Firth Love  

Elizabeth Burke | The Lady – September 16, 2016

His family were missionaries; his wife is Italian, but their courtship was pure Austen. Elizabeth Burke is charmed by the surprisingly complex Colin Firth.

Colin Firth is talking about the attraction of opposites. ‘It’s always interesting how two people who have seemingly incompatible characteristics can get along very well to­gether,’ he muses over coffee at Claridge’s. He’s an amiable sort is Firth, tall and lanky, with unruly brown hair and kindly grey-brown eyes that today blink amusedly at the world from behind thick, dark-rimmed glasses. ‘You wouldn’t think it would be so, but it is, perhaps because each finds in the other some­thing compensatory. If one person is very stable and the other less so, then I think they can each take something from the other – I certainly don’t think people need to be the same sort of person to have a good partnership.’

The actor can currently be seen, once again, as half of one of the most fa­mously disparate couples in modern film – playing the noble, crusading law­yer Mark Darcy to Renée Zellweger’s forever-putting-her-foot-in-it Bridget Jones in the latter’s latest outing, Bridget Jones’s Baby. Bridget is in her 40s now, and getting herself into as many muddles – albeit of a differ­ent sort – as ever. And Mark Darcy remains, well, Mark Darcy, eternally well meaning, eter­nally repressed.

‘Darcy’s problem’ says Firth, ‘is that he is a very English sort of character, in that he is an extremely passionate man who is also emotion­ally illiterate. He just can’t make gestures, either physically or emotionally – he’s really incapable of demonstrating anything – and yet underneath it all, he has all this passion churning around. I think that the English have always been a very pas­sionate nation of people – it was actually only during the Victorian era that they learned to repress that. If you trace the history back to before then, you see some wildly de­monstrative, passionate behaviour among the English – go back to Shakespeare’s time and you find a great deal of it: pirates, ambitious people, highly sexed people, even violent people... And although we have learned to repress the passion these days, it doesn’t stop it from existing.’

He himself is, of course, English to the core. Well, with a twist. His parents were raised in India (as well as Iowa, in the case of his mother), where their parents were mis­sionaries, and the family travelled frequently throughout his childhood. He spent the first four years of his life in Nigeria, where his father had a teaching post – he remem­bers making friends with a small African boy there, though he can’t remember in what language they communicated – and another year in St Louis, Missouri, where in order to fit in at school he quickly acquired an American accent, which he shed just as quick­ly upon his return to England. He now has a grown son, the product of his relationship with Canadian-American actress Meg Tilly, who lives in Canada, two younger sons who are half-Italian and a wife who is very deeply attached to her family in Rome. Confusing? For him, he says, it’s just the natural order of things.

‘I never felt I entirely belonged to the Home Counties even when my family lived there. I was born in Hampshire and largely grew up around that area, but we spent so much time away, and even when we were at home our family was always surrounded by people from Nigeria, or India, or all over the world really. It was just the way my life was, and I have to balance the good with the bad there, because, yes, I had difficulty in fitting in some­times, but I also had extreme privilege in that I was able to see the society I was part of both from within and from without. I suppose it alienated me from some people, but it also freed me from some of the conventionalities that other people might have experienced.’

Nevertheless, it is scarcely surprising to learn that as soon as the teenage Firth had finished school, he left the sleepy English countryside for the cosmopolitan buzz of London, where he has maintained a home base ever since. ‘You can’t not fit in in London, can you?’ he says. ‘It’s all just a big wonderful kaleidoscope. You can’t not belong, because it’s made of absolutely everything.’

His wife is Italian – Livia Giuggioli, a darkly beautiful film producer he met on the set of the miniseries Nostromo in 1995, and with whom he immediately fell head over heels in love. ‘Our courtship was like something out of Jane Austen,’ he says, happily. ‘She was living with her parents and had to spend two years taking her out on dates and bringing her home at 11 o’clock! Obviously, I tend to be attracted to people from a different culture. And one of the joys of being married to an Italian woman is that it gives me a chance to explore what I think is probably one of the most fascinating countries in the world. I’ve always loved Italy, and although we do live mostly in London, these days I do also count myself a part of that country, too. It’s my second home and I feel very comfortable there. I’m sad when they lose at football, that sort of thing.’

The Firths are raising their two sons, Luca, 15, and Matteo, 13, who are both fluent in Italian, to have a keen appreciation of their mother’s native culture. Ask Firth about certain Italian stereotypes, however, and he refuses to be drawn.

‘I think the more you get to know a country, the less you take a simple view of it. It’s like a marriage or a family – after you’ve lived with it for a while, you can’t any longer say just one thing about it. When my wife and I were first married, she would say or do something and I would think, “Aha! That’s because she’s Italian!” But the more I got to know her, the more I realised that the differences between our two cultures are actually fairly inconsequential. Because as soon as I would think she was reacting to a situation in the way she was because of her nationality, then immediately I would learn that her sister or her cousin or her best friend would have a completely different reaction. The fact is that she behaves as she does and I behave as I do not because of our different nationalities, but because she is herself and I am myself.’

He thinks, smiles and shakes his head. ‘And as for the national stereotypes... Well, let’s take the idea of the Italian so-called lack of organisation. Let me say, once and for all, that I have never met anyone who was more fiercely organised than my wife, and that I’ve had to shape up considerably to keep up with her!’