I've been cursed by Darcy...

OH dear. Here I am preparing for my audience with Colin Firth and it seems I am about to inherit a hostile interviewee.

I'm peeking through the door, watching a large, ageing German lady - whose palpitations have probably not reached such a frenzy since she saw the Fab Four that night in Hamburg - interview Firth before me, and she has uttered the dreaded D-word. "Ooooh," she swoons, syntax all a-scrambled. "It is so nice to be meeting at last the real Mr Darcy."

Poor old Firth. How much must the poor man suffer? His heart sinks, he fixes that black-eyed look betraying neither joy nor pain (regulo five - smouldering) and lets out a sigh. "I dare say if I did spend my waking hours reading my own fan mail I probably would feel Darcy was following me around," he deadpans. "But I've got family and friends and children and none of them call me Mr Darcy."

It's actually seven years since Firth appeared in Pride and Prejudice, in a role that, hitherto, was only a minor character in romantic literature. No Heathcliff, that's for sure. But then came Firth, rising from the fishpond before a surprised Elizabeth Bennet. The world changed.

Firth and "Darce" have been conjoined ever since. And, as if to underscore the awesome slaying power of this twin-headed hydra, only this summer the drama was replayed on BBC2 to surprisingly good ratings.

YEP, in hot demand is Mr Darcy. When Canadian journalist Leah McLaren was over here, whining about how no London men would go out with her and were therefore all homosexuals, she clung to the faint hope of being snatched up by someone "like Colin Firth" (only she really meant Firthy/Darcy, our very own English archetype). If Firth were suddenly to pursue an alternative career as an astronaut, the D- word would still abound.

In the years between Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones," he says, "I don't think there was a single interview in any newspaper that didn't have Darcy in the headline. Before that it was almost invariably a pun on my name - 'Firth Holds Forth', 'Firth Impressions'."

"I call him Frothy," booms Rupert Everett, wandering into the room from next door. Everett co-stars in Firth's new flick, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and is between interviews. "But it's not very funny unless you know him, and I can't really explain it" (he adds that Firth is "a bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh").

If the ghost of Darcy is ever to be laid to rest, then Firth isn't doing himself any favours with his latest role. In the film he plays Jack Worthing, a Victorian gent who - dashing, repressed, and reliably tight of trouser - is cut from the same finely tailored cloth as you-know-who.

Firth and Everett go way back, having made their screen debuts in the 1984 film Another Country.

"We used to hate each other.

From my point of view he was just so redbrick universityish, kind of communisty, always strumming on a guitar," says Everett. Hard to believe faced with the man sitting opposite in a sombre, dark suit.

"I was allowed to lead a life largely outside of convention for a very long time, so I have now embraced the bourgeoisie with gusto," laughs Firth.

Of course, he was not born into Darcydom at all. Though he did spend his early years in Nigeria as a faux-colonial child (his parents taught abroad), he has never been anywhere near a public school, let alone a university. He "sort of fell" into acting in Winchester as an escape from his secondary modern.

"I think that often actors represent what they're not," he says.

"You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common."

Of the 30-odd films he has made, Firth has played a variety of roles ("I haven't only been a string of repressed Englishmen in suits"). And while his parts have not always been showy - it takes a minute to remember he was cuckolded in both The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love - the toffs have been offset by things like the Falklands War drama Tumbledown, the chilling Final Solution reconstruction, Conspiracy, and his turn in the screen version of Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby is one of his best friends).

FURTHERMORE, Firth himself is rather confused by his own identity, what with spending his early teens in St Louis, Missouri, and then five years in the wilds of British Colombia with then-girlfriend, actress Meg Tilly. Even nowadays he spends a lot of time in Los Angeles, visiting his now 11-year-old son from that relationship (he's since married Italian documentary maker Livia Guiggioli with whom he has another boy, of 18 months).

"My mother grew up there," he says. "I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am.

Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America."

It was las t year that Firth's worlds collided when he played Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary. Author Helen Fielding was so besotted with Firth's Darcy that she fashioned her brooding Mark Darcy after him (and what greater irony than having the real Firth play the fake one?).

Working Title Films is pushing ahead with the sequel The Edge of Reason, from Fielding's follow-up novel. And yes, Mark Darcy's in that, too. "They've got to solve the problem of Rene's size," he says, trying to be a little circumspect (Zellweger, who has since reduced to rake-thinness, has reportedly refused to bulk up for a return).

"But there is a script and a very genuine plan to put it together."

In the book, Bridget gets to interview the real Colin Firth - the film version would thus entail Firth not only lampooning himself by playing Mark Darcy, but would necessitate an Elvis Presley-like Kissin' Cousins twin to play his real self...unless, of course, they got someone else to play Colin Firth. How about Hugh Grant?

Confused? Absolutely.

"We all know the dangers of sequels.

Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place too often and I think you've got to move beyond it, go the extra mile and have the courage not to just repeat the first one," he insists, giving nothing away.

Or, as Mr Darcy probably never said, "Go jump in a lake."

Copyright 2002
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