "The real problem was they were trying to find out where my wedding was going to be, and that was the bottom line. It was in the Italian countryside and they would have spoiled it. Having people trying to trick you into telling them where it's going to be - it makes you very protective."

So Firth is finally over his wanderlust: he has married, sold his Hackney flat, upgraded to Islington, joined Amnesty and begun campaigning for the rights of asylum seekers. He talks books with Nick Hornby, eschews the company of actors, and now and then plays piano and guitar. And he hopes to carry on this anonymous existence, despite appearing in cinemas nationwide. "The attention might not focus on me. I mean, there are two actors in it who are far more famous than I am, they'll soak up most of it." He may be right. Bridget Jones might prove more of a showcase for Grant, who for once has been cast in a role with some bite. "He's very witty company," says Firth. "I've always found him bright, and he's a fantastic raconteur: he's wicked. He's not like his Notting Hill persona at all."

And Firth's decision to do so high-profile a film may have as much to do with pragmatism as with a readiness to step into the mainstream for a spell. He is providing for his new baby at a time when impending strike action by the Screen Actors Guild, of which he is a member, threatens his earning power over the next year. In the immediate future, however, Firth is back in dress shirts, in Oliver Parker's The Importance Of Being Earnest, in which he plays Jack. Beyond that, projects will have to be child-friendly: "I'll be a dad who goes to work. I do intend to be a dad. If I do do something in the summer, it'll have to be something where I can have my kids around me."

The baby may well have another effect on the anxious, brooding, Darcyish side of Firth's character. His concerns about success, being populist, selling out or losing his privacy may seem less tumultuous: "All that stuff pales into insignificance next to the things you really care about in your life."

"Colin Firth" by Monica Agelorius.

Unreel.co.uk, 17 March 2001

Have you ever felt like the character that you play? What is your relationship with your mother? Do you wear the clothes she gives you?
A: Are you my shrink? Do I wear the clothes my mother gives me? No. No. My poor mother would no longer dare do that. I was not quite as gracious as Mark Darcy about wearing what my mother tried to make me wear. It tended to stop really, when I was quite young.

Do you have any examples of embarrassing garments like your character has to wear?

A: Not really, no. Just the standard ghastly Christmas sweater. You know. They didn't usually come from my Mum. My mum wasn't bad at observing requests. It was usually aunts and grandparents. You look back on those things with affection now. But at the same time you really wonder. The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn't know well. You're doomed I think to get it wrong. I probably would go to certain lengths to please her... now. If she really wanted me to wear a reindeer sweater for the Christmas occasion I probably would. I have to wear what she asks me to wear.

There is another film coming out called 'Animal Husbandry' (aka 'Someone Like You') which has a bad portrayal of men. Do you think that men are as lost as women these days, when it comes to relationships?
A: I think that they're all hopeless cases. I think the whole thing is about getting it wrong, and misjudging everything and screwing up. Comedy essentially is about that. Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

Is it difficult for a man today to know what's expected of him from a woman? Because women seem to want a career but they also want the perfect gentlemen and all that sort of thing. Is it hard to know what they're after exactly?
A: I think that some men are probably quite confused about it. I think the goal posts have shifted a little bit over the last few decades. Feminism came along and there seemed to be some sort of requirement to re-invent ourselves. The new man concept arrived. We're tired of men being bullies and rapists, warmongers and insensitive beasts. And now we want them to be nice and gentle fathers, and considerate and treat women as equals. And put an apron on...

But still fix the car and the roof...
A: But then women got disgusted by that, and most women can't bear it. So now women suddenly decide that they hate men like that. And only want men in gladiator costumes. And so I think that there are probably a few men who are a little bit confused. I thought we weren't supposed to... And so suddenly men's movements grew up. It was all about Robert Bligh. The new man doesn't work so now I've got to try to discover my inner wild man. Men are horribly mocked for being in confusion. Horribly mocked. They are mocked for being sensitive... So I think there is a certain amount of confusion. It hasn't bothered me too much personally. I've just tended to find that I'll operate on a case-by-case basis. You know, I'll be who I am.

I read somewhere or someone told me that you're expecting a baby quite soon.
A: That's true. He's not due for a month... or in about three weeks. I should be there, in fact. Yes. I've got a bleeper. And I'm ready to go.

Is this your first?
A: It's not my first. No. I have a child.

Do you live in London?
A: Yes.

What's the best and worst thing about living here?
A: I don't know what the best and worst thing. I find London is international. That's something I like about it. There is no - it escapes - any sort of provinciality. I think it is endlessly varied. There is a street near me, which is a very small street. It dates back to about seventeen fifty. And in this very small street I can remember it exactly. It starts, there is an Italian restaurant, a button shop, a hat shop, an antique tool shop, a taxidermist, a puppet theatre...

Where is this?
A: This is in Islington... a pub, an Italian deli. I think that London is very much like that. I find there's humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it's a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive. I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments. You go to the local market; my wife is Italian, she'll go to a fruit stall and say "Can I try one of those cherries?" And she'll be told: "If you want it, you buy it." And that's the attitude you get in the market. It's not always there. But I can't imagine someone saying that in Rome. You work most of the time in England.

Is it a choice?
A: It's a sort of a mixture of both. Hollywood hasn't aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood. So it's a mixture of both. I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.

But you did live in Italy for a while, didn't you?
A: I've spent time and I still do spend time in Italy. Rome, mostly. A speak a little bit of Italian now. We also spend time in Umbria. My wife is from Rome. Her parents are from...one is from Sienna and one is from Florence.

What does your wife do? Is she an actress?
A: She has produced documentaries.

Would you like to work on that side of things, as well? Real life rather than acting?
A: It would interest me. Yes, it would. Absolutely. I think it's fascinating. Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they're doing. I don't know why it produces this dissatisfaction. Perhaps they feel that they are not being treated as substantial enough, or something. I am no exception. I'd love to try my hand at something else.

Do you share any African memories with Helen Fielding (writer of Bridget Jones) because she's been there so many times and you grew up there.
A: I didn't you know. The thing is, I left when I was four. But...I've long claimed to remember it. My mother who thought it was rather implausible, put me to the test at one time. And it did turn out that the things I thought I remember were actual.

What were they?
A: Well, I remember a small boy who lived next door, a Nigerian boy, with whom I remember having fluent conversations. He spoke a different language and I spoke English. And probably neither of us really spoke very much in either of those because we were only three. But I remember talking to him. But she remembers him. I remember his name. His name was Godfrey. And I remember seeing his family around. I remember watching my father driving to work. I remember a bird flying in through the window. I remember the cat that shat in the house. There was all sort of things...

That's not a particular African memory...
A: No. But the atmosphere that goes along with those memories is very African. And when I meet Nigerian people, when I hear the language spoken, when I hear the music, I actually do feel some sort of natural empathy. They say kids who are not five yet, can't remember anything. But the kids who spend their early years in a foreign country, they always remember.

I was wondering: did you ever go back?
A: No. I'd like to. It is something that always seemed like an important thing. And now I'm suddenly forty. And I haven't done it. And I can't quite believe it.

Where was it?

A: This was in northern Nigeria.

What was your father doing there?
A: He was teaching.

And your grandparents were missionaries?
A: Yes. They were. People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different. My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the nineteen-thirties

She couldn't possibly have been a Catholic.
A: Neither could they have been Anglican. One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of thirty-eight in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor. He started medical training and went to America with a ready (made) family, and studied medicine. And then returned to India, I suppose seven or eight years later, as a doctor.

How do they regard your profession?
A: They're dead. So they're perfectly at peace with it now.

What about your parents?
A: They were a little bit alarmed about it, I think, when I first made an announcement that this is what I was...

Isn't it a bit too light-hearted a profession...?
A: No. It wasn't that. I don't think that they had that perception of it. They just were worried that it was a precarious profession.

Did you ever have to struggle?
A: No. I haven't had to struggle very much. I haven't paid my dues. I think I have been lucky. I think I wondered if it was going to cost me something, at some point. I don't want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it's gone. I think it's fine.

Does your child watch your movies, and when you come on TV?
A: Generally, no. We decided not to do that. As time goes on.. .it is not a harsh judgement we make. When he was very young I didn't want it to be confusing. To see me in strange situations, and to have to explain the difference between reality and fiction. It's not everybody that sees his or her father on a screen, or on the television. And I wanted him to feel relatively normal.

Is there anything that you want him to see?
A: No. There's nothing I'm burning him to see, at all. He has seen things now. He's been on an aeroplane when they have shown something. You can't control that situation. That must be freaky for him. A: It is a bit freaky. I wasn't there at the time. He was about three and stood up and shouted, 'That's my daddy'.

How old is he now?
A: He's ten. What do you do when you're not working? A: I kind of reserve the right to have that not is anybody else's business. In general, I just enjoy myself. I spend the time with people who are more consistently in my life than perhaps the people I work with. Some of them are people I have worked with. Italy is an enormous asset in my life now. I feel it's just a privilege for me to have actually met someone who is from a country that is so fantastic. And so a lot of it is the exploration of that country, trying to learn its language, eating its food; which is probably one of my primary pursuits.

Now you're famous, what's the weirdest thing a fan has ever done to catch your attention?
A: There's quite a few. You get sent strange things.

What...underwear?
A: Yes. That too.

What do you do with it?

A:Yes. What do you do with it?

Do you have to do something with it?
A: I don't think so. But I've been sent shoes. I think that is even stranger than underwear. I have been sent socks and ties. And a carving of a bird. Pictures of me. A lot. Pictures people have drawn and painted.

Do you keep any of these? Because it is almost like voodoo! Someone who is really, really into you has painted a picture and then you throw it. Scary.
A: It can make you a bit uncomfortable. I think you can sense the spirit in which it is done. Some times its scary and sometimes you just feel it's quite sweet. If it's a child, it's not scary. It's the sort of thing a child might do. It's usually all right if it's not recurrent. It's when it's recurrent I think it gets a little bit alarming. There is a line not to cross. And I think if you reply to someone, or if someone starts to become fixated then it's worrying. If someone approaches you in the street, or off back-stage from the theatre and says things and wants to make conversation for a second, that's entirely feasible. But if you walk away and they start to come with you, that's crossing the line. Because then you've moved into a different space.

But does that happen? Do you get groupies in the theatre, like a rock band thing?
A: Yes. In a manner of speaking. Yes, I do.

Are they different?
A: They're different from rock groupies. Yes.

Do they look better?
A: Well, I don't know. I don't know what rock groupies look like. I can say to this day, that I've actually never had a sexual proposition. And I think rock groupies generally have the reputation of being fairly direct.

They don't beat around the bush!
A: I mean from a fan! It would be sad if I said that I've never had a sexual proposition in my entire life.

Have you ever expressed your admiration to somebody, as a fan? Someone who didn't know you?
A: Yes. I have done. Yes. I did. I went up to Rod Steiger the other day. Not the other day, I mean a few months ago. I saw him at the Venice film festival. I have been a huge fan for a long time. And I came over all coy and shall I, shan't I? And then I felt, I had to. Steiger was one of the first actors to really capture my imagination. And I just felt that impulse to say something to him.

What female stars would you like to work or think you'd have great chemistry with?
A: I'm not getting caught out on that one. That's private.

What's your new project?
A: It's with Frances O'Connor and Reese Witherspoon - who I have always felt I would that chemistry with... It's inevitable! It's The Importance of Being Earnest. It's a film of the Oscar Wilde play. It's with Rupert Everett and Judi Dench, as well.