Now Colin darling, why would you want to be rid of US?
Hee. Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link to an article about Colin Firth in which he talks about his relationship with Mr. Darcy.
But Firth’s life really changed when he emerged, sodden-shirted, from the lake as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The screenwriter Andrew Davies recently revealed the plan had been for Darcy to be naked. Firth had “a bit of the usual tension about getting your kit off” but thinks it remained sexy because we “rerobed, not disrobed, Austen”.
He groans at the very mention of Darcy, whom he regards as “a part-time burden. It got my name recognised but it also put me in a box. Things were going well; I was building a diverse working life.”
Darcy made him feel “a bit of a star” (he smiles pleasurably at that thought), his wife Livia Giuggioli would greet the sight of him dishevelled every morning with an ironic, “Oh look, it’s Mr Darcy”. But, Firth says, “12 years on it feels like a school nickname you can’t shake. It occurred to me the other day to change my name to Mr Darcy and be done with it.” I laugh but he is serious, despite parlaying the Darcy image to his advantage in the Bridget Jones movies, playing Mark Darcy, much obsessed over by Helen Fielding’s lead character.
“The frustration is anything I do not on a horse looks a stretch,” says Firth, smiling yet serious. “When I did Fever Pitch, to get into my own jeans to play a guy living in North London where I lived, to play a character from my own background – people considered that a stretch.”
Discuss. We know you want to. 
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I want your review!!!!!!
:::bangs metal cup on table, jailhouse style:::
Ooop.
Wrong topic.
Carry on discussing wet shirtedness.
Did you NOTICE I’ve been BLOGGING for like FOUR HOURS? Steadily since the end of the Penn State-Michigan game *sob*. It will be done, very soon I hope.
Mine’s been done for TWO days!
I’m sorry about PSU. I was rooting for them. Dear old Dad when to Michigan State so I learned quite young to hate the Wolverines.
I never did understand the whole “Colin” thing myself. Granted he was a damn fine looking Mr. Darcy, but after that, well, he just doesn’t do it for me… he never did it for me.
I will NEVER understand why Colin gets all the attention, and poor Jennifer is more or less left flapping in the wind. She won the BAFTA, she has the Tonys, she has worked with many, many, great actors and has the chops and the pedigree and has made far more interesting films than Mr. Firth, and yet Colin STILL gets all the attention. I don’t get it.
Well, the audience for P&P is mostly women, so many will react, um, positively to teh hawt Mr. Darceeee.
Also Miss Ehle keeps a very, very low profile, and does few films; stage work doesn’t get as much attention in the popular press. Colin does mostly films, and the studio publicist will set up interviews for him, so he gets articles.
And lazy journalists will invoke the wet shirt whenever they need to come up with a quickie article about The Perennial Interest of Jane Austen. Because it couldn’t possibly be that her books are warm, witty, intelligent, and endlessly entertaining; it’s all about The Wet Shirt.
“It’s all about the wet shirt”….
This is a problem?
If you want to catch fish, you have to freshen your bait.
The power of The Wet Shirt should not be underestimated! Colin Firth? Good. Mr. Darcy? Also good. Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy? Better and better. Oops, I mean CF as Darcy = teh hawtness, 4 realz.
I get a little tired of this attitude. I suppose nobody forced him to play Mark Darcy? Or those other movies since P&P where he has played a rich young man with a large estate in _______shire? I’d probably watch him in any role he played, just because I appreciated him so much as Mr. Darcy. That wasn’t because of a wet shirt. It was because he so closely matched my own vision of what Mr. Darcy should be.
My husband and I visited Chawton Cottage in 1996. We talked with a woman working there who had met Colin Firth when he visited there, I suppose as part of researching the role. She referred to him as the Mr. Darcy for all time, or something like that. I would hope he would be proud of a job well done.
I agree that he should be proud of his performance as Mr Darcy! (Isn’t it ironic that we should tell Colin Firth, who IS in my opinion Mr Darcy, that he should be proud?!)
If he really wanted to get rid of his nickname, he shouldn’t have played Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones movies.
I agree! Playing Mark Darcy was just hyping up the whole Darcy thing. (Not that I’m complaining…)
And they’ve got it wrong… Renee Zellweger plays Bridget Jones, not Helen Fielding.
Every epic starts with a reluctant hero…
I don’t think they meant that Helen Fielding played Bridget Jones. Bridget IS Helen Fielding’s character, after all.
I think he played Mark Darcy because it was a chance to have a little fun with his image. He did a great job.
Poor, pitiful whinger. Why did I read that interview? I prefer to keep my favorite films unpolluted by annoying knowledge of the actors behind them, who rarely measure up. It’s the character I like, not the guy playing the role (except maybe for his hawt bod). I do agree with him about actors being a bit messed up in general, getting high on attention. But then they whine so when they actually get it, a fan can’t win. So I just leave them alone, and pick up the novels, instead. Guess what, there’s Mr. Darcy.