Colin Firth by Alison Maloney Read Free Book Online

sandals’.
    ‘He produced a guitar and began to sing protest songs between scenes,’ wrote Rupert. ‘“There are limits,” said my friend Piers Flint-Shipman when “Lemon Tree, Very Pretty” began. Colin was visibly pained by our superficiality.’
    Secondary-modern kid Colin, who came from a very different background to the pair, was an earnest, politically minded young man at the other end of the scale from the frivolous attention-seeking star. ‘Colin was very red-brick university, strumming a guitar,’ Everett recalls. ‘I remember him saying once that if he earned any money he was going to give it to the Communist party or something like that, and I was way in the other direction. He wasn’t really much fun. We were at the end of the working-class revolution in the theatre at that time, that Look Back in Anger generation. English theatre was still very politically motivated when Istarted out, and it attracted a very politically motivated type of person. Colin was the kind of emblem for Redgraveism, and I didn’t fit into that and I didn’t like that whole Royal Court, RSC kind of right-on “kill ’em with art” vibe.’
    Colin has since disputed Rupert’s version of events, claiming he never wore sandals and that he doesn’t remember bringing a guitar on to set either. Certainly, he says, he never learned to play the 1960s folk song, which compares love to the pretty but bitter fruit of the lemon tree.
    ‘I did bring a copy of The Guardian , so I suppose the essence of Rupert’s version is sort of true,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph . ‘It was a grisly experience – he was so badly behaved, and had the most powerful bullying technique, which was that he shimmied on to the set, and everyone promptly fell in love with him, so it was awful to be subsequently excluded by him.
    ‘One was very easily seduced by Rupert. And he was much more worldly than me – I thought I was sophisticated, until I met him.’
    And Rupert concedes that his youthful self was less than charitable to the inexperienced Hampshire lad. ‘I’m sure I was just as nightmarish as he was, you know,’ he has said. ‘And Another Country was kind of my gig – I’d done the play, the producers were my friends, and I was probably a bit cocky in those days, you know, especially towards Colin.’
    Colin agrees that ‘Rupert got on with very few people. He found us all ghastly, naive and bourgeois.’ But headmits there were faults on both sides. ‘Basically I was unbelievably dull. And Rupert, well, among his virtues was not tolerance of earnestly dull people, so it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven at that time. We were both ghastly in our different ways.’
    Rupert’s obvious disdain made the set an uncomfortable place for Colin, and the Russian spy drama sparked a cold war between the two rising stars that would last for nearly twenty years. But the dynamic between them worked well on screen. The disaffected schoolboys of the film, although friends, are wildly different characters. Guy is a flamboyant, pleasure-seeking extrovert who enjoys the privileges his upbringing affords and is hungry for more. Tommy Judd, closer to Colin’s personality at the time, is an intense, banner-waving Marxist who sees the public school and its hierarchy as a ‘system of oppression’.
    Contrary to popular belief, Judd is not based entirely on Guy Burgess’s friend and accomplice Donald MacLean, but on an amalgam of one Esmond Reilly, a Wellington School boy whose left-wing magazine was banned, and John Carnford, a Communist killed in the Spanish Civil War.
    Judd is ridiculed and ostracized for his views, and Colin admired the character’s conviction to his cause. ‘I’d never have Judd’s strength in terms of allowing himself to become a joke in order to publicize his convictions,’ he said. ‘The way he sticks by these convictions all the time makes him unique. Most people don’t have that kind of courage. They prefer to go