SNOB APPEAL: COLIN FIRTH
IN A TALE OF 2 DARCYS

By Roger Moore - The Sentinel

There's something liberating about being haughty. Ask the master, the guy whose picture would fit nicely next to "supercilious" in the Oxford English Dictionary, Colin Firth.

"You can't imagine how it feels to have a director tell you, 'Be really unsympathetic, unfunny and unsexy - Go for it!" Firth said from Perugia, Italy. "Trying to be loved is an awful lot of fatigue for something that in the end is not terribly interesting." 

Firth has never broken a sweat playing at being "sweet" on the screen. For us to like him, as Mr. Darcy in the acclaimed 1995 miniseries Pride and Prejudice, or in such films as The Advocate (1993), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and the new film, Bridget Jones's Diary, the audience has to go to him, not the other way around.

"He makes haughty so darned sexy," said his Bridget director Sharon Maguire. "I remember when all of Britain was enthralled with Pride and Prejudice, and watching him, the more haughty and aloof he became, the more sexy he became. His stock went up and up."

Firth, 40, may not be the most beloved actor in the movies these days. But thanks to a career-defining turn as Mr. Darcy, a man of frosty integrity who takes hours and hours of a mini-series to warm up to Elizabeth Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) in Pride and Prejudice, he gets another crack at Darcy, the same snob transported to modern-day England. In Bridget, he plays a character he inspired.

"It was impossible to think of anyone else playing Mark Darcy, because Helen [Fielding, the author of the novel] wrote the character while she was watching Colin Firth play Mr. Darcy on Pride and Prejudice," said Maguire. "You just saw him being haughty, aloof, standing on the periphery of rooms, always being the outsider, wanting to be the insider. And no one does that better than Colin."

Fielding's ex-boyfriend, screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral), adapted Bridget for the screen. He said that Firth's face has been in the picture since "the publication party for the book, where they had a cut-out of him as Mr. Darcy. Helen took it and put it in the lobby of our office, and I had to walk past Colin bloody Firth every day, with that smug, supercilious look on his face, for three years."

After all that, "there was no way that I could not be a part of it," Firth said with a laugh. "It's probably not quite as self-reflective as Being John Malkovich, but when something has so much to do with something you've done before, you just throw your hands up and say, 'Right. I'm in.' The layers of irony are so deep that I can't begin to fathom it."

The two Darcys are equal in haughtiness. But the modern one is also a modern man in other respects.

"He got to be Mr. Darcy in silly reindeer sweater, with a snowman tie," Maguire said. "He got to snog [kiss], and he got to wallop Hugh Grant and he got to say the F-word. It was a tongue-in-cheek approach to the character, which I loved."

Bridget not only borrows a character, but its entire plot from Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's story of a sweet but socially awkward young woman - who fears spinsterhood, is drawn to a sexy "bad" boy and repelled by the haughty "good" boy - is the basic framework of Bridget. When it came out in 1996, the Diary touched a nerve and became a phenomenon. 

All that was required to film it was to find the right Bridget, whom the producers decided was American Renée Zellweger and the right Daniel "Cleve" Cleaver, her "sexy bastard of a boss," as Maguire described him (Hugh Grant). And Colin Firth.

And all it required from Firth was for the actor to get over the sense of deja vu he had, every day on the set.

"Some of the time, I felt like I was ironically recycling something I'd already done," Firth said. "The thing you have to do is to try and suggest the same thing through a different convention. It's not just the costumes that change. It's the prose. I don't have those things that Mr. Darcy said so elegantly. You can't talk like that. So I had to try to deliver the same idea of this rather elegant mind without having much to say. And when I do talk, it is with a very different, less eloquent vernacular. And it's hard to imagine Mr. Darcy kicking and scratching like a little girl the way Darcy and Cleaver go at it [in a fistfight] in this movie."

Looking at Bridget's complicated lineage, so much dependent on the right actor playing Mr. Darcy in that original TV series, it is hard to believe Firth almost didn't play him.

"One of the things that made me reluctant to do the first Darcy was I was worried if he was playable or not," he said. "The way he's written in the book; snobbish and aloof, is very much the way he is seen from the female point of view. Eventually, we see him warm up, but there is nothing in the text that tells you what makes the guy tick. I wondered if he was too much of an image to really inhabit. But what convinced me was the realization that 'I'm free to be a real jerk. I don't have to make anyone like me.'"

And the key to playing him comes not from Austen's novel, but from a work by Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers.

"It is about American girls going to England to look for wealthy husbands, and she writes of these girls being taught to be suspicious of charming, likable men," Firth said. "Because in those days, charming, likable men were only charming because they needed to be. The guy with the money and the title doesn't need to be. The guy who doesn't have those things, has to be charming. It's hard work."

But as aloof as Darcy is, he can spot a quality woman across a crowded ballroom, even if she is spilling the punch, or dressed in a most inappropriate bunny costume.

"I think that, quite bizarrely, that he sees someone a lot like himself," Firth said of Darcy and Bridget. "She's socially ill at ease. I think he also detects a wit and intelligence there. He sees a fellow fish-out-of-water. He senses that she's as disgusted with this suburban mediocrity as he is. He is paralyzed with discomfort in social situations, and so is she. He deals with it by clamming up, and she deals with it with pure verbal diarrhea. In a way, they're two sides of the same coin."

And both Darcys react the same way when Bridget Jones or Elizabeth Bennett falls for the wrong guy.

"The whole thing goes up a gear when he sees his arch-enemy swooping in on her," Firth said. "He sees her in danger... He's got a very old-fashioned protection instinct."

Dashing, cool, aloof, a guy who has made ladies swoon in two versions of the same role might be someone worth emulating. But lest you think that Darcy would make a great male role model, Firth wants to set you straight.

"Funny thing, but that may be something that works better in the 19th century."