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Forget glitz and glamour, Colin Firth returns to cinemas tonight in a poignant British film about a father and son. He tells Rob Driscoll about his own relationships with both his parents and his children
YOU could say Colin Firth is a bit of a chameleon. The heart-throb British actor has just returned from Greece where he has been singing some Abba.
Dressed in full obligatory ‘70s-style spandex, it was part of his performance in the film version of the stage musical Mamma Mia! with the likes of Meryl Streep, Julie Walters and Pierce Brosnan as co-stars.
And this Christmas he will be seen flirting outrageously with a dragged-up Rupert Everett in St Trinian’s.
It’s all a far cry from the role that made him a true superstar – the smouldering Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was sexed up by Cardiff screenwriter Andrew Davies.
But one suspects that, out of his latest big screen projects, the movie of which Firth is most proud is a far humbler, less glitzy affair.
Behind the clunky title of the new British film And When Did You Last See Your Father? hides a strongly emotional, unapologetic study of family relationships with the power to reduce many of its audiences – especially men – to tears.
Based on Blake Morrison’s award-winning autobiographical memoir of the same name, the film is an extraordinarily honest and unflinching exploration of a father/son relationship, as Morrison deals with his father’s terminal illness and imminent death.
In the film, Firth plays the real-life Morrison, with Jim Broadbent as his father Arthur, ultimately struck down by cancer. As soon as Firth was offered the part, there was no hesitation about accepting it.
“Everyone can relate to this movie,” explains Firth. “We’ve all had a father or a father figure. The issues in this film are so wired into absolutely all of us, that I really don’t think you have to look that far to find bits of your life that overlap.
“One of the reasons why people respond so much to this story is that everybody’s got unresolved issues in any important relationship, and this story is so starkly honest about that. Yet you don’t come out of the cinema depressed.
“It gives you some rather difficult truths that apply to all of us, and I think there’s something soothing and edifying about that. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s because you realise you’re not alone with all your inadequacies in that department. But I think it makes you feel actually better than coming out of a sugar-coated fantasy.”
Indeed, the very notion of Hollywood getting hold of this project and heaping it with gloss is a terrifying one. The strength of And When Did You Last See Your Father? is in its deadpan truths and refreshingly un-flashy honesty.
Firth immediately empathised with a screenplay that refuses to shirk from all those petty embarrassments of a suburban upbringing in baby-boomer Britain that still hover over his conscience.
In the film, Firth’s parents are played by Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson, while his wife is played by Gina McKee. TV star Sarah Lancashire makes a telling big screen debut as a family friend of the Morrisons whom we slowly realise means much more to Arthur.
The essence of the central father and son relationship is further expressed through flashbacks to Blake’s teens – a family holiday, a fumbled affair with the au pair – where the awkward and introverted Blake is constantly crushed by his father’s flirtatious ways and need to be the centre of attention.
“The more you enter the film, it’s clear that there’s so much of this that is immediate to everyone,” says Firth, whose own father is 73.
At 47, Firth is also a father himself to three children – the younger two by his Italian wife Livia Giuggioli.
“My father couldn’t be more different from Arthur Morrison, but I still had issues, and I have that dreadful piece of programming in my system, that however far I think I’ve gone in life and however much I’ve moved beyond the trials of living with my parents, it only takes five minutes walking into the parental home and I’m 16 again,” he smiles.“The film’s made me realise that there’s the danger we let our parents die with things unsaid – though, of course, I’d like to think there’s nothing unresolved with my parents.”
Firth had read the book on which the film is based several years ago, although he never imagined seeing it on the big screen.
“I loved the book from the moment I read it for all sorts of reasons,” recalls Firth, who is an executive producer of the forthcoming documentary feature In Prison My Whole Life, the latest film from Welsh director Marc Evans.
“I responded to the flavour of the ‘60s, the ‘80s, washing your car on a Sunday, putting up a camping tent come hell or high water, being stuck in the family car in motorway traffic jams, all of that.
“It was such a self-contained piece. The adaptation is quite a big reinvention of the book. There’s nothing of a film in the book. There are little episodes you can imagine being filmed, but it doesn’t have that shape, that quality – it doesn’t cry out to be a film at all. It’s a series of brilliant, courageous observations.”
Familiar as he was with the material, there wasn’t much time for the eternally-in-demand Mr Firth to prepare for the challenge of playing an autobiographical figure.
“My preparation basically involved getting on a plane in New York and arriving just in time to shoot,” he chuckles. “It was a bit on the hoof. I’d lived with the idea of it for quite a long time. But I’d met the director Anand Tucker before, we’d chatted about it, and I’d known the book for a good 10 years. And then there was a lifetime of having a Dad…”
As for Firth’s own parenting skills, he insists he tries to make himself available to his children.
“I think that’s a constant issue for any working person, questioning your availability,” he says. “Actors, in fact, have quite a lot of down time, and however all-consuming the work period is, the down time is real down time at home, probably more so than with people who have a regular job. So one thing balances off the other.”
Firth is optimistic that there will be a very real audience out there for this movie, which stands out from the usual diet of formulaic thrillers, romances, comedies and period adaptations. “I really do think its success hinges on its unflinching honesty,” he says. “Blake wrote the book fairly soon after his father’s death, and he was probably in an unguarded period.
“He might have been more cautious if he’d written it a bit later on, but what we have is something very real when it comes to warts-and-all portrayals. If it was just the usual love-fest, I don’t think many people would care.”
And When Did You Last See Your Father? opens today.
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