Interview: "Proof good guys can finish first" by Evan Fanning (The Irish Independent)

'HAVE you seen Rock 'n' Roll, the Tom Stoppard play?" Colin Firth asks me. Colin Firth is a vinyl junkie, which is why we're talking about a Tom Stoppard play and not about his acting career, or his relationship with his father, or even his new movie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

His collection, he says, is big. "It hasn't been expanded in many years, but it's big for where I stopped buying. It takes up a few shelves... and I've still got the turntable," he says, rather enthusiastically.
Despite being a lover of vintage vinyl, Firth has embraced modernity and now downloads most of his music -- mainly, he says, due to "laziness". However, the perfunctory nature of buying online has made the 47-year-old somewhat nostalgic for a different time.

"In some ways the download thing has driven me back to the hard-copy satisfaction," he says. "CDs never gave me that anyway. Every vinyl lover bangs on about the cover and the artwork and the gatefold and the inner sleeve, and I was a sucker for all of that. And CDs were crap....more

Interview: "Colin Firth: portrait of a young writer" by Sheila Johnston (The Daily Telegraph)

"If a film succeeds in weaving a spell over you, you won't really question it." When he was shooting Girl With a Pearl Earring, everyone was sceptical about the choice of Scarlett Johansson. "By the time it came out, there was endless talk about how uncannily like the girl in the painting she was.....more

Interview: "Colin Firth's Darcy dilemna" by Tim Teeman (The Times UK)

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 Sr could cope with the long hair but not Firth’s “bad choice” of friends. There was a charismatic hard nut at school who led Firth astray. Or “the misdemeanours that go along with wanting to be rock-and-roll and hippy, the music festivals, staying out late.” Drinking? “I was a bit naughty in that respect,” he says. Drugs? Firth looks stricken. “I’m not at liberty to go into detail about such misdemeanours. Yeah, it was all the usual stuff. If Labour Cabinet ministers can confess to some of those things, I probably can as well.” How did your father find out about the drugs? Did you smoke cannabis at home? “Nahhhuhhhh,” Firth mutters. “It was a whole series of things and was as much as to do with what he suspected. It wasn’t one incident.” The worst rows with his father “were about washing dishes and homework. There wasn’t a massive meltdown,” he insists.

But his teenage rebellion was concerted. “I would have gone to university had I not allowed myself to be derailed into moody adolescent laziness. I liked to characterise it then as a defiant decision to resist the system. But I was just resistant to schoolwork. If someone wanted me to read Shakespeare, I wanted to read Thomas Mann. If someone tried to make me listen to Brahms, I had to listen to Hendrix.” On the morning of A-level retakes, “I thought, ‘F*** it’ and went back to bed, it felt like a treadmill I didn’t want to be on.” Firth pitched up, “like Dick Whittington”, in London wanting to act and he got a job at a theatre switchboard. He read Kafka in his cubbyhole, and “stared into the abyss”, until he met a casting director who smoothed his way into drama school and then to a part in Julian Mitchell’s Another Country....more