"World's sexiest dad?" by Fiona Hudson

Brisbane Courier - Mail,  31 December 2005

I had hoped the story might lead to a playful game of words, with Firth choosing between options such as film or stage, love or fight, an pride or prejudice. My reasoning was that Firth-aka Mr Darcy-is probably sick to death of the standard promotional trail questions about that scene a decade ago when he emerged from a lake in those britches. Except, he doesn’t seem too keen.

Business, I ask, or pleasure?

”Pleasure,“ he says, showing none.

Crosswords or sudoku?

”I loathe both,“ he almost snarls.

Parliament or pressure group?

”Pressure group, definitely,“ he says, warming to the task.

Hugh Grant or Kevin Bacon?

”Depends on what we’re talking about,“ he says.

Given he recently filmed sex scenes with Bacon in the edgy film WTTL, there’s plenty I would like to talk about but this is a family newspaper and he’s here to talk about a family movie, so we move on to Nanny Mcphee.

In it, Firth plays the widowed father of seven wild children who finds a women on his doorstep, and she soon gets them all into shape. The actor says he liked working on the film, though he initially doubted he was right for the role. ”I’d never done a film for children of this age and I wasn’t sure about it,“ he says. ”I usually play the fairly complicated characters and I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the innocence of it. Once I got over myself a bit, and it took a couple of days, I had a great time doing it. I like characters whose good side doesn’t come easily; who resist doing whatever it is they are being called upon to do or to be.“

Perhaps, something akin to his attitude to the promotion treadmill…. Firth was especially attracted to the idea of working with Emma Thompson, who wrote the script as well as playing the title role. ”I thought, this is an opportunity to have a very enjoyable time,“ he says.

He couldn’t resist creeping on set wearing Nanny Mcphee’s full garb-including a hideously bulbous nose, snaggle tooth and warts. Widely regarded as a dreamboat, Firth says given the chance to erase an unwanted facial feature, as happens in the movie, he wouldn’t bother. ”I’m quite happy to let the face go where it goes, really. We can, if we want, evaporate our facial features. Members of my profession go rushing to the surgeon all the time.“ 

Firth says he was thrilled by the reaction to Nanny Mcphee in Britain, where it doubled expectation at the box office. ”Really, the film is just trying to delight all kids,“ he explains. ”there is something quite uplifting about that. We are actually trying to please children. It’s that simple.“

Thanks to Gumby, Australia

"Don't photograph me from the waist down!" by John-Paul Flintoff

The Sunday Times Magazine, 4 December 2005

When Firth does finally become available, we'll only have a few moments to take his photo, so to be sure we get it right, we practise.

We create a plausibly English environment, with lime trees and horse chestnuts. Martin asks me to be Firth, stands me on a soapbox, and holds a variety of framing devices behind me. The most effective is an opaque filter, borrowed from the film crew. The effect is stunning: sunlight brightens the filter so that I seem to shimmer. We agree that Firth will look fantastic. Hours pass, and the winter sun moves rapidly across the sky. Again and again, Martin adjusts the lighting setup as we are promised Firth will be with us soon. Every so often we wander over to watch the shooting, only to find Firth is central to every scene and can't be spared. Martin becomes less Tiggerish by the minute. Me, I bite my lip.

Only at the last moment, just before the sun drops behind a hill, does it seem that we shall have Firth for a few minutes after all. But there's a problem: his costume. We've come to talk about a film set in the late 20th century, and Firth is dressed like a Roman soldier.

He dashes to his trailer to fetch something to wear over the top - but by the time he returns, a grim-faced assistant director carrying a clipboard and a walkie-talkie is waiting to call him back on set. The pictures will have to wait. The photographer, now playing Eeyore, resigns himself to losing the sunlight.

Then, just as Martin has finished dismantling his lights, Firth reappears, accompanied by the assistant director and a publicist whose exchanges with Martin have become increasingly embattled. We've got five minutes, they say grimly. Martin springs into action, moving the lights back where they were. Firth, wearing a sweatshirt over his leather shirt, climbs into position. But just as Martin starts to take some pictures, the publicist says we can only photograph Firth from the waist up. Otherwise, Sunday Times readers would see his Roman trousers and Timberland boots, also customised to look Roman. And we can't have that.

It's at this point that the artist loses his cool. He throws up his hands and says: "I can't do this. I can't make a hundred compromises in one day!" The artist in question is Martin.

Firth steps down off the crate. "I'm sorry about your compromises." He looks sincere, but it is impossible to rule out the possibility that he's also a little amused. Martin is already regretting his outburst. It's not Firth's fault, he says, and apologises effusively. Firth steps back up and Martin places me behind him, holding a screen of black felt. Look closely at the picture and you can see my fingertips.

It's not that Firth asks much, he says jovially. He doesn't demand outfits by Armani, for instance, or Hugo Boss. He's willing to be photographed with his hair and face smeared in glycerine - lending him a sweaty appearance appropriate to a legionnaire but less so to a movie star. He'd just prefer not to be pictured in trousers with a leather gusset, if that's possible. "You try to be a good bloke," he says, "and to make yourself available. But I don't want to open a magazine and think, 'Why on earth did I let them do that?'"

Many people might think it more embarrassing to be filmed in some of the off-colour high jinks of Where the Truth Lies: the sex, the drugs, the violence. Firth is unlikely to send still photographs from this to his aged aunts. Where the Truth Lies explores the dark and destructive side of showbiz success. Vince Collins (Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) are the hottest showbiz partnership in 1950s America. When a beautiful young woman is found dead in their suite, their world falls apart. Fifteen years later, a journalist persuades a publisher to offer Collins $1m to collaborate with her on writing the untold story. Through a variety of conflicting accounts, the mystery is grippingly sustained until the movie's end. The sex scenes, featuring Bacon and Firth together in the same room as assorted young women, were anything but sexy, Firth reports. "We ran through the morning with our curlers in. Then we ran through it partially clothed, sorting out where the guy with the boom microphone was going to be. Hopefully, not anywhere near me: it takes all the sex out of it."

The film is based on a novel, in which Firth's character is American. The director, Atom Egoyan, changed that: he fancied that a Brit could be interestingly uptight alongside the unruly American played by Bacon. The models he had in mind for Firth included David Niven and Rex Harrison. As for the double act, Egoyan wanted Firth and Bacon to work up their own routine, and helped out by creating plausible environments for them: a club, a telethon studio. He even hired a professional laugher to react to their jokes.

"People have said that the act is crap," says Firth, referring to American reviews. "But if you go through the footage of the Rat Pack and people like that, a lot of their stuff was crap by today's standards. It was macho, often racist. I don't think our routine was crap - anyway, it wasn't about having the best gags. We were more concerned with creating glimpses of that world. It looks tired, like a proper routine."

The actors sometimes had to play both 1950s and 1970s scenes in a single day. "It was very, very bizarre. You're ageing 15 years, and then going back to when you are young and everything was going well for you - and then back again. But that is what actors do. I'm not complaining: I find it exhilarating. You get ready and they say, 'We're not doing that scene. The light's not right.' So you get ready for something else, then they change their minds again.

"People have this idea that if you don't get it right you can do it again. But you can't. Not unless you get 20 takes with Kubrick. Even then, it can get worse, not better. You don't want to piss everyone off because they all got it right - the other actors, the director, the lighting people, sound. And if you do ask to have another try, they might say, 'Sorry, but the scene coming up is even more important.' And you are thinking, 'Oh, so this is for ever?' That's something you catch yourself thinking all the time. I read a comment on the art of translation: you have never finished, you just abandon it. With film, that happens many times a day."

In person, Firth proves much as I had expected. Tall and good-looking, sure. A teeny bit earnest. And thoroughly polite: he goes out of his way to make himself available, sitting down with me three times to make sure I have covered everything. The first time, we speak for precisely 13 minutes. (The publicist times it, presumably so I can't complain later that I've not had long enough.) We sit on a bench in the freezing cold while the crew rearranges the set. Firth looks preoccupied, and answers questions defensively. ("I don't know how I choose the parts I play.")

The second conversation falls at the end of that day. Firth changes into his own clothes, then wanders back uphill to find me, rather than - as I'm sure he'd prefer - driving back to his hotel or to a particularly good sushi restaurant he's discovered in Bratislava. This time, he's more expansive. The publicist leaves us alone and we talk for more than an hour. I even get him to open up on the mechanics of acting, which I find fascinating, but which many actors prefer not to discuss lest they sound pretentious.

Firth was born in Hampshire, moved to Nigeria where his father was teaching, and returned to England aged five. He went to a comprehensive school in Winchester. As a boy he dreamt of being a writer. "But when I was 14 it came to me that I could act." So he spent two years at the Drama Centre in London, and landed his first role on the professional stage as the lead in the award-winning 1981 production of Another Country. After that, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Firth's film career began in 1984 in Another Country, with Rupert Everett. In 1989 he took the lead in Milos Forman's film Valmont. His lead role in the TV drama Tumbledown, based on the Falklands war, earned him the Royal Television Society best-actor award and a Bafta nomination. He's since starred in the films The English Patient, Fever Pitch, Shakespeare in Love, Bridget Jones's Diary, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. In 2002 he was reunited with Everett in a film of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

But the part he's best known for remains Mr Darcy. More than 10m viewers tuned in to the BBC's 1995 TV adaptation. Worldwide, more than 100m have seen it. On Google, if you search for Colin Firth and Pride and Prejudice, you'll find about a quarter of a million websites. Most feature gushing commentary from women viewers, such as: "Oh, Mr. Darcy! How often in my reveries have I longed to console you." Or describing their all-time-favourite screen moment: "When Mr Darcy emerges from the lake (mmm Colin Firth!!!)".

The screenwriter Andrew Davies, who adapted the novel for the BBC, makes a point that's often overlooked: that Darcy represents a considerable acting challenge. "At the start, the actor mustn't give away too much the fact that Darcy is going to be a sympathetic character," he says. "But he must play him in a way that he's not just a really nasty person who turns into a really nice person." Firth's solution was to stay very still and to convey everything through Darcy's eyes. "I thought to myself, 'This is where he wants to go across the room and punch someone. This is where he wants to kiss her. This is where he wants sex with her right now.' I'd imagine a man doing it all, then not doing any of it. That's all I did."

Kevin McKidd, the star of the BBC's epic drama Rome, has been playing opposite Firth in Slovakia. Firth is "expected to smoulder all the time", says McKidd. "And his face, in repose, is a bit like that. But Colin injects fun into the work, and this business should be fun. He has the right balance between paying the job the respect it deserves and not taking himself too seriously." In this respect, perhaps having children helps. In 1989, Firth entered into a relationship with Meg Tilly, his co-star in Valmont. Their son, Will, was born a year later. In 1997 he married an Italian, Livia Guiggioli, whom he met while filming Nostromo. They have two sons: Luca, aged four, and two-year-old Matteo. "Your own children, by their very existence, make you rethink everything. They keep your mind alive and question you, and mock you."

Since meeting Livia, he's learnt to speak her language fluently - he once described that as the most romantic thing he ever did. He's also become heavily involved in cultural events at the Italian Institute in London. For his efforts, he was honoured in May as a Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. He'd see more of his family - and of the Italian Institute - if he wasn't so often abroad on location. Why not stay in England, I ask, perhaps do a spot more theatre?

"Theatre acting is infinitely easier than film, in every way. You don't have a scrambled process, you can't be messed around by the editor, you have proper rehearsals and you're on stage before an audience. But there are a million reasons, noble and otherwise, for doing film. The recognition is very high, for a start. And at its best, film is a beautiful medium. It is wonderful that you can keep it. To me, Spencer Tracy does not look dated. Nor does Garbo, even in her silent work. Film doesn't disappear into the air. I find it devastating that you lose theatre performance."

Firth's not done much on stage since leaving the RSC, but he did win excellent reviews in a 1991 revival of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, directed by Pinter himself. The experience evidently stuck with him. "When something is that well written, and the production functions that well, it gets under your skin." What was Pinter like? "Harold was extremely practical and economic. His notes were not designed to reveal what lay behind the text: they were to do with blocking. He might have said, 'Why don't you sit down before you say that?' And I couldn't believe how much that tended to solve the problems I was having. He also treated the text as though it were someone else's. He would make jokes about telling the author what he thought of it."

Firth was delighted when it was announced in October that Pinter had won the Nobel prize: "He's a stunning writer and very important." 

Is he equally impressed by Pinter's political views? Many people wish he would stick to play-writing, not attacking George Bush, Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. Firth curls his lip, assuming a scornful expression hardly less familiar than the trademark smoulder. "Why should he not have the views that he has? I don't understand this thing about celebrities 'telling people what to think'. It's an English whinge. If you don't like it, don't listen. I think Harold is courageous and passionate."

Firth had long been a supporter of Amnesty and Greenpeace, paying subscriptions, writing letters, attending protest marches. But recently he became more outspoken. "I didn't want the fact that I was famous to stop me, and maybe it was irresponsible not to use it." In April he met Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, to discuss an Oxfam report on rich countries forcing poor ones to open their markets, and dumping surplus crops. "I had the choice between being the guy who smiles for the camera and says a few words, or doing some homework and trying to make the issue my own," he says. "It's hard, when you open up that kind of door, to close it again and do nothing. You are open to attack. The cynics and those who don't give a shit are constantly on the lookout for hypocrisy in everything that might be well intentioned. Working with Oxfam, for example, and being tremendously well off could seem like a contradiction. It's a fair cop. But this is not all about giving away your possessions. We are all at risk of being called hypocrites."

He adds: "I have a huge distrust of certainty and conviction, particularly the crude type politicians like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher have, that people seem to admire so much. Where do they find that certainty? I don't believe it's possible to have that if you are an imaginative person."

Our third conversation takes place in a pair of folding canvas chairs in front of the director's monitors. Firth has put himself out for me and covered a great deal of ground. Among other things, I ask if he's ambitious ("I think I must be"), then about his long-standing interest in writing fiction and, more recently, directing. We also discuss travel and his attempts to play the guitar.

But as I sit at my computer in England, none of that seems half as absorbing as the photo session in Slovakia. The whole thing was over in just five minutes, but it seems to exemplify much that Firth told me about the process of making a movie: the exhilaration, the uncertainty, the dependence on good light. It even bears comparison, I like to think, with Where the Truth Lies. It didn't specifically address the destructive side of showbiz, nor was there a great deal of sex, drugs and violence. But there was a rather tired partnership, comprising Martin (the unruly one) and me (the uptight Brit). And there was ample scope for conflicting accounts of what occurred, like the ones used by Egoyan. Did Martin really throw a wobbly? Was the publicist a pain in the bum, or just doing her best in difficult circumstances? Was the real villain the assistant director with the clipboard and the walkie-talkie?

Just one thing's for sure. There was a ghastly crime, with an innocent victim. Not a naked woman dead in the bath, but a 45-year-old actor, a good bloke, Commander of the Order of blah-blah, captured on film in The Wrong Trousers, on a soapbox for all the world to see his horrid leather gusset.

As they say, Mmm, Colin Firth! ! !

Where the Truth Lies is now on general release

"Don't call me Darcy, says Colin" 

The Ilford Recorder, 1 December 2005

In WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (18), Colin Firth plays against the Darcy image that just won't leave the public imagination, starring as Vince Collins, the English half of a hugely successful showbiz double act.
 
Along with Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) his star shines brightly during the 1950s. When they abruptly split, the mystery of where it all went wrong remains hidden in rumour and supposition. That is until a journalist and long time fan begins to investigate.
 
Here Colin talks about the new film, and that Mr Darcy shadow.
 
Q: The dark and edgy tone marks a return to the kind of thing you were doing at the beginning of your career, doesn't it?
Firth: I've been hearing year after year after year, "well this is a departure for you, isn't it?" I don't know how many departures I have to make. I think if someone hadn't seen Bridget Jones, or Pride and Prejudice, and had only seen Trauma or, going back further, seen Tumbledown or Master of the Moor, they'd probably wonder why I always killed people.
I don't do things in order to change the pattern really, I just do it because I like a script and think it might be interesting.
 
Q: The characters you and Kevin Bacon play have some depth to them - something we discover as the story unfolds.
Firth: Yeah, we're supposed to see a contrast between what's going on on-stage and what's going on backstage.
Kevin and I are off stage looking very tense, we don't know why yet but we know something's going on. We walk onstage and present a happy face to the audience, and then the camera goes through the corridors and into the bath tub where there's a dead girl.
That's the world of the film, it's what's going on after the curtain comes down.
It's interesting for me to play a performer. I've played soldiers and psychopaths and human rights lawyers, but this is my first actor.
 
Q: Were you disappointed not to be able to sing some great 50s songs as Vince?
Firth: Yes, I don't think anyone else was. I would have liked to have a crack at it.
 
Q: While this is a fictional double act, did you draw inspiration from any real people?
Firth: We went though everybody really, but we were never going to tie ourselves to any particular character and get stuck doing imitations of them.
 
Q: How did you deal with the sexually frank scene at the heart of the story?
Firth: I know most people wouldn't want to take their clothes off in front of their colleagues.
But by the time you've been through drama school you've had to go through a bit of that anyway, and by the time you're in your mid-40s you've been round the houses a few times.
That doesn't mean you think nothing of it. There's always a slightly tricky moment when you go from being dressed to undressed and yet you've got a scene to play.
It was quite a tricky scene, emotionally. We had to get that right while also framing out people's private parts. A lot of the time you're wrestling with the technical requirements, as you are on any film. Even if you're not naked you're having to hit a mark and hit your light and move in accordance with the camera movement, while looking as if on take 15 you've said it for the first time and it's spontaneous.
 
Q: You're a big music fan. Did you know that Rupert Holmes had written the book upon which this film is based?
Firth: He doesn't feature in my record collection, but I was very familiar with those songs. Anyone who had a radio in the 70s would have heard both of his best known songs played endlessly. I met him a few times on the set, he's a delightful man who was very generous towards us.

"Mr Darcy dares to bare everything" by Caroline Briggs.

BBC News, 28 November 2005

Colin Firth's new role in Where the Truth Lies will come as a surprise to fans used to seeing the actor in more romantic roles.

His roles in the two Bridget Jones films, the Brit-flick Love Actually, and his breakthrough role as the smouldering Mr Darcy in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, has ensured him a legion of female fans.

But Where the Truth Lies, by director Atom Egoyan, sees Firth cast in a much darker character alongside Hollywood star Kevin Bacon.

They play Vince Collins (Firth) and Lenny Morris (Bacon) - a comedy duo who are the darlings of 1950s America.

But their reputations are sullied when a young woman is found dead in their hotel bath tub and, despite water-tight alibis, their partnership is over.

Neither speaks to the other, or to anyone else, about the death until the 1970's, when ambitious writer Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) begins to look into it.

The film explores the dark side of fame, fortune, and celebrity, something Firth says he was immediately attracted to.

"I liked all the dark stuff, the unpredictability of the character, and I thought it had a lot of possibilities," he told the BBC News website.

"[Darker roles] are not entirely new to me. In Trauma, which I did about three years ago, and throughout the 1980s, I was playing characters who were less than pleasant.

"It's not a reaction to typecasting - I just tend to like that territory. "I have reaped enormous benefits from doing rom coms... but I tend to be more comfortable in drama than in comedy."

While Firth admits he would be open to future comedy roles, there is the possibility of more gritty roles in the near future.

"Tortured is always good for an actor. I don't know anyone who doesn't want to do a bit of torturing," he added.

"It is hard to imagine any central character in any film that is happy at the beginning, happy in the middle, then happy at the end. What story has there been?"

But while Vince may be a polar opposite of Darcy, there was one element of his affable Englishman demeanour that Egoyan was keen to tap into.

"Vince was originally an Italian-American, but that was never going to happen," said Firth."[Atom] thought it would be more interesting to use what people associated with me already and he was absolutely right.

"There is something that surprises people more about the character if I play this buttoned-up Brit who goes off stage and beats the crap out of people and behaves in an evil manner."

While the violence is graphic, it is the explicit sex scenes - one in particular - that caused controversy in the US.

It was released with a restricted NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America, despite Egoyan's cuts to the contentious scene.

He later failed in a bid to challenge its rating.

Nudity 

When asked about the controversy Firth throws his hands up in defeat.

"In terms of the psychology of the film [the scene] is critical. If that scene was not critical we would have saved ourselves a lot of grief at the box office by chopping it out, but you can't. "It's not the most explicit scene I have ever seen, there is not full-frontal nudity, so it's not that."I can only think that because the scene itself is uncomfortable - and intentionally uncomfortable - that they were reacting to that discomfort and considering it across whatever threshold they are using to judge."

Firth is succinct about the perils of taking his clothes off for a living.

"It's a bit grisly at first really, but it's alright," he laughs

"You've got the added obstacle of cameramen going into contortions trying to frame out your privates at the same time.

"In a film situation you are asked to do all kinds of things that are not usual: you pretend to kill people, torture people, conjure up rage which would be completely anti-social in any other situation, and so the sexual thing is only one more weird thing we have to do."

Firth admitted the role also provided an uncomfortable glimpse into the future of a celebrity whose fame turns sour.

"Vince is a very, very bleak character to portray in that way and playing him was a real stare into the abyss. There but for the grace of God go I. "It's a horrible glimpse at what happens when you walk out of the limelight and into total isolation, and I think it is a very, very easy thing to happen. "If you invest in that sort of adoration and you capitalise on all those perks, it is going to distance you from real human beings and real relationships and Vince is totally dysfunctional in that way.

"It's also the fear of mediocrity and spinning into that place where over years and years the quality of your work just declines, declines until people who used to celebrate you now feel a bit sorry for you. "I don't want to think about it at all. You've depressed me terribly," he joked.

"Without prejudice" by Peter Ross

Sunday Herald, 27 November 2005

For a decade, Colin Firth has been Britain’s most lusted after leading man. But in truth he is much more complex than the sex symbol tag suggests. He talks to Peter Ross about the shock of fatherhood, the highs and lows of acting, and why Tony Blair’s religious beliefs make him want to jump in a lake.

"COOL!" beams Colin Firth. "That sounds very reasonable." He looks almost absurdly grateful, like a prisoner on death row granted a last-minute reprieve on the condition that he sleeps with the warden's beautiful daughter.

Firth is pleased because I have solemnly promised at the outset of our interview not to ask any questions about Pride And Prejudice or Bridget Jones. These are the projects with which he is most closely associated, and which have defined him in the public mind as a piece of prime posh totty whose turbulent emotions are kept in check by good old-fashioned British reserve.

All rot, of course, but nevertheless almost every profile of him written in the last decade - and there have been hundreds - has been a variation on this theme. The journalist who spoke to him just before me concluded by asking, "So what's a Texan doing playing Bridget Jones?" and the only thing that prevented Firth from responding to this by falling to the floor and writhing around with blood streaming from his eyes was (a) the rugs in this London hotel room are pretty expensive, and (b) he's too polite a chap to make a fuss. Nevertheless, he is delighted by the prospect of talking about something - anything! - other than Mr bleeding Darcy and Renee sodding Zellweger. "That would be very cool," he says. "Thank you very much."

He is sitting on a sofa in a room of The Dorchester, a gaff so chintzy that the staff have lace frills round their faces, and so hoity-toity that a little man follows you around sweeping up your dropped aitches.

Firth has been here all day, promoting his new picture. The ambience is hotel zen - calm to the point of numbness. It is 5pm and I am Firth's last interview of the day, all that stands between him and soup and a salad. He is wearing jeans, scruffy trainers, a striped shirt, and the beginnings of a beard. He is tall and handsome, as you know, and thinks about what he is going to say before speaking. He tries to make an interview into an actual conversation rather than an empty ritual of obvious questions and unsurprising replies, and while this can lead to waffle and waste precious time, it's nice to see him behaving like a human in the dehumanising context of a press junket; it's a mark of the man - decent, intelligent and determined to make life a little more bearable.

We begin by discussing his film, Where The Truth Lies. Directed by Atom Egoyan in the noir tradition, it's a complicated story about sex and murder. Firth plays Vince Collins, an English actor in Seventies Los Angeles who used to be one half of a hugely successful Fifties comedy duo, his former partner - Lanny Morris - being played by Kevin Bacon. Both men are planning to publish explosive memoirs of the decadent years they spent together, and what everyone wants to know is what really happened to the young girl who was found dead in their New Jersey hotel room back at the height of their fame. The film's theme is the gap between public and private self.

All famous people experience that disparity, and Firth is no different. "The way the public see me doesn't seem to be very coherent," he says. "Unless it's just as Mr Darcy or the guy who does Bridget Jones, I don't think there's a finite image. The person that I read about in newspapers, who looks back at me, is an unlikely montage of disparate things, pieced together from one phase of my career attached to another. And actually, that's fine by me. I don't mind it at all." In other words, he doesn't want people to know who he is. He would rather they were confused.

If he will allow it, though, I'd like to clear something up. One of the great Firth myths is that he is modest and self-effacing, and he nods when I mention this, dismissing it as "a load of British shtick". It is essentially the Colin Firth act that he slips into in public. But the truth is that acting requires enormous amounts of self-belief, even arrogance, and he certainly has those personality traits.

"Yeah, it requires huge ego," he says. "I remember one of my grandfathers, who was a minister in the church, said that he had to have quite a considerable ego to get up in front of people, tell stories and preach to them. He said that's what got him up there, and over his nerves about being the centre of attention."

This is typical Firth, making a point about himself by referring to his family background. He does it a number of times during our relatively short time together; he clearly believes in the importance of bloodlines and a certain level of genetic predestination.

Anyway, he is not finished talking about ego.

"I remember at drama school it struck me that the great extroverts were not necessarily the best actors. Very often the best actors were not that sure of themselves socially; they could be very quiet and retiring people, and the stage was the place where everything got released." Although too fond of his British shtick to say so, he is talking about himself.

The young Firth who grew up in Winchester and then attended the Drama Centre in London, does seem to have been something of a loner, uneasy in a crowd.

But as he points out, being like that "is not inconsistent with having a lot of vanity and really, really wanting to succeed for your own sake."

Success came quickly. Firth was the star of the Drama Centre, known for his intelligence, poetic sensibility, and willingness to immerse himself in characters. When they staged Hamlet, he played the lead. He was talent-spotted and cast in the West End production of Another Country, the play which had already launched the careers of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett and Daniel Day-Lewis. Firth had arrived.

He appeared in the 1984 film version of Another Country and quickly notched up TV and film work which saw him cast alongside some legendary actors. In Camille, he worked with John Gielgud, and appeared in the 1986 mini-series Lost Empires, the last television programme Laurence Olivier ever made. What must it have been like for a young actor in his mid-20s to act with people of that calibre?

"Stunning," he says. "It made me feel I had achieved something, although I hadn't achieved very much in my own right, just to be in the company of the most luminous names in my profession. There was nobody more dazzling than Laurence Olivier, the most celebrated actor of the century. And I was treated, on the whole, with equality. Acting in this country is a very egalitarian process; there is that feeling that one is in a company. Olivier used to call me 'partner' . . ." Firth breaks off and laughs, ". . . partly because he couldn't remember my name. He asked me to call him Larry."

Back in those days, Firth felt differently about his talents. "In some ways I find acting more difficult now than I used to," he admits. "There were certain things that were easier because youth gave them to me for free. One was the ability to suspend disbelief, to believe whatever you want to believe. And that can produce the arrogance, which we were talking about. I was not nervous when I went on stage in my early 20s; I am now. When you are young, you go on stage thinking, 'This is my right. How can it go wrong? And what does it matter if it does - I'm indestructible.' The the realities of life tell you after 20 years that you are totally destructible, and you have seen the destruction, and you know what can go wrong. That is the sort of thing that can interfere with your work."

At this point, I hazard a guess that he is referring - in part - to his feelings about becoming a father. It's true for a lot of men, I think, that when they become a parent, a sensation of constant low- level fear enters their lives; a lot of anxiety and pressure to succeed and be dependable, to live up to that word: dad. When you have a child, you are confronted with who you really are, and for an actor - a person whose work rests upon their ability and willingness to flit blithely from identity to identity - that can be difficult. In 1990, Firth had a son, Will, with Meg Tilly, the Canadian actress whom he met on the set of Valmont.

"That was the biggest thing," he says. "I went through a brief period after my first child was born when I felt even more bullet- proof. It was so important to me that it felt like nothing else was important, and so I felt like nothing else could touch me. I couldn't possibly be intimidated by a social situation, and my career just didn't seem important.

"But then you find out all sorts of things about yourself, as you become a parent, and start to make mistakes, and start to realise how much depends on your judgement at every step in terms of what your child's future is going to be. Those things start to make you feel vulnerable.

You realise that the world is quite scary and you have a huge responsibility to make it better for someone other than yourself. It turned my life completely upside down, and my feeling of invincibility pretty well ended around that time."

I ask him to please tell me one surprising thing which he learned about himself during that period. He takes his time replying, I think because he is deciding how honest to be.

"Well," he says, "before I had a child I had thought I was a person who had a reasonable capacity to care for other people. But then I realised that it had basically all been about me up to that point. All my pursuits. I enjoyed not having ties, certainly not having any that I felt I couldn't undo. And having a child is the one thing that you categorically and clearly cannot undo. It was a shock to have something that was bigger than me, bigger than my own ego. That my peace of mind and happiness depended on the well-being of someone else was a huge shock. That hadn't happened before. I thought I had loved people sufficiently that their happiness was equal to my own. But it wasn't. It was nowhere near."

Do not take from this that Firth is entirely self-centred. He is, for example, very politically engaged; he has campaigned for rights for asylum seekers, and is a director of Progreso, the ethical coffee chain which gives growers in the third world a percentage of the profits.

Anyway, his feelings about fatherhood began to affect the way Firth acted. He had been trained according to the Stanislavski system which required him to immerse himself in roles, and his own natural inclination was to strive for maximum truthfulness, but after the birth of his son he was increasingly unwilling to become the characters, to feel what they felt. The crisis came during the filming of Hostages, the 1993 docu-drama about John McCarthy's kidnap and imprisonment by Islamic terrorists, which seems to have been filmed around the same time as Firth's relationship with Tilly was coming to an end. "I thought, 'Why am I doing this silly job where I am entering into someone else's shit? It's ridiculous. I've got my own issues to deal with here, and I'm supposed to pretend to be this guy suffering.'" Although Firth only became truly famous three years after this point, with his iconic Mr Darcy, my sense is that his commitment to acting has never been quite the same since. I hope any actors reading this will forgive me for saying so, but he's a bit too smart for the job. He seems more naturally a creator than an interpreter of work. Five years ago he published a promising short story as part of Nick Hornby's Speaking With The Angel collection, and has written more fiction since, although he prefers to write for his own pleasure rather than with a view to publication. He finds writing calming, but if he knew it was going to be published then he would get stressed about deadlines, and it would lose its therapeutic quality. Nevertheless, as he says, "the writing itch is growing, the acting itch is diminishing, and the possibility of doing something on the other side of the camera has raised itself."

Acting isn't coming naturally to him at the moment, but he is bringing up two small boys - Luca and Mateo - with Livia Giuggioli, his wife of eight years, and so the time isn't really right to swap the Winnebago and film star salary for the writer's garret and relatively paltry royalty cheque. Plus, he enjoys the company that acting brings. Firth is Hamletishly given to brooding and introspection, so being on his own isn't good for him; that's partly why he wasn't at all at ease when living in the Canadian wilderness with Meg Tilly, and why he will be sticking to acting for now.

He puts it simply: "The solitude and selfdiscipline of writing usually can't compete with the allure of getting a paid job with lots of mates."

He grew up in a very well-read home.

Both of his parents were lecturers. "Books were very much encouraged, and my parents read a great deal. Different strands of the family pass that down. My mother's mother was very literary."

"You knew her?" I ask.

"Yes, I knew all my grandparents. They were all there until I was about 35. It was extraordinary. She married a man who was completely self-educated - a butcher's son who ended up as a doctor. They beat the crap out of him at school for being lefthanded so he left and did it all himself.

Education has always been of importance in the family. They were a bit freaked out at first when they realised I was not going the conventional route."

Firth used to be a bit paranoid about having never gone to university; he felt he was lacking something, but is over it now. Perhaps mindful of his autodidact grandfather, he uses acting jobs as a way of educating himself. While filming Apartment Zero in Argentina, he learned all about the history of the country. He had never read any Jane Austen, or indeed been that interested in English literature, until he signed up to Pride And Prejudice. Even after filming had finished on Conspiracy, in which he played one of the Nazi leaders planning the extermination of the Jews, he continued to research the Holocaust. "I suppose it's a weird way to study," he says, "but I enjoy the homework."

He's interesting, Colin Firth; much more interesting than I thought he was going to be before I met him. His mind and conversational range are sprawling, swampy. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey and make it fear for the other two.

He is the sort of man with whom one could have a tremendous 3am conversation after seven pints and a half pizza supper. Trying to get his measure in a hotel room in less than an hour is an impossible task, like attempting to reduce the Everglades to a nice water feature. However, if pressed, I'd say that the key to unlocking him is to understand that he's all about movement and change.

When he was 12, his family lived for a year in St Louis, Missouri. They made various lengthy road trips from the city, and as a result Firth saw much of the American landscape - its mountains and canyons, skyscrapers and neon streets - at a very impressionable age. "It was absolutely amazing and very wild," he says.

"I had been living in a little suburb in Hampshire; I came back feeling very much at home in that world of travel, and have felt very itinerant ever since. I've had a lot of friends who are not English; my partners, girlfriends, have rarely been English. That's not been conscious - will not accept English girls - it's just happened that way."

Although Firth - like his rival for parts, Hugh Grant - often seems to represent a certain old-fashioned Englishness on screen, he himself does not feel especially English. He is a jumble of English, American, Canadian and Italian, and seems to like it that way. He is opposed to certainty of any kind - "I have less and less patience with any kind of moral absolutism" is a typical Firth sentence - and can't stand politicians who are convinced that their approach is correct, particularly if that point of view is rooted in faith. "So I have a big problem with Mr Blair's religious convictions. I think they are very dangerous. And let's not even talk about the White House."

One set of Firth's grandparents were Methodist missionaries, but the atmosphere when he was growing up was always very progressive, and he was raised to be suspicious of religious fundamentalism.

What was important was to debate, to discuss, to bounce opinion around. "I think questions are all you've got in life in the end," he says, and can't even tell me if he believes in God or is an atheist "because those words are such absolutes that I find any discussion of them meaningless until we both know what we are talking about."

You could scoff at this, of course, and say that Firth's attitude is wishy-washy liberal garbage, and that if we all thought like him, nothing would ever get decided; that may very well be true, but it makes him an interesting man. More, his ability to see every side of an argument, to put himself in someone else's shoes, is - I would think - what has sustained him as an actor even as his willingness to feel the emotions of his characters has diminished. The 12-year- old who went to America, and felt at home as he hurtled along the freeway, is now a 45year-old with a protean imagination. It will be interesting to see what he does with it in future.

It is almost 6pm when I leave the hotel room. "Thanks for not being obvious at any point," he says as I'm going out the door.

Likewise, Colin, likewise.

Where The Truth Lies is released on December 2

"We find Where The Truth Lies…" by Sam Toy.

Empire, November 2005

He's played Mr Darcy and Mark Darcy for so long that we perhaps best know him for his romantic comedies, but Colin Firth is nothing if not versatile. In his latest film, Where The Truth Lies, he plays Vince, a violent, insecure, drug-using half of a television double act, with Kevin Bacon. We talk to the man who's doing his best to put that wet shirt behind him about his dark side, why he enjoys being tortured and why Kevin Bacon's butt saved his blushes…

 
What was the original appeal of doing the film?
I don't know; what was not to like really! It was Atom who had me going from the start, because I spoke to him before I saw the script. I thought that it's gonna be thoughtful and it's gonna have an unusually take on the subject. It'll probably be somewhat uncomfortable; it'll probably be specialising in or humanising something that people find disagreeable. And sure enough, it was unlike anything I was used to. I liked all the dark stuff; I liked the unpredictability of the character. I thought it had a lot of possibilities.

 
Looking at the stuff that you have coming up on IMDB-
I'd take it with a pinch of salt, IMDB. I find that I'm involved in things I've barely heard of. They're things people try and set up, the order of things have been changed. So none of those are certainties.

 
But those that you have confirmed seem to be darker roles…
Some of them definitely are, yeah. You're probably talking about Toyer, La Fenice, things like that, if they ever happen. They're definitely around, but they're not entirely new to me - Trauma, which I did about two-three years ago, was a darker role and through the '80s I was playing characters who were less than pleasant. The rom-com is not the sort of affair that anyone came to me with for the first 10 years.

 
Are you trying to avoid typecasting?
It's not a reaction to typecasting. I just tend to like that territory, really. I've got nothing against rom-coms, but I never went out looking for them. It's something that landed in my lap somehow, I participated in it and I've reaped enormous benefits from having done them. My life would be much more of a struggle had that not had happened. But I feel more comfortable in drama rather than comedy.

 
Would you still consider rom-com roles in the future?
I consider anything that's good, really. The criteria is quite broad for why I would take on something. As I said in the case of Atom Egoyan, a director could be the first hook. I've done jobs because there's a group of people I want to work with. But a good comedy is hard to come by and I'll definitely do it if I feel it's worthwhile. One of the things on that list is called Gambit, which is written by the Coen brothers. Having said that I'm not really up for comedy at the moment, this came along which is so brilliantly written - it'd be stupid not to jump at it, if it happens.

I saw you at last year's London Film Festival with Kevin Bacon. Were you working on this film then?
Yeah, we must have been. We shot part of it in London and Kevin was there for The Woodsman. We were working together and probably had been naked together that day. (laughs)

 
How were the nude scenes?
It was a bit grizzly at first, really. I mean, we've been through most of it as actors and by the time you reach the mid-forties, if you've done a few films, there's always sex somewhere. You even have to be naked in drama school, get your kit off and do some of that. You get over it really. You stop giggling about it and don't register it that much. There's still gonna be a bit of a moment to get over when you walk onto the set with your clothes on and there's gonna have to be a moment when they're not on anymore…but you get over it. You are more concerned after a few seconds have gone by with conveying what has to be conveyed. Presumably, you're making a serious film and the scene has some importance. Certainly in our film it does, because in terms of the psychology of the film it's critical.

The greatest obstacle of filming anyway is having to appear spontaneous and fresh, and you're working under unbelievably artificial circumstances and filming way out of sequence. The room is full of lamps, lights and technicians and you're repeating yourself and it's supposed to look like it's happening for the first time. So that's difficult enough anyway and if you're doing scenes like that, you've got the added obstacle of the camera going into contortions to try and frame out your privates at the same time. So you know, let's get the vase of flowers there and the guy walking across with the plank. In the end, it's more about that than your own embarrassment.

 
When they started chopping bits out for the censors, was it disappointing?
When you've gone to all that trouble, yeah. I think if you're trying to tell a story that you think has some validity…that scene is so critical - if that scene wasn't critical to our film, we would've saved ourselves a lot of grief by chopping it out. But you can't even chop into it because it's one take. But it isn't the most explicit scene I've ever seen and there isn't even any frontal nudity in the scene, so it's not that. They sometimes add up how many thrusts there are and you'd cut a long thrust out and you may be able to get it through. But I can only think that because the scene itself is uncomfortable, intentionally uncomfortable, they're reacting to that discomfort. I think there should be some measures in place. I've got kids; I don't think there should be a total free-for-all. But I cannot for the life of me see what caused so much grief in this film.

 
Shooting sex scenes can be dull and difficult to remain spontaneous? Is it 50% harder trying to do that as a threesome?
Actually, probably not, funnily enough. You've seen those scenes in Love Actually when you're talking about the traffic on the M3 while humping each other. But somehow, three of you tends to make it more normal. You talk about safety in numbers, really. I'd had about a week where I hadn't been filming and I showed up and that week was taken up with solid shagging. It was Kevin and various women. By the time I came on that scene for the film, there was no interest at all. They were so sick of the sight of his ass that mine was nothing new. In a film situation, we're asked to do all kinds of things that are not usual or normal. You pretend to kill people, torture people, you conjure up rage which is not yours or would be extremely anti-social in any other situation. We make a lot of the sexual thing, but that really only one more weird thing we have to do.

 
Was your character Vince always a Brit?
No, Vince was an Italian-American. There was a clear Dean Martin reference in the book, and that was never gonna happen. I would've liked to play him as an American, but Atom convinced me very, very quickly that he wasn't looking for that. He thought it was more interesting if I used what people associate me with already and I think he was right. There's something that surprises people more about the character if I play this buttoned-up Brit, who then behaves in such an venal manner. I think a lot of the Americans will be surprised. Also, he wanted it to work for the act, that the act was a juxtaposition of a controlled, almost disciplinarian Englishman and an unruly American. He made use of those features.

 
One of the things in the film is obviously the decline of the celebrity. Is that one of the things to think about in terms of your future?
Vince is a very, very bleak character to portray in that way. Playing him was a real stare into the abyss, actually. To desperately need your status in that way and yet to have it as a big, big part of your burden must be a kind of hell. He assumes he's got a massive secret and the instinct is you've got a secret is to get out of the light and go and hide somewhere. But his whole lifeblood is being in the limelight; he has to be out there. I think if you're investing that sort of adoration and you capitalise on some of those perks, it is going to distance you from real human beings and real relationships. And also, the fear of mediocrity spinning into that - years or years where the quality of your work just declines and declines and declines. You can't help, people who you used to celebrate, now feeling a bit sorry for them. I don't want to think about it at all, you've depressed me. (laughs)

"Is that Mr Darcy taking part in an orgy?" by Sheila Johnston.

Telegraph.co.uk, 26 November 2005

The cocktail of drugs, sleaze and sex in their new film, Where the Truth Lies, might shock some of Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon's fans. They talk to Sheila Johnston.

At early screenings of Colin Firth's new film, Where the Truth Lies, it was hard to know what confounded his fans most.

Was it his presence as the ham in the sandwich, as it were, of a three-way, bisexual orgy? His generous pill-popping? The scene in which he batters a bystander to within an inch of his life? Or, most alarming of all, perhaps, the spectacle of Britain's eminent heartthrob in naff 1970s vintage sideburns, moustache, hipster trousers and gold chain?

The film begins in the late 1950s when Vince, Firth's character, forms half of a phenomenally popular lounge act: the cool, debonair straight man to Kevin Bacon's brash, manic comic.

Offstage, both men's voracious and mostly illegal appetites draw them into a scandal that ends their partnership. Then 15 years later, after the two have long since gone their separate ways and entered discreet semi-retirement, a nosy female journalist (Alison Lohman) starts to probe their story.

Despite raised eyebrows at the film's world première in Cannes, Firth's performance should not have come as too much of a surprise; after all, as he helpfully pointed out, to play a drug-addled swinger hardly requires a great leap of imagination for most actors, and certainly involved rather less research than Mr Darcy, the lord of the manor from Derbyshire.

Ten years after that iconic role in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, Firth has placidly resigned himself to embracing Darcy's memory. In the two Bridget Jones films, he played an ironic modern version of the character, and now Where the Truth Lies draws knowingly on that suave, cultivated persona.

The original novel, by Rupert Holmes, was widely supposed to be a roman à clef about the spontaneous combustion of the relationship between Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.

In it, Vince was an Italian-American singer. "I've got some crooning issues - or rather, other people around me have them," Firth says.

"But I would have loved to have a go at playing Vince as an American and I felt it was within my grasp." However, in the film the character has become immaculately British. "I realised," he says, "that it was valuable to bring my baggage and use a bit of the Darcy thing."

The film's director, Atom Egoyan, cast Firth partly to avoid "irrelevant" echoes of the Martin-Lewis story (and, possibly, any attendant litigation).

He conceived the character as a composite of David Niven, Rex Harrison and Noël Coward, and says he was attracted to the "veneer of civilisation" that Firth could bring to the role.

But Egoyan adds: "I've also seen him be really brutal in earlier work, like Tumbledown [the 1987 BBC drama], where he was absolutely terrifying as a Falklands soldier. He used to play much darker characters, and I thought it would be great to summon that up, even if some people will be shocked that Vince is so reprehensible."

Firth and Bacon had never met before making Where the Truth Lies. None the less the director, somewhat dauntingly, expected them to devise their own comedy routine from scratch, apparently even hiring a "professional laugher" to encourage them in their efforts.

Happily, the chemistry between the two actors appears to have gelled; in interview together they perform as a double act, with a barbed but friendly line in mutual banter.

"He gave me silk boxers from Harrods as a wrap present, so that gives you an indication of how we got on," Bacon reveals.

Firth counters, "I just wanted him to wear something. We've been through a lot on this movie and there are things I never want to see again. [To Bacon] You gave me a nice silver thing, which I thought was a bit camp, actually, with a very suggestive engraving on it."

The film's cocktail of drugs, sleaze and sex - in particular that three-way encounter between Firth, Bacon and an impressionable chambermaid played by Rachel Blanchard - caused a minor scandal and attracted the unwelcome attentions of the American censor.

After a series of arguments, Where the Truth Lies was released in the US unrated, due, reportedly, to an excess of "thrusting"; it will have an 18 certificate when it opens here on Friday.

Aside from its more lubricious elements, one of its presiding themes is the shifting sands of showbusiness and, in particular, the seismic shift between the star-struck 1950s and the ruthless 1970s when celebrities' secret lives became fair game for the media.

It's something that both Firth and Bacon - though both men's lives are mercifully scandal-free - are well-placed to comment on.

"My parents get weird phone calls and people showing up at their house," Firth says. "They're innocent about it - they want to be nice to absolutely everybody because that's the kind of people they are, and they answer questions politely. Then they'll get me on the phone saying, 'How could you tell them about the Batman outfit I had when I was 19?' The press are pretty determined and they'll do anything. It doesn't matter to them what the wreckage is in someone's life after the one-day story."

"In the 1950s there was much more of a wall protecting the stars," adds Bacon. "The media co-operated more, there was no internet and you couldn't tap into somebody's cellphone. You've gotta keep it in your pants more these days.

"I would say 95 per cent of being famous is pretty good and the other part, the idea that you are never anonymous, is a strange kind of jail sentence. Personally I don't like to complain about it too much, because I worked my whole life to become famous - that's what you do if you're an actor - but for my children it's a real invasion."

Bacon, whose own first major box-office hit was Footloose in 1984, has been hovering on the edge of major stardom ever since (most people now probably identify him most with the game he inspired, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which recently spawned both a book and a photography exhibition).

Firth, meanwhile, is girding his loins to play a Roman soldier in a historical drama called The Last Legion.

"I wear a little mini skirt and a thong," he reveals.

Bacon sees his chance for one last parting shot, and seizes it immediately. "Yup," he chimes in. "You'll be swinging your lance around all over again."

"Colin Firth chats about "Where The Truth Lies"

Close-Up Film

In Atom Egoyan's new film WHERE THE TRUTH LIES Colin Firth plays against the Darcy image that just won't leave the public imagination, starring as Vince Collins, the English half of a hugely successful showbiz double act.

Along with Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) his star shines brightly during the 1950s. When they abruptly split the mystery of where it all went wrong endures, yet remains hidden in rumour and supposition. That is until a journalist (Alison Lohman) and long time fan of the pair begins to investigate what really happened between them.

Q: The dark and edgy tone of WHERE THE TRUTH LIES marks a return to the kind of thing you were doing at the beginning of your career, doesn't it?

Colin Firth: I've been hearing year after year after year 'well this is a departure for you, isn't it?' I don't know how many departures I have to make, perhaps I'm being typecast as someone who does departures and doesn't get known for any one thing. I think if someone hadn't seen BRIDGET JONES , or PRIDE & PREJUDICE , and had only seen TRAUMA or going back further seen TUMBLEDOWN or MASTER OF THE MOOR they'd probably wonder why I always killed people. It's very often a journalist's job to look for patterns but it's mine not to. I don't do things in order to change the pattern really, I just do it because I like a script and think it might be interesting.

Q: The interest here would seem to come from the fact that the characters you and Kevin Bacon play have some depth to them. Something we discover as the story unfolds.

Firth: Yeah, we're supposed to see a contrast between what's going on on-stage and what's going on backstage. The first few frames of the film set all of that up. Kevin and I are off stage looking very tense, we don't know why yet but we know something's going on. We walk onstage and present a happy face to the audience, and then the camera goes through the corridors and into the bath tub where there's a dead girl. That's the world of the film, it's what's going on after the curtain comes down. Actually it's interesting for me to play a performer, as I am one. I've played soldiers and psychopaths and human rights lawyers, but this is actually my first actor.

Q: Were you disappointed not to be able to sing some great 50s songs as Vince?

Firth: Yes, I don't think anyone else was, but I would have liked to have a crack at it. I opened my mouth trying to show Atom what I could do, and after about three bars he said 'thanks, we'll let you know'.

Q: While Atom Egoyan is at pains to stress that this is a fictional double act did you draw inspiration from any real people?

Firth: We went though everybody really, but we were never going to tie ourselves to any particular character and get stuck doing imitations of them. I think we were completely right to take that approach, because it gave us ownership of our own characters. And also it isn't about anybody in particular. You can't base it on a known double act and then imply that they have a dead girl in their bathroom, and behaved in this way. We weren't interested in doing that anyway, this was a made up story like any other with, hopefully, an inclination to make you think about an area of life, about the entertainment business, in a certain way.

Q: It deals, on one level, with the nature of celebrity, doesn't it?

Firth: There is an area in which very, very famous people can live according to rather different rules. But you're only allowed to break the rules because people allow you to. You tend, if you're extremely famous, to be protected more. Doors are opened for you, you have a lot of people dancing around you making sure that there aren't any obstacles in your path. They're probably going to protect against having any meaningful human relationship as well. That's what happens. I don't know that level of fame at all, I haven't even had a sniff of it, so I've no idea what that would be like.

Q: You didn't know Kevin Bacon going into this. Did you find you had much in common with each other?

Firth: We're of the same generation, we've got various reference points in common.

Q: How did you deal with the sexually frank scene at the heart of the story?

Firth: We have to do so much weird stuff as actors anyway. I know this crosses a threshold which I think most non-actors find the least comprehensible and the most difficult to get their heads around, because most people wouldn't want to take their clothes off in front of their colleagues. But by the time you've been through drama school you've had to go through a bit of that anyway, and by the time you're in your mid 40s you've been round the houses a few times. That doesn't mean you think nothing of it. There's always a slightly tricky moment when you go from being dressed to undressed and yet you've got a scene to play. In the case of this film it was quite a tricky scene, emotionally. We had to get that right while also framing out peoples' private parts. A lot of the time you're wrestling with the technical requirements, as you are on any film. Even if you're not naked you're having to hit a mark and hit your light and move in accordance with the camera movement, while looking as if on take 15 you've said it for the first time and it's spontaneous.

Q: You're a big music fan, did you know that Rupert Holmes had written the book upon which this film is based, and does he feature much in your own CD collection?

Firth: He doesn't feature in my record collection personally, but I was definitely very familiar with those songs. Anyone who had a radio in the 70s would have heard both of his best known songs played endlessly. His career is absolutely fascinating, though he didn't go straight from writing the Pina Colada Song to writing this book of course. He started writing musicals and it followed on from that. It's an amazingly diverse set of achievements, really. I met him a few times on the set, he's a delightful man who was very generous towards us.

"Director's edgy moment of 'Truth" by Roger Moore.

Orlando Sentinel, 12 November 2005

It's been a rough few weeks," says director Atom Egoyan.
 
The Canadian maverick had received an estimated $25 million to make his "most commercial" film, with a "name" cast that includes Kevin Bacon, Allison Lohman and Colin Firth.
 
It was in the can, ready to hit a few film festivals and then head into North America's movie theaters this fall.
 
Then he ran into a little thing called the MPAA -- the studio-run Motion Picture Association of America, whose ratings board decides what to label movies: G, PG, PG-13, R -- or the dreaded adults-only NC-17.
 
Egoyan, director of The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, earned commercial cinema's equivalent of the death penalty. As reported in Variety, the MPAA identified four scenes in the sexually explicit murder mystery, including a menage a trois that Egoyan could not cut to its satisfaction. His studio appealed, but no dice.
 
ThinkFilm decided to release Where the Truth Lies without a rating. To no avail, as it turns out.
Truth won't be coming to a theater near you.
The studio gave up on rolling it into new cities, including Orlando, as of Friday.
 
"I was happy, at least, to see the film in its uncut state," Egoyan says. "The last time I saw it was at the MPAA's screening room in Los Angeles in our 'final cut' version, and I was really unhappy.
 
"It was a very confusing moment for me, because one side of me really wanted to get the R, and the other side didn't want the movie to go out that way. I guess I'm just relieved that the film won't be tampered with."
 
Movies with NC-17 have a hard time advertising on mainstream outlets. The rating also restricts the audience, ruling out those 17 and younger. Releasing a film unrated skirts that stigma, though studios prefer to have films rated, widely advertised and able to reach the largest audience.
 
Truth is based on a lurid serio-comic novel by Rupert Holmes, the singer-songwriter of "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." The film is about a reporter (Lohman) who investigates a long-covered-up scandal, a murder mystery overshadowing the breakup of a beloved comic team (Firth and Bacon). Her research uncovers the kinky sexual overtones of the mystery and how they relate to the long-estranged comics.
 
The MPAA doesn't make public statements about its edicts, but filmmakers are certain that the movie's suggestions of gay sex earned it that NC-17 stamp.
 
"I think they offered the information early on that this is 'not, repeat not, about the homosexuality,' " says Bacon. "And that's a pretty good indication to me that it is about the homosexuality."
 
Firth seconds that.
"We're being penalized for the nature of the sexuality," Firth says. "I've seen many movies with more nudity. The sex here is not pornographic or titillating. It's this business of them telling us, 'Well, there's one thrust too many' that is so maddening about this. It's hypocrisy at its worst."
 
Egoyan says that the very fact that his film has a name cast "and all this Hollywood studio machinery behind it is what is transgressive about it. If this had been an indie film with lesser-known actors, there wouldn't have been any fuss whatsoever."
 
In any event, it's the uncut Truth that took its shot in theaters, and failed. But look for it on DVD.

"Sex on legs! Me?" by John Millar

The Daily Record, 21 October 2005

He may be the world's most romantic leading man but Colin Firth draws the line at getting his pins out for his latest Roman epic role

He's one of the sexiest men on legs after his starring role as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but it's exactly those legs that are worrying Colin Firth. Famedand adored for playing romantic dashing leads andno stranger to dressing up for a part, movie hunk Firth was worried his latest role might makehimmorecomedy star than swoon material.

Off to Tunisia and Slovakia to film The Last Legion, an epic drama set during the end of the Roman Empire, the 45-year-old plays a seasoned Roman general guarding the boy emperor from ferocious barbarians. But it's the costumes - and his legs - which are playing on his mind. He said: "Whether you have the build or not, you can be killed in a costume.

"Russell Crowe didn't look ridiculous, but even if you have the most incredible physique there is still the danger of looking comical flaunting it in a skirt."You might become some kind of cheesy erotic fantasy."

And he added, clearly concerned about how he might look: "It is dangerous if you have beautiful legs and dangerous if you have legs like pipe cleaners. I can leave you to guess what applies to me."

Luckily producers have set The Last Legion, which also stars fellow Scots Peter Mullan, James Cosmo and John Hannah, in a period where fashions of the day mean he is covered up.

Colin said: "I thank my blessings that the film takes place at a time when they were out of mini skirts and wearing slightly more dignified apparel. "I have done masses of the more balletic style of sword fighting, but this type of combat is more cut and thrust."

Colin is relieved he is more covered up because he is only too aware that even some of the hunkiest stars of Hollywood, like Brad Pitt in Troy, have some difficulties with that sort of outfit. The Roman adventure is an interesting change of direction for Colin, who has earned fame and acclaim for starring in a string of hit romantic comedies.

These include the two Bridget Jones movies, Oscar-winner Shakespeare In Love,The Importance Of Being Earnest, Love Actually and his current success, kids' film Nanny McPhee.

But now he's contemplating a role that would shatter his romantic image - a movie titled Toyer in which he'd play a madman who lobotomises women.

He said: "I think it will upset a lot of people... understandably, it's a very upsetting script. But it may or may not happen, I'm waiting to see."

It's confounding people's expectations of him as an actor by mixing up the types of roles he takes that fills Colin with enthusiasm for his craft.

He said: "Sometimes I can't believe how ridiculous my existence is.

"I could be lobotomising women one minute and riding across the desert wielding a sword the next."

The next film that is on the way will provide another look at the edgier side of Colin's talents, because in Where The Truth Lies, Colin and Kevin Bacon play a Fifties comedy double act.

The characters are not above taking advantage of their groupies and one pivotal scene in the movie sees Colin and Kevin involved in a threesome that goes horribly wrong.

He said: "I have done stuff that is a long way from the romantic comedies I'm known for. But it is not to do with career strategies or trying to change perceptions of me, it's just what keeps me amused."

While he was filming Nanny McPhee - in which he plays the single father of seven children whose life is changed by a magical nanny played by Emma Thompson - Colin got some unexpected help as he prepared for Where The Truth Lies.

The cast of Nanny McPhee included Hollywood legend Angela Lansbury, who had met the sort of showbiz acts that Colin portrays in the movie. He said: "So here I had someonewhoknew The Rat Pack and she was fantastic with her advice." 

Colin is married to Livia Giuggioli, with whomhe has two children, four year-old Luca and Mateo, two. He also has a 15-year-old son from a relationship with American actress Meg Tilly.

No doubt it was with his younger sons in mind that he agreed to star in Nanny McPhee and experience his first big screen slapstick when he gets involved in a frantic and messy pie fight. He said: "I can't imagine that it is ever going to happen again.

"But I realised from day one that I was going to be asked to participate in something that was very broad. It was nerve wracking because I'm not known for that."

While you can imagine the Firth children one day getting a lot of fun from seeing dad making a fool of himself in the pie fight, Colin is quite content to keep his children distanced from his career. He said: "I'm not particularly anxious for my youngsters to see my work early on. Until they start to get really curious about it all I will leave it. It's a bit odd watching dad running around in a film."

Nevertheless he has taken a significant step towards classic family movies because Nanny McPhee is the first children's film in which Colin has starred.

He said: "If you are talking about targeting kids who are under 12, then I have never done anything in that area.

"I did What a Girl Wants, but that was more of a teen film."

Colin got his first taste of acting in pantomime as a five-year-old doing Jack Frost, but now he's so frequently on screen that he seems to be one of our busiest actors. But he insists he's far from a workaholic.

"People think you never stop, but the reality is I have an average of two films a year.

"I used to do a lot more films back to back before I had a family of my own.They are my reason for paring it down a bit," he said, adding that he is also aware of the dangers of being too prolific.

"I think people do need a break from you. If there is a Bridget Jones film out, you are on the side of every bus.

"I get sick of being stuck in traffic in London and getting overtaken by a bus with my face on the side."

Mention of Bridget Jones caused me to ask what he reckons the chances are of a third comedy in that series, and Colin admits he has mixed views on that topic.

He feels it could be in the running if author Helen Fielding was to dream up the plot for another brilliant book that was irresistible.

Colin said: "But I wouldn't want to do a third Bridget Jones film that just went over the same ground.

"However if it was about a sad, unhealthy, bloated Darcy and Cleaver (Hugh Grant's character) as a pathetic, ageing Don Juan with a fake tan and Bridget being even more neurotic, it might be good."

Nanny McPhee is released today and Where The Truth Lies is out on December 2

"Nanny dearest" 

Empire Online, 10 October 2005

The tick of biological clocks was deafening in Leicester Square's Empire cinema on Sunday, as hordes of female journalists went "aaaaah" at the sight of the little Snow Whites, fairies and princesses gracing the red carpet for the premiere of Nanny McPhee.
 
The film is the baby of Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay based on the 'Nanny Matilda' books (think Mary Poppins with Hannibal Lecter's manner). It also marks the return of Angela Lansbury to the big screen for the first time in 20 years, as the children's dreadful great-aunt.
 
Imelda Staunton, freshly returned from filming My Family and Other Animals in Corfu, was full of enthusiasm for playing a comedic role again - she stars as the family's grumpy army-trained cook. "What I like is doing lots of different things so it works for me," she said. "We've known each other for a long time. It's a lot of fun, terribly funny, far too much talent for my liking." Still, it wasn't all love and 'dahling' on set. "Colin Firth is a terribly difficult man and I don't care who knows it," she said frankly. "I think he'd be the first to admit that." Phew.
 
Difficult or not, a stubble-flecked Colin Firth sent Empire's heart into leapfrogging spasms before charming the pants off everyone with a story about the difficulties of working with children: "The director had at one point been so bombarded with questions that he said 'I'm only going to take incredibly important questions, very, very, very important questions or else, nothing,'" quoth Mr Firth. "And little Sam (Honywood), who's always eating in the film, put his hand up. 'Is it important Sam?' 'Yes.' 'VERY important?' 'Yes.' 'Well go on, what is it?' 'What's going to be in my bun?' And to him of course, there could be no more important question if you're going to spend the next hour eating." Bless…
 
Meanwhile, lady of the hour Emma Thompson was elated to have finished the film, but had one niggle which had nothing to do with working with children or animals. "The most difficult thing on that whole shoot was that effing blancmange," she pronounced. "Blancmange and porridge, very tricky."

"My Firth, my last, my everything" (Colin on The Last Legion)

Empire Online, 10 October 2005

At last night's Nanny McPhee premiere, Empire managed to quash their Mr Darcy blushes for long enough to find out what Colin Firth and onscreen son Thomas Sangster were up to next, only to find that both are filming Doug Lefler's debut feature, The Last Legion, in Slovakia.

 
Sangster coolly deflected Empire's questioning saying: "I can't say too much but it's about Ancient Rome. I play Caesar and Colin is kind of like my bodyguard I suppose." Sangster 1, Empire nil.
 

Luckily for this news piece, Colin Firth proved to be a little more loose-lipped on the subject, and The Last Legion sounds like it's a good leap away from the cosy comedy of Nanny: "This is fighting off Saxons and Goths and the menaces of the ancient world," said People magazine's Hottest Man Alive. "It's an adventure story and I think it has an intimacy about it because, unlike a lot of these things with massive battles, it's a group of stragglers, about seven people trying to survive and you get to know each other very well under those circumstances."

 
The film is adapted from the novel by renowned historical writer Valerio Manfredi. Sangster, who played the eldest of Firth's brood in Nanny McPhee, stars as Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of Rome, who flees the city to Britain to track down a group of supporters while Firth's character Aurelius follows him to keep him out of harm's way.

 
"We're in a bit of a father and son role there as well really," says Firth. "It's Ancient Rome you see, so I'm appointed to guard this last, child emperor at the moment where the whole thing collapses. Apparently this is true, that the Goths, when they finally did sack Rome, spared the life of the Emperor because he was so young. We don't know any more, but the writer just supposed, 'Well, what about the guy who was sworn to protect him? Is he going to carry on protecting him even though he's not the Emperor any more?' It's about that kind of relationship."

"Film stars leave crowds spellbound"

The Press Association, 9 October 2005

British film stars Emma Thompson and Colin Firth left crowds spellbound at the premiere of their magical new movie Nanny McPhee.

The actors wowed fans that gathered in Leicester Square in London's West End, performing the now-obligatory walkabout to greet the hundreds outside the cinema.

In the family movie Thompson, 45, plays a warty, severe, black-gowned nanny with magical powers who joins the family of recently widowed Firth and attempts to tame his unruly kids.

The actress who looked stunning in a blue dress by designer Tashia and Jimmy Choo shoes said: "It was liberating having moles for this part. I always find it more strange being glammed up."

Commenting on starring in a movie with a large cast of children and some animals, the actress, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie, joked: "It was really good but working with the donkey was tricky. But the most difficult thing of all was blancmange and porridge - trying to get them to do what you want."

Her co-star Firth famed for his TV role playing Jane Austen's Mr Darcy and parts in the Bridget Jones films described his experience of working with the young cast.

He said: "They do warn you not to work with children. There are risks about it however delightful they are that they're not going to be working along the same wavelength as you," he joked.

Asked how he felt about another actor playing the Mr Darcy in the new movie of Austen's book Pride and Prejudice movie he replied: "I don't own that role. I enjoyed it once in 1995 but if somebody can take it and run off with it, good luck to them."

The movie contains a host of British stars, from veteran actor Derek Jacobi, stars from Gosford Park and Gladiator to character actresses Celia Imrie and Imelda Staunton, who played the lead character in Mike Leigh's film Vera Drake.

Firth was well liked by his co-stars with Staunton making the wry comment: "I've known Colin a long time, we have a lot of fun. But he's got too much talent for my liking."

"Legends of the lounge" by John Clark

New York Daily News, 9 October 2005

A couple of cool-looking guys enter a hotel suite and sit down opposite each other. They might be taken for swingers, except Kevin Bacon's hair is Shaggy Rock Star and Colin Firth's is Shaggy 1970s. They are not drinking highballs. They are not smoking cigarettes. They are not even hitting on the pretty publicists in the room.

"It's called acting," Bacon says of their characters and their relationship in Atom Egoyan's new film, "Where the Truth Lies." A scathing look at showbiz corruption, it opens Friday.

Bacon, 47, and Firth, 45, play partners in a popular '50s lounge act - not unlike Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin - who are being profiled in retirement by an enterprising reporter (Alison Lohman). The focus of her story is the discovery of a young woman's body in their hotel suite years earlier.

Although they were absolved of any wrongdoing, her death seemed to have broken up the act, which is glimpsed in bits and pieces throughout the film. Bacon's character is the cutup, the clown. Firth is the straight man, the guy who reels him in, though unlike Martin, he doesn't sing.

"I was gearing up for it," Firth says. "I took some singing lessons. And I opened my mouth, and Atom promptly said, 'That's not going to happen. We love your voice, but maybe we could use some of your English wit.' He had doubts about it from way back. For starters, we weren't going to be doing the Italian-American crooning thing."

Egoyan, who adapted Rupert Holmes' book, says he was trying not to invoke Lewis and Martin because it would be "distracting." That was one reason why he cast Bacon and Firth, who don't really suggest a lounge act at all. After all, Bacon is a character actor best known for giving tightly wound performances in such films as "Apollo 13," "Mystic River" and "The Woodsman." Firth is a serious English actor and sometime heartthrob ("Pride and Prejudice," "Bridget Jones's Diary") with a dry, clipped delivery and a crisp manner.

"I wanted there to be a chemistry between how those two are perceived in our culture and then transposing them to this other culture," Egoyan says. "The pairing makes you cock your eyebrow and at the same time is intriguing at some level."

The model for Firth was not Martin, but urbane English actors like Peter Lawford and David Niven. Bacon's character might be antic in the Lewis way, but unlike Lewis there's an edge to him - "untethered, in a sexual way," as Egoyan puts it. "An erotic undercurrent."

Having established the characters, the filmmakers had to come up with an act. Though Bacon plays with his brother in a band called the Bacon Brothers and Firth joined a R&B group when he was a teenager, comedy took precedence over music.

"Part of the day would be spent thinking about the act," Bacon says. "Eventually we brought the band in and had rehearsal space. It was a little frightening because I kept thinking, 'We need to get a choreographer, a music director, a comedy writer.' And Atom kept going back to wanting it to come from us. Ultimately, in a very short time, we had something going for the little bits that are seen of [the duo performing] in the film, just because we were forced to."

It helped that the two men liked each other. "We didn't know each other [before the shoot]," Bacon says. "But I think we have pretty similar sensibilities. Even though we live on opposite sides of the pond, we live similar kinds of lifestyles." (For starters, both are married with children.)

Egoyan, 45, also did his bit by creating environments - a club, a telethon studio - so believable that the performers believed them. He even hired a professional laugher to react to their jokes.

"Something about being given that microphone and if you're dressed right and the spotlights are on you, how can you not play that stuff?" Firth says. Some of what they did was improvised or scripted from improvisation, including a scene in which Firth delivers a frenzied, Benzedrine-fueled monologue onstage (after beating out a man's brains offstage because he made an anti-Semitic remark about Bacon's character). This is one of the longest glimpses of their act. The idea was to give the audience just an idea of what they were about, since more would be another distraction. But according to Bacon many such scenes were cut.

"There was quite a lot of your rear end that didn't make it either," Firth says, needling Bacon.

"There's enough of my rear end already," Bacon replies.

They are referring to the nude orgy scene they did with actress Rachel Blanchard that earned the film an NC-17 rating, which Egoyan thinks had as much to do with who was doing it (major actors) as it did with what they were doing (a homosexual act). The movie will be re