And When Did You Last See Your Father? Colin Firth's Take... [ 20/09/2007 ]

Off Colin Firth goes, darting around topics as unexpected as taking drugs, screwing up at school and flawed parenting. It’s odd for such a famous actor to be so candid, and even odder to find a star better looking off screen than he is on – old-school rugged, softly spoken and mahogany-brown after filming the big-screen version of Mamma Mia! in Greece. The 47-year-old actor didn’t like Abba: “Like most boys it wasn’t my thing. I was 14 in 1974 and fancied girls to death.”

Firth’s confessional mood echoes his role as Blake Morrison in the film version of Morrison’s autobiographical memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which evoked the relationship between Morrison and his domineering father, Arthur. In this moving, quietly powerful film Firth and Jim Broadbent, as Arthur, have just the right kind of double-edged intimacy.

Arthur couldn’t be more different from Firth’s “quiet, unassuming” father. “But I was a surly, pretentious adolescent, like Blake’s portrait of himself. My father and I were not close in a cosy sense but I am as connected with my father as Blake was with his. The difference is my animosity with my dad was left behind in my teens. But, even now, three seconds in my parents’ company and a tone of voice or trigger will bring me back to being 15.”

Firth was born in Hampshire, then moved to Nigeria where his father taught. His parents have always been “eternal students” and it is a close family, he says. Firth lost his first grandparent (his grandfather, whom he was close to) at 35. “It was a shock,” he says, “some part of me finding out we weren’t immortal in my family.”

Something went awry in Firth’s teenage years. “I loathed authority but was frightened of it. My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn’t smash windows or get into fights – if I did I was strictly on the receiving end. Like Blake, I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky. It wasn’t Hardy or Austen for me, but Camus. I grew my hair long, pierced my ears and then got slightly stranded by the punk thing.”

Firth is an intense thinker and considers everything – family, career, politics – quite deeply. Morrison’s book made him pause before teasing his two younger children (he has three; a son, Will, by the actress Meg Tilly and two younger boys with Giuggioli). He jokingly agrees with “whoever said that when he upset his children he put a dollar in a jar for their future therapy”.

Firth’s own father is 73 and the Blake Morrison film “made me think we let our parents die with things unsaid”, but he cannot imagine a relationship with his father where “everything has been resolved”, even though they are close. Firth himself isn’t sure if he is a good father – “I’m not going to be writing the review on that one” – but says he tries to make himself “available” to his children. He reveals that he squeezed himself “into a bourgeois life to reach a sense of being settled”.

He broods momentarily, agonises, looks down. “Acting messes with you. Whatever it is to seek that kind of attention is combined with the ability to play different characters – so there’s something fractured there. You take a person like that, subject them to all the vicissitudes of praise and attack and critique and you are going to wreak havoc with people who aren’t stable.”

Is he talking about himself? “Yeah . . . I didn’t go off the deep end. But it gets lonely. There came a time where I wanted to settle down. Excessive praise is like a drug but it doesn’t stay around for long. People can’t come with you while you’re up your own a***. If you want to have any companionship you have to have a little bit of generosity.” So he’s created “new disciplines” to maintain close relationships.

This is said in a halting mumble. It reminds me of the gruff intimacy between Morrison and his father in the film – that particularly masculine trait of revealing something heartfelt by sounding as determinedly unheartfelt as you possibly can.

And When Did You Last See Your Father? is released on Oct 5, 2007

Tim Teeman, adapted from The Times, 20 September 2007

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