 This is too rich: Colin Firth originally refused the part of Mr. Darcy in this year's BBC-TV production of Pride and Prejudice because he didn't think he was right for the part. "Physically, I don't cut the mustard," he says. (Odd; many would say he slices, dices, and purees the mustard.) "Also, Austen doesn't write Darcy from an internal perspective, and I didn't know how to supply it.
By the time you read this, Firth will be three roles beyond Darcy and the stir he caused here and in England (perhaps doing more for the puffy shirt than Seinfeld, even). In November, the thirty-six-year-old British actor will be seen in The English Patient, a stirring film based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje. (He gives a beautifully modulated performance that includes the most charming rendition of "Yes! We Have No Bananas" by an actor in a supporting, catalytic,
tragic role.) In late spring he'll be a powerful presence in Nostromo, Joseph Conrad's adventure in corruption.
 He'll have finished shooting A Thousand Acres, the screen version of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-winning novel, also starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Firth approached farmer/love interest Jess with the rigorous intelligence he's brought to his work since his stage debut, replacing Daniel Day-Lewis in Julian Mitchell's Another Country.
"I've ridden tractors, gone to barbecues, and asked farmers intrusive questions," Firth says from a heartland Holiday Inn. "I can't get a character without understanding where he's from. I'm not sure it helps the results, but it makes the work more fun."
But could we discuss the Darcy thing just a little while longer? "I thought the role was next to unplayable," he says, '"unless you appropriate it and turn it into something else. But after a month of saying no, something started getting under my skin--a sense of what drives him, images
of how I might behave in his situation. And then I realized that saying no would mean someone else would get the part!"
 Work on his character in The English Patient followed a similar pattern. "Geoffrey didn't excite me at first," Firth says, "but then he started to get under my skin." That phrase again. "It was the English thing: violent emotion and pain well-disguised by jauntiness." Sure, maybe he's talking about himself, but probably he's talking about acting, a craft he finds
both supernally rewarding and fiendishly frustrating, "a constant encounter with limitation. That's not modesty but intense vanity, the result of huge expectations."
Except for spending as much time as possible with his six-year-old son (Mom is actress Meg Tilly), Firth, single and living alone, has no grand plan--that he'll discuss. He alludes to an agenda of desired roles and accomplishments. "It's a pretty secret list. While they're a fantasy, it's silly to talk about them. Nothing's crossed off yet)''
Not definitively erotic Austen icon? Not sexy organic farmer? Not cutter of mustard? He must be holding out for his own talk show.
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