The war hero, Paddington Bear...and THAT wet shirt
Colin Firth must really be looking forward to the Christmas break. It has been quite a year, after all. He has been killed off by Helen Fielding, shot by Samuel L Jackson, spent months in a harrowing Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, played a talking teddy bear and may soon be sailing around the world – or at least pretending to (more on this later).
His next film, The Railway Man, opens in UK cinemas on New Year’s Day. It tells the true story of Eric Lomax, a British soldier who was captured by the Japanese and spent much of the Second World War in a brutal POW camp, building the infamous Burma Railway. Lomax survived and returned to Britain, but he was left with terrible emotional scars – until he set out to find one of his former captors.
Also starring Nicole Kidman as Lomax’s wife Patti, the film opened at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where it was well received by the critics. But it was an exhausting part to play. Firth explained to the Canadian Press at the time that there was a ‘huge amount of pressure’, adding, ‘I haven’t had any experience which is the equivalent of this… You feel a responsibility to be as truthful as you can.’
Sadly, Eric Lomax, who wrote about his experiences in his book of the same name, died before the film was released. But Firth had met him at his Berwick-upon- Tweed home and clearly was affected by his remarkable story.
‘If the characters you’re playing, if they exist and you form a relationship with them, it becomes personal,’ the actor explained in Canada. ‘It’s no longer just the case of a job to be done.
Colin in 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
‘This is a long storytelling process… it’s on behalf of an awful lot of people who weren’t able to speak out, who didn’t have a voice and who still haven’t been heard. You just want to be absolutely sure that you don’t drop the baton, that you don’t compromise how well this story has been told up to now.’
Firth has also had to deal with the death of one of his best-loved characters, Bridget Jones’s dashing barrister love interest, Mark Darcy. Firth played Darcy in both Bridget Jones films, but the character is killed off in Helen Fielding’s latest novel, Mad About The Boy. Fielding had decided that ‘no one gets to Bridget’s age without suffering some sort of loss’ and that Darcy would have to go. But it certainly wasn’t easy for her to break the news.
‘I did want to tell Colin in person but we were trying to arrange lunch, and I couldn’t really tell him why I was trying to meet him and he was in a different place,’ she confessed to Time magazine. ‘So I ended up telling him on the phone. I had to ask him if he had someone with He’s been imprisoned, killed off and done a turn as a talking teddy – it’s just another day at the office for Colin Firth, says Matt Warren him and if he was sitting down. It was like someone actually had died. We had to process it. And I was almost saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss”.’
Memories of his outing as Jane Austen’s Darcy, however, remain as vivid as ever. The shirt he wore as he emerged from the lake in the BB C’s 1995 adaptation of Pride And Prejudice is currently the highlight of the new The Only Way Is Pemberley exhibition at the National Trust’s Lyme Hall, near Stockport. It will be joined by a giant sculpture of Firth in the lake. In fact, a recent poll named it the most memorable moment in British television drama.
And there’s plenty more in the pipeline. Recently, Firth has been busy playing Peru’s most famous export, Paddington Bear. The film, set for a 2014 release and also starring Julie Walters as housekeeper Mrs Bird and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville as Mr Brown, features an animated Paddington, voiced by Firth. ‘The idea is that Paddington will have something of me in his DNA because I’m going to do some sessions wearing one of those helmets with cameras to capture my face muscles, and all that data will somehow be incorporated into Paddington,’ Firth explained to the Daily Mail.
Paddington Bear
Perhaps more worryingly, however, he was recently pictured being ‘shot’ on the Surrey set of The Secret Service. The film sees Firth take on the role of dapper MI6 agent Jack London, but the images appear to show his character being gunned down by Samuel L Jackson, who plays the film’s arch villain.
Other projects include a role in Woody Allen’s muchanticipated new film Magic In The Moonlight alongside Eileen Atkins and Emma Stone, and a possible outing as tragic British sailor Donald Crowhurst.
The latter project, which is also rumoured to star Kate Winslet, will reportedly tell the tale of Crowhurst’s doomed attempt to compete in a high-profile 1968 round-the-world yacht race.
Crowhurst began the epic voyage ill-equipped and hopelessly unqualified, falling so far behind the other competitors that he staged an elaborate hoax that ultimately drove him to madness. If the film goes ahead and Colin takes on this hugely complex character, it could be one of his finest roles yet.
As long as he gets a little downtime over Christmas, that is.
The Railway Man will be in cinemas on 1 January 2014.
His next film, The Railway Man, opens in UK cinemas on New Year’s Day. It tells the true story of Eric Lomax, a British soldier who was captured by the Japanese and spent much of the Second World War in a brutal POW camp, building the infamous Burma Railway. Lomax survived and returned to Britain, but he was left with terrible emotional scars – until he set out to find one of his former captors.
Also starring Nicole Kidman as Lomax’s wife Patti, the film opened at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where it was well received by the critics. But it was an exhausting part to play. Firth explained to the Canadian Press at the time that there was a ‘huge amount of pressure’, adding, ‘I haven’t had any experience which is the equivalent of this… You feel a responsibility to be as truthful as you can.’
Sadly, Eric Lomax, who wrote about his experiences in his book of the same name, died before the film was released. But Firth had met him at his Berwick-upon- Tweed home and clearly was affected by his remarkable story.
‘If the characters you’re playing, if they exist and you form a relationship with them, it becomes personal,’ the actor explained in Canada. ‘It’s no longer just the case of a job to be done.
Colin in 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy‘This is a long storytelling process… it’s on behalf of an awful lot of people who weren’t able to speak out, who didn’t have a voice and who still haven’t been heard. You just want to be absolutely sure that you don’t drop the baton, that you don’t compromise how well this story has been told up to now.’
Firth has also had to deal with the death of one of his best-loved characters, Bridget Jones’s dashing barrister love interest, Mark Darcy. Firth played Darcy in both Bridget Jones films, but the character is killed off in Helen Fielding’s latest novel, Mad About The Boy. Fielding had decided that ‘no one gets to Bridget’s age without suffering some sort of loss’ and that Darcy would have to go. But it certainly wasn’t easy for her to break the news.
‘I did want to tell Colin in person but we were trying to arrange lunch, and I couldn’t really tell him why I was trying to meet him and he was in a different place,’ she confessed to Time magazine. ‘So I ended up telling him on the phone. I had to ask him if he had someone with He’s been imprisoned, killed off and done a turn as a talking teddy – it’s just another day at the office for Colin Firth, says Matt Warren him and if he was sitting down. It was like someone actually had died. We had to process it. And I was almost saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss”.’
Memories of his outing as Jane Austen’s Darcy, however, remain as vivid as ever. The shirt he wore as he emerged from the lake in the BB C’s 1995 adaptation of Pride And Prejudice is currently the highlight of the new The Only Way Is Pemberley exhibition at the National Trust’s Lyme Hall, near Stockport. It will be joined by a giant sculpture of Firth in the lake. In fact, a recent poll named it the most memorable moment in British television drama.
And there’s plenty more in the pipeline. Recently, Firth has been busy playing Peru’s most famous export, Paddington Bear. The film, set for a 2014 release and also starring Julie Walters as housekeeper Mrs Bird and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville as Mr Brown, features an animated Paddington, voiced by Firth. ‘The idea is that Paddington will have something of me in his DNA because I’m going to do some sessions wearing one of those helmets with cameras to capture my face muscles, and all that data will somehow be incorporated into Paddington,’ Firth explained to the Daily Mail.
Paddington BearPerhaps more worryingly, however, he was recently pictured being ‘shot’ on the Surrey set of The Secret Service. The film sees Firth take on the role of dapper MI6 agent Jack London, but the images appear to show his character being gunned down by Samuel L Jackson, who plays the film’s arch villain.
Other projects include a role in Woody Allen’s muchanticipated new film Magic In The Moonlight alongside Eileen Atkins and Emma Stone, and a possible outing as tragic British sailor Donald Crowhurst.
The latter project, which is also rumoured to star Kate Winslet, will reportedly tell the tale of Crowhurst’s doomed attempt to compete in a high-profile 1968 round-the-world yacht race.
Crowhurst began the epic voyage ill-equipped and hopelessly unqualified, falling so far behind the other competitors that he staged an elaborate hoax that ultimately drove him to madness. If the film goes ahead and Colin takes on this hugely complex character, it could be one of his finest roles yet.
As long as he gets a little downtime over Christmas, that is.
The Railway Man will be in cinemas on 1 January 2014.