Love at Firth Sight

Image credit: Valmont: Komarek

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Colin Firth

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Even before a big-screen adaptation was conceived, the obsessive heroine of Bridget Jones's Diary, the book, couldn't stop fantasizing about...Colin Firth. So when it came time to cast, it's no shock that ''Helen Fielding said if we didn't cast him, she would not let us have the rights,'' laughs Eric Fellner, who's produced four of Firth's flicks (both Bridgets, Love Actually, and next spring's Nanny McPhee). Ask Fellner what incites such fervor and he says: ''I truly don't know. I'm not a girl.'' Reason director Beeban Kidron takes a stab: ''He embodies a particular kind of Englishman — chivalrous, polite, articulate, clever — that is a fantasy. One night he came [to the set] as himself, Mr. Relaxed. I withered all over again. People think directors don't have those feelings, but I'm a girl.''

Before cult Colin kicked in, Firth was keeping busy in local stage productions, having horrified his professor parents by bailing on university for drama school. Milos Forman cast him as Valmont's lothario in 1988, but the film was eclipsed by the similar Dangerous Liaisons. ''People love it when they see it now,'' he says. ''At the time, it felt like walking into a room where someone had just told a joke and the laughter was dying down and you go in and tell the same joke.''

Even after Pride and Prejudice, only supporting roles in films like The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love came his way. But when Bridget made $71.5 million, he was christened the go-to guy for the hottie, haughty hero. Sometimes that worked out well (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Love Actually); sometimes it didn't (What a Girl Wants, Hope Springs). But with this year's Sundance entry Trauma, Firth ditched his comfort zone. ''Marc [Evans, the director] used that principle of putting Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo,'' Firth says. ''Take someone [the audience] is comfortable with and make them uncomfortable.''

Not that Firth is finished with good-guy gigs. It took several tries, but Emma Thompson persuaded him to play the aloof father in Nanny McPhee, a fairy tale she'd written about seven difficult kids and their caretaker. ''He kept saying 'I don't want to do any more nice people,''' recalls Thompson. Firth gave in, but only after ''lots of begging, lots of money, lots of favors,'' she says.

With Nanny and Truth both wrapped, Firth is officially unemployed. No concrete plans, other than picking at the guitar and revisiting unfinished short stories he's been writing (his debut, ''The Department of Nothing,'' is included in the Nick Hornby-edited collection Speaking With the Angel). He's still getting offered ''lots of bumbling romantic-comedy figures,'' and his name perennially pops up as a potential James Bond (''No one has approached me, but I would not be averse to it''). For sure, we won't be seeing Mark and Bridget: Smug Marrieds. ''At the moment, I can't think of anything I would be less attracted to.'' The one project tempting him is Brian De Palma's thriller Toyer, about a womanizer who also happens to be a lobotomizer. ''It's about as dark as it gets,'' he says. ''I met with [De Palma] and we both said, Let's do it when we are both ready.''

Whether he'll be tearing out hearts while tearing out brains remains to be seen. Firth, for one, is more than ready to put the swooning masses to the test. ''The idea of who I might be may always be skewed, but I'm just a guy,'' he says, exasperated. ''Mr. Darcy would never have become an actor.''