Firth among equals

Colin Firth's character in A Single Man has an impeccable dress sense, courtesy of director and fashion mogul Tom Ford. Photo / Supplied by Hoyts

He might turn 50 in September but it's already been a significant year for Colin Firth. The genial British actor has won a Bafta and an Oscar nomination for A Single Man, in which he plays a gay man grieving the loss of his partner.

His awards run started with winning the Venice Film Festival best actor award for the role. "I can see why people get their breath taken away when recognition of that sort is unexpected," Firth said of receiving his first major award. "It really is kind of bizarre; it wins you a little bit."

But does this mean that Firth has finally escaped the brooding buttoned-up Mr Darcy of the 1995 BBC TV series Pride & Prejudice, and updated in the Bridget Jones movies?

"Darcy will be dead when he's buried at the crossroads at midnight with a cross through his heart," Firth deadpans. "I think a generation's going to have to die out. The number of times I've done something and people have pronounced his death and yet he lives and walks in some way or other. I don't care what happens to him frankly. I'm getting on fine."

In A Single Man Firth plays George, a gay British professor at an early 1960s Californian university, whose life is shattered by the death of Jim, his partner of 16 years.

He says he had no trepidation about playing a gay man. "The character could as easily have lost his wife in a car accident."

Loosely based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, the story changed in the hands of fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford.

The book is mostly an interior monologue about a man's mid-life crisis, so had to be broadened out. Most significantly, Ford added the concept of George planning his own suicide and has him looking at the world during his final day.

The movie is mostly a mood piece and follows George, who has been warned by his partner's relatives not to attend the funeral, as he glides around 1962 Los Angeles with a strange optimism. Eventually he returns to his sumptuous Lautner house, which like everything in the film, was carefully chosen by Ford.

"If people didn't know Tom's history, they'd look at the film and think, 'What a beautiful cinematic sensibility! What a wonderful film grammar!'

"It would be nothing to do with the decorative elements of these things. Yes it's beautiful, but to me, when I put George's clothes on I didn't think they'd been created by a fashion designer. I felt they spoke of his desperation, his need, which was very clear and explicit at the beginning of the film. He needed to fastidiously wear a kind of body armour. He had to create this constructed character in order to step out of his front door. That's what the cuff links and the tiepin are all about. Pull one piece of that armour away and that man could collapse.

"Tom's a highly imaginative, highly intelligent person with an extraordinary set of skills, so there was nothing but intrigue from the beginning."

Firth's other imminent film is Genova.

Helmed by prolific and varied English director Michael Winterbottom, it casts the actor in yet another role as a grieving academic. A widowed father of two, he takes his two daughters to Italy to make a fresh start.

"If he stops and thinks about how much pain he's in, he can't be there for his daughters," says Firth.

"So he throws himself into his life in his new city. He develops a love for the sound and feel of the place, for its narrow dark alleyways and its open sunny piazzas."

Firth, who speaks Italian, is married to the Italian documentary film-maker Livia Giuggioli, with whom he has two sons, Luca and Matteo. He spends around three months in Italy with his family each year and feels very much at home.

"Genova is not my favourite Italian city, but I fell in love with the place while I was there," he notes. "I didn't make the film because of my love of Italy though; I made it because of my love of Michael Winterbottom's films."

The director's incidental, off-the-cuff style proved a direct contrast to the big budget Mamma Mia! which Firth was making at the same time.

"Michael works with a small crew, no lights and cables, just the walls of the streets as his backgrounds. He draws you into his story very gently; nothing is ever obvious. I absolutely adore the film. I think it's one of the best I've done."

With Firth clearly acting at the height of his skills, would he be up for a Mamma Mia! sequel? "I'd love to do it, just to be back with the same cast, because we all enjoyed it so much," he replies.

"I think there's some fairly serious intention to do it in some way or another, but it won't be with Abba songs, from what I understand. Maybe they'll have to pick another band."

He recently completed The King's Speech in which he plays Prince Bertie, who ascended to the English throne as King George VI after his brother Edward (Guy Pearce) abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. The film, directed by Tom Hooper, focuses on the king overcoming his nervous stammer with the aid of Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).

Soon Firth will re-team with Winterbottom for The Promised Land, a political thriller set in Palestine at the end of the World War II, and co-starring Matthew Macfadyen, who played Mr Darcy in the 2005 film version of P&P.

"When the Darcy thing happened to me in the mid-90s I suddenly found myself being patronised by journalists for the first time, because I'd never played roles that had anything to do with looks.

"You know," he adds lowering his voice for effect, "before that I'd been fairly neutral. I could scrub up a bit or look a bit worse for wear. But the minute people started putting a heartthrob label on it, attitudes toward me changed."

LOWDOWN

Who: Colin Firth, The Bafta-winning Oscar-nominated actor formerly known as Darcy.

Key roles: Mamma Mia! (2008), And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2007), Nanny McPhee (2005), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Love Actually (2003), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Fever Pitch (1997), Pride and Prejudice (1995), Circle of Friends (1995), Valmont (1989), A Month in the Country (1987)

Latest: A Single Man (screening as part of the World Cinema Showcase starting at the Academy, Auckland on Thursday, before opening at cinemas on May 6) and Genova, opening at cinemas on April 15