Colin Firth has a great fondness for a quote attributed to the jazz deity Miles Davis, who advised: "Don't play what you know, play what you don't know." Music lovers will dig this sentiment in Miles, particularly during his early period when he approached the trickier trumpet solos like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid running out of the bank and realising they are not alone. Firth could quote Miles vigorously in relation to his latest foray into character acting, playing the gifted but short and bald Nick Hornby in the film version of Hornby's classic soccer confessional, Fever Pitch. Can it be true, do they mean him?

Although the names have been changed to protect the guilty, there is no denying that Firth's character in the feature, directed by first-time feature director David Evans, is the Nick Hornby who dreams about football like surfers chase the big waves in their head. Firth's Paul Ashworth is not an altogether likeable character, which can be seen as either a strength or weakness of the film depending on your point of view; you can almost relish the sex symbol that was Mr. Darcy hoisting up his jeans and pulling on that slightly sweaty tee-shirt, while he moans to himself about the problems of replacing star player Liam Brady.

Given the actor's success in the TV version of Pride And Prejudice, there was even some early publicity about a bedroom scene with girlfriend Sarah (Ruth Gemmill [sic]) in which Firth cavorts around his Highbury, London flat with a pair of Arsenal (the Premier League soccer team Hornby is obsessed with, which plays at Highbury) boxer shorts on display. Having seen the encounter in question, I would imagine that even firm Firth fixatees will find it as erotically stimulating as a brisk rubdown from Norah (or David) Batty (the former an elderly TV comedienne, the latter a famous "hard man" footballer).

As for playing what he doesn't know, Firth admits that when he was offered the part he'd only been to see one live football match in his life, bewilderingly a dour clash between Southampton and Hull, hardly "glamour" teams, in 1976 when ageing Scottish international Billy Bremner "kicked lumps" out of vintage England player Mike Channon. "I first read Fever Pitch when I was in Rome, and I got quite obsessed by it; I got to longing to be back in England, for those grey, damp, cheerless days."

Now Firth says that he hardly ever misses a Highbury home match when he's actually in residence at his flat in Hackney and not jetsetting to his girlfriend in Italy, a film set in Colombia, or to his son in Los Angeles. He even turned out for Arsenal star Paul Merson's testimonial game last year, but admits to being conscious of one of the book's abiding themes: that being a football fan takes time and commitment, that you can't jump into it at the deep end before you've learnt to do the doggy-paddle.

"I was in Chicago filming recently and I went to this theatre and there was a black actor there that I met who asked me where I lived and what part of London it was, and then what part of Hackney it was, and it turns out that this black American actor and entertainer is a staunch Gunners (Arsenal's nickname) fan and was trying to get a number plate that reflected his allegiance. I hugged and embraced him like a long lost brother and I wasn't at all worried about being outclassed by someone like Nick Hornby any more; and there were no worries about my credentials and I felt ... really great."

When I once interviewed Daniel Day-Lewis in Dublin, there was an almost palpable whiff of relief in the actor's realisation that we could talk about football and Bob Dylan and I wasn't going to start flashing my eyelashes at him and write that he'd made my legs turn to jelly. There's something similar with Firth, whose own cuttings reveal a staggering preponderance of women journalists panting over their notebooks and reduced on occasion to the sort of tosh that is one of the real downsides of post-feminism, such as this gem from the Daily Express: "When Darcy plunges into the pool on his estate for a cooling swim, wearing his shirt and underpants, there isn't a woman watching who isn't picturing what he looks like without."

Of course Firth, whose parents are academics and who evinces convincing distrust of his own profession as "essentially trivial", likes to downplay his position as a current international heart-throb. " I feel a bit of an imposter; I certainly don't get mobbed in the street and nobody's sent me their knickers yet. There is a Fans of Firth computer website now, or so I've been told.

"Obviously I want to leave Pride And Prejudice behind and go on to other things. I think my problem is that I never really appreciate what I'm doing until a long time afterwards. It seems obvious that what happened with the Darcy character was very special, not just to me but to a lot of other people, and I feel that I must look at it all again, absorb it, understand this bewildering golden moment."

Firth's career has always carried a certain emotional frisson with it, given that he is one of those rare commodities -- a handsome, intelligent, youngish, heterosexual film star who is as quintessentially English as and a lot more rugged than Hugh Grant. When he made Pride And Prejudice, his off-screen romance with co-star Jennifer Ehle was manna from heaven to the PR and press corps; when he filmed Valmont, Miles Forman's sadly undervalued rival to Dangerous Liaisons from 1989, he began a six-year relationship with Canadian co-star Meg Tilley [sic], which produced son Will; and there have been persistent rumours about a pending wedding to current squeeze, Italian beauty Livia Giuggioli.

But Firth says that even when he came to play Valmont he refused to fall back on his looks: "I don't think I'm a steamy sexpot sort of bloke, I don't have the eyebrows. For me, the idea of Valmont the seducer was the claw in the velvet glove, it was about duplicity and cunning, which was Forman's intention. I think he was genuinely shattered by the failure of that film; it was almost like a tragic experience for him from which he's never recovered. I think that he was really too subtle for his own good."

Firth studied at the Drama Centre, where they forbade the use of mirrors as a vanity aid, and were prone to ask the acting hopefuls "to pretend that they were a bison going up the stairs of a double-decker bus while doing a speech from Richard III. It sounds daft, but there's definitely something behind it; if there are no obstacles in the way, then actors start to declaim or fall back on cliché.

"I was very lucky to work with Christopher Fettes there, who is one of the most intelligent and underrated forces in British theatre. He and Harold Pinter are the two best directors I've ever worked with on stage -- very pictorial, very economical and practical, always with an answer that's simple but makes sense immediately."

Firth's career was transformed while still a student, with a much-féted Hamlet; so powerful was his performance that he found himself in the West End taking over from Rupert Everett in Julian Mitchell's hit play Another Country. Not playing Hamlet for real still causes him a certain amount of concern, particularly as he's now 36 years old, three years older than Shakespeare's tragic hero, according to the text anyway, and Kenneth Branagh has brought out the big Elsinore guns with his own four-hours-plus film version. Ironically, Firth took over Branagh's role when he played the Communist sympathiser Jud [sic] in the eventual film version of Another Country.

As you might expect, Firth is a big stickler for good parts and worthy projects, though he says that he is not beyond temptation. "I do have a son, after all, and the more money I earn the more time I have free to visit Will. That is one of the reasons that I hate doing things back to back. I'm not a saint. It's true I turned down the Jack Nicholson role in a very big-budget remake of The Shining, that had Stephen King's blessing, but I felt that it had all been done before. And it was a three-month shoot. Still, I would have loved to say 'Heeere's Johnny!'"

Instead, Firth has been turning out some high-quality fare: as well as Fever Pitch, there's his performance as Charles Gould in Conrad's Nostromo, which is one of the BBC's biggest-ever costume dramas and which gave Firth the chance to ride horses and shoot guns. "I know that anyone who was at school with me might read this and think 'What a ... !' but it was a case of Firth as Clint Eastwood. One of my dreams actually came true because I got to ride a horse through a South American town, through the old Spanish quarter, caked in dirt, filthy, matted, holding a gun, with Enio Morricone blasting out in the background and the town burning. It was certainly worth spending five months in Colombia for, sweating buckets." Candidly, Firth doesn't like the book at all: "Structurally incoherent, tediously heavy, boring. The best thing about it are the images."

Then there was his supporting role in Anthony Minghela's film of Michael Ondaatje's Oscar-winning The English Patient, and a rare American job in the Mid-West filming the celluloid version of Jane Smiley's celebrated family saga, A Thousand Acres, which allowed him to work alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jennifer Jason Leigh under Jocelyn Moorehouse's direction. "I've never been any good in anything that has been badly written," says Firth, who is known to be highly self-critical, even of acclaimed performances like his portrayal of wounded Falklands soldier Robert Lawrence in the award-winning television drama Tumbledown. (Indeed, Firth is remarkable for having played three celebrated living characters -- hostage John McCarthy, Lawrence and Hornby.)

"Being honest, I didn't think too much of my performance at the time, though a few years have passed now. You know, it's that sort of part. He gets paralysed here, he stabs someone there, he cries here. It's straight drama-school fare and Robert is a far more nebulous character than that; he's not reliant on his looks or his charisma. When you meet him you realise here's a man who's been cracked by his own imagination. The thing that shocked me most about Tumbledown was that I'd got so close to Robert; here was a guy who was at my side through the whole shoot, and I thought, 'I'm really like him', and I was imagining being him, and then when the thing came out and all those familiar facial gestures appeared, I was physically ill with disappointment. It took years to appreciate what I'd done.

"It's just an actor and his vanity, but with Fever Pitch I learnt from that. I filtered out all the bullshit early on. I think that's why I'm a lot more like Nick in the film than some people expect. It's not an impersonation, but it is a form of osmosis." It's certain that Firth also learnt about subtlety in his role as Darcy; despite the moist tripe that was written in some quarters, most people accepted that what made Firth's performance so special was that it was a romantic rather than a sensual depiction, one in which less was more and restraint was the emotional order of the day. Maybe Firth's astringest attitude to his craft is a reflection of his admitted guilt at not having followed his parents into academic life, "not having got into Cambridge or been a missionary in Africa. Mind you, my granny was pleased as punch that I'd done some Jane Austen."

Firth has mixed feelings about the Method school of approach: "It's difficult to assess an actor's ability. It can be a conjuring trick. It doesn't depend on internals. I remember the story about Marlon Brando being asked what was going through his head at the climax to On The Waterfront. Brando said he kept thinking, 'I'm so glad this movie is over'. Would it have the same effect on anyone without Brando's talent! I doubt it!"


From: Mandarin Oriental, December 1997.