Colin Firth

There are many types of Stuffy Englishman, and Colin Firth can play them all. You want repression? He can do you repression. You want cruelty? He’s your man. You want secretly selling out his country to the Soviets? Weird choice, but he’s done it twice. You want unable to connect to his feelings? Oh, yes. Bewildered family man? Sure. Crusty officer? Doubtless. Colin Firth is your man, over and over again since 1984. It’s an interesting way of being typecast, by playing dozens of different kinds of roles that all have the same root.

Firth has a ridiculously English background. He was born in a village in Hampshire to parents who were both educators. Both parents were the children of missionaries who were born in India. He spent part of his own childhood in Nigeria, where his father was an education officer. He cultivated the right accent to fit in, though in his case it was a working class Hampshire accent. He studied at the National Youth Theatre and Drama Centre London. From there, he launched his film career.

I’m too young to be one of the women who thinks of him as Sexy Mr. Darcy. Or I suppose the issue is that it happened right around the time I didn’t really have TV. I did see him as Adult Colin Craven in a production of The Secret Garden, a role that annoyed me deeply given they’d tacked on a framing device the story didn’t need. I’m deeply fond of Circle of Friends, but I don’t watch the movie all that often. So the role that really sank for me was in Shakespeare in Love, where he’s Lord Wessex, to whom Viola has been sold. He’s not called on to do much in that, but it’s a fun role.

Perhaps his most surprising role is as Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Firth has been trying to avoid typecasting through his career, and he is in this literally reprising the role he’s trying to avoid duplicating. I suppose there’s an argument that it isn’t really the same, but it might as well be. Still, while Austen is intended to be funny, it’s not quite as overtly a comedy. Firth does tend to get cast as a straight man, but when he’s allowed to be funny, he can be very funny indeed. I think he may be the opposite of a stay-in-your-lane actor, one where he has more lanes than people realize.

He is also a committed activist. He is devoted to refugee rights. He’s listed as a co-author on a scientific paper doing brain scans to try to determine if there’s actually a structural difference in the brains of people with different political leanings. He may hold a CBE but is a small-r republican, opposed to the idea of an unelected leadership. He opposed Brexit and currently holds dual citizenship so he and his half-Italian children will have the same passports. Fancy, a stereotypical-seeming Englishman opposing xenophobia and colonialism.