Colin Firth by Alison Maloney

was something of a hangover from his early dreams of rock stardom. Strenuous singing with his teenage band had left him with a weak larynx and he suffered an inconvenient bout of laryngitis which left him unable speak any louder than a whisper for a few months. In keeping with his training from the Drama Centre, the normally verbose actor had to use fewer words and more eloquent facial expressions. ‘I would avoid bars and restaurants because I couldn’t project above the level of the room,’ he says. ‘I started to strategize my way around my failure to communicate. I said things differently than the way I would choose to say them. And I remember thinking: “I don’t have my personality. If I can’t say it this way, who am I then?”’ Even so, it was to prove good training ground for his most famously taciturn character, Mr Darcy, some ten years later.
    Fully recovered, Colin returned to the stage to star opposite Anthony Hopkins in Schnitzler’s The Lonely Way in 1985 . Translated and directed by drama school mentor Christopher Fettes, the play opened at Guildford’s prestigious Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and transferred in February to London’s Old Vic. It’s the story of an ageing artist, played by Hopkins, who craves a relationship with the son who has been brought up as another man’s child. Colin played the twenty-three-year-old Felix, who is oblivious of histrue parentage.

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    Keen to learn from the best, Colin was excited about working with great actors like Anthony Hopkins and treated each new job as an opportunity to hone his craft.
    In his book The Half , a study of actors and actresses in the thirty minutes before they go on stage, theatrical photographer Simon Annand recalled: ‘He was starring with Anthony Hopkins, who was just back from America. I think Firth had been in a couple of things, including Another Country . He wasn’t exactly new to the stage, but being at the Old Vic and with Anthony Hopkins, he regarded every day as like a masterclass. You could tell even then that he was a star. He had a charisma about him.’
    Colin was fascinated by his Welsh co-star and commented, ‘I learned so much from him. He gave me everything, he listened intensely, and yet it was him everyone looked at.’
    He had been working non-stop since leaving drama school and had enjoyed an enviable variety of roles and legendary co-stars. But he realized the fragility of the business.‘Jobs float around like bubbles,’ he remarked. ‘They might pop any minute.’
    Yet Colin’s next offer was so substantial he baulked at the commitment. Lost Empires was a seven-part TV series set in the music halls of Britain, and would take a year to film. Worried it would take him away from other potential projects for too long, Colin was on the verge of turning it down when he read the original novel by J.B. Priestley, and found he couldn’t stop reading.
    ‘ Lost Empires took a solid year,’ he told the LA Times in 1987. ‘Not on and off – more like, on and on. I’d never toured in a repertory company, so making this was a little like rep for me – and also a little like a life sentence.’
    Then there was the small matter of the ‘supporting’ cast, a daunting list that included Laurence Olivier, Pamela Stephenson and Brian Glover. ‘It’s an impressive line-up,’ admits Colin. ‘So I had quite a turn when I read something about me heading the cast.’
    Producer June Howson, who chose him from 150 hopefuls at the auditions, was grateful he changed his mind. ‘I knew Colin was right as soon as he read it for me,’ she says. ‘He has a commanding quality.’
    Playing a young Yorkshire lad taken on to tour the halls as an assistant to his magician uncle, Colin could at least ditch the cut-glass accent that had landed him the upper-class tag in previous roles. His character, Richard Herncastle, is a wide-eyed innocent in a stereotypical flat cap who is intrigued and informed by the colourful