Colin Firth by Alison Maloney Read Free Book Online Page B

young actor’s dream come true.
    His next job may have seemed like coming back down to earth with a bump. In the summer of 1984 he was starring in The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, Kent. The George Bernard Shaw play, written in 1906, centres on a physician who has a cure for tuberculosis but can only afford to administer one dose. He has to choose between a fellow doctor and a talented but amoral artist, Louis Dubedat, played by Colin. The doctor’s dilemma is further complicated by the fact that he is in love with Dubedat’s wife, and his motives are therefore clouded.
    While it may not have been the most glamorous of settings after a summer filming in Paris, the play boasted a solid cast, including Patrick Cargill, Tom Baker and Gayle Hunnicutt.
    The same summer brought another film role that instantly fulfilled one of Colin’s wildest ambitions – a chance to work with his hero, Paul Scofield. Shot almost entirely inside, 1919 is the story of a meeting of two of Sigmund Freud’s former patients, fifty years on. Colin was to play the young version of Paul Scofield’s character, who is tortured by his love for his own sister. ‘My whole part consists of lying on a couch talking about my bowels,’ he told Company magazine. ‘I loved every minute of it.’
    The film attracted a very small, art-house audience and Colin’s screen time was not substantial, but he was happy to work in the shadow of the man whose brilliant performances had convinced him to pursue an acting career. ‘I was star-struck and absolutely in awe of him but he was incredibly kind to me,’ he said.
    Next was a romp in Amsterdam in the TV movie Dutch Girls in which Colin was once more in school uniform. A teenage hockey team are sent on tour in Holland to representtheir school, but find the girls a lot more interesting than the windmills, tulips or, indeed, the hockey. The promising group of youngsters who made up the team included Another Country compatriot James Wilby, the extremely funny Timothy Spall, and one Daniel Chatto, who was later to wed Sarah Armstrong-Jones and become Princess Margaret’s son-in-law. Colin’s character, Neil Truelove, is a typical public schoolboy on the verge of sexual awakening when he meets the beautiful Romelia, played by Gusta Gerritsen. Too shy to kiss her on the first date, the smitten teen finds romance doesn’t come easy.
    Coming from a boys’ school himself, Colin identified with the timid, awkward approach of Truelove. ‘I just didn’t know any women through most of my teens. Later it was hard to relate to women. I was afraid of them. I thought they were another species at first. I thought there had to be a completely different approach with talking to a woman.
    ‘I was very envious of the boys at school that did know girls of our own age and seemed to be able to talk with them without spluttering. I watched this incredible confidence from some of the others and I would imitate them and would end up sounding petulant and ridiculous and not impressing anybody.
    ‘Then I was probably ludicrously polite and gentlemanly for a while. Which I think didn’t go badly but it certainly was a while before I realized women was just human beings.’
    Although happy to be working, Colin worried that he was being typecast in the white-flannel mould.
    ‘I was given the sort of English public schoolboy stamp,’ he told Attitude magazine in 1987. ‘It got me my firstand second and third jobs. Very high-profile stuff. I was delighted to get them, and then there comes a point when you think “but I can’t keep doing this”.
    ‘I’m not that – I’m not a public schoolboy, you know. I went to secondary school. I went to the worst type of English schools. It’s not what interests me ultimately. I didn’t want to spend my entire life telling the stories of various English, privileged men – it’s not me.’
    In the midst of all this frenzied activity, Colin suffered a setback that