On Day 12, Colin Firth launched his online film project Brightwide at a Festival screening of Bahman Ghobadi’s No One knows about Persian Cats and audiences at the Surprise Film screenings were treated to Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. Jonathan Romney hosted an inspirational masterclass with A Prophet writer/director Jacques Audiard, supported by uniFrance. On the red carpet Jordan Scott presented her debut feature Cracks, with star Eva Green present to discuss her role as inspirational teacher Miss G, as well as producer and BFI Fellow Sir Ridley Scott. Finally Mario Gianani, producer of Vincere, talked about this acclaimed work.Featured as part of BFI Live’s daily Vodcast series filmed at the 53rd Times London Film Festival. Find more athttp://www.bfi.org.uk/live
The Australian movie magazine Filmink are doing a piece on Colin Firth and A Single Man next for the next month issue.
You can buy the Magazine direct by emailing an inquiry : dina@filmink.com.au
soon we will put the scans on!
In January Colin visited an elephant orphanage in Nairobi. Here’s the link:
http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/updates/updates.asp?ID=257
Colin Firth interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning with Mark Phillips, Jan 31 2010
All-Star glamour walks the red carpet at the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards! Marc Istook & Adrianna Costa interview Tom Ford & Colin Firth of the film A SINGLE MAN!
Our Fan site is on Fan Carpet website.
Go to Colin Firth’s profile on the website and you’ll find our website there. the link
I’ve checked the website and it’s actually really cool, there are reviews and trailers and a lot of cool stuff and information on a lot of movies and actors. check it out now !
Once upon a time, movies about British royals used to be unctuous, forelock-tugging affairs.
Not any more.
Stephen Frears’s The Queen, with Helen Mirren, broke the mould and now Tom Hooper’s film The King’s Speech, which has been shooting in and around London – snowstorms be damned – offers a fascinating snapshot of how our present Queen’s parents went through one of the most extraordinary periods of the nation’s history.
George VI ascended to the throne after his brother Edward VIII abdicated, after less than a year, to marry twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.
Hooper’s ’subversive view’ looks at the abdication crisis through the prism of how George VI, or ‘Bertie’ as he was known before he became King, coped with a crippling speech impediment.
Colin Firth portrays Bertie, Helena Bonham Carter is his forceful wife Elizabeth (better known to us, of course, as the Queen Mother), and Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the Australian-born speech therapist who helped Bertie and insisted he and his royal patient treat each other as equals. Guy Pearce portrays the vain and selfish Edward VIII.
Even one of the film’s main locations is somewhat subversive. The central London mansion, close to Broadcasting House, being used for various purposes – from Logue’s consultation room to Bertie and Elizabeth’s suite of rooms – has other, less regal, uses in real life.
During one visit to the set, Firth gave me a mini-tour of some basement rooms. ‘This is where they give pole dancing lessons,’ the actor told me, as he indicated a series of ceiling-to-floor steel poles. ‘Of course, the daytime activities of this house are very different.’
Producer Iain Canning came across The King’s Speech when it was an unproduced stage play by David Seider. Canning saw its potential as a feature film and, like director Hooper, was keen to make a movie featuring royals that wouldn’t come across as deferential.
Indeed, some very unregal words are emitted from Bertie’s mouth as he fights with Logue over his treatment.
‘Most people don’t have to speak publicly, and some who are called up to do it have a terror of it,’ Firth told me.
‘It’s an irrational fear, like claustrophobia. It never occurred to me the enormity of what he was up against. Not only was he not groomed for it (the throne); he came from a family which can only be described as dysfunctional. He had harsh schooling, he was very lonely, his parents were distant and remote. He was beaten for being lefthanded. And he stammered.
‘His brother was famously very charming and Bertie was considered the dull-witted one with little charisma.’
But Firth was won over by Bertie’s inner steel.
‘It must have been utterly overwhelming. Whatever one feels about the monarchy, I found there to be something very much to be admired about this man as an individual. There’s something heroic about the fact that he took on his worst fear.
‘He saw a little bit of action in World War I, so he didn’t lack physical courage. In fact, he would rather have been seeing action as a naval officer than standing in front of a microphone.’
Firth shoots his last scene today, and tomorrow flies to Los Angeles for Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony, where he’s in the running for a best actor honour for his role in Tom Ford’s film A Single Man.
The part won him the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and he’s strongly tipped to garner an Oscar nomination.
The same could happen again next year for The King’s Speech – for Firth and the movie.
Colin Firth has admitted that he used to hate awards ceremonies.
The A Single Man star, who was recently nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, joked that he has now changed his mind.
“When I was young, I remember being quite militant about these things,” he told the Daily Record. “I said there should not be awards. Well, now I have changed my mind about all that. They are a very good thing!”
Firth added that he was particularly honoured to win the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival because his wife Livia is Italian.
“Winning in Venice was absolutely fantastic,” he said. “It was a very special thing as far as I was concerned, not least because I have such an Italian strand in my life. And I was able to say ‘thank you’ in Italian.”
LOS ANGELES — Colin Firth is that actor whom women love (they mention his Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television miniseries “Pride and Prejudice” or his Mark Darcy in “Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and who guys think is really good at playing stuffy Englishmen.
That reserve he projects so well is all acting. In real life, Firth is cordial, funny and outgoing in a low-key way.
It has never been more effective than in his latest movie, “A Single Man.” Hollywood thinks so, too, having rewarded Firth with Golden Globe and SAG nominations for the role.
He’s also impeccably dressed in just about every scene, no surprise since “Single” is the directing debut of superstar fashion designer Tom Ford.But hold your horses, ladies. Firth’s George is a confirmed gay man who’s never gotten over the death of his longtime companion many months before a fateful day in 1962, the year the film unfolds.
Firth was Ford’s initial choice to play George. But Firth couldn’t fit the film into his busy schedule. By lucky chance, he became available just when the actor hired in his stead dropped out at the last minute.
“I’ve always seen this character in Colin,” Ford says. “Even in the smallest thing that you’ve ever seen Colin in, there’s something that comes from inside him. He is able to telegraph his thoughts or what his character is feeling with almost no movement to his face. There’s something about Colin that does seem very contained on the surface, yet inside you know that there’s enormous emotion, and that seemed perfect to me for George.”
While not wanting to be stereotyped in any way, Firth concurs that George, an expatriate English lit professor teaching at a small Los Angeles college, was a good match for his talents.
Of all the acclaim that has come to Colin Firth’s depiction of hidden grief in “A Single Man,” precious little of it has focused on the physical Firth. At 49, the Golden Globe nominee looks 10 years younger and as fit as he was in those glory days as Mr. Darcy on TV’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
“I pick up the script, and it says ‘Naked man lies on bed.’ And then a few pages in, ‘Naked man jumps in ocean,’ ” Firth recalls. ” ‘Well,’ I thought. ‘It’s time. One more push against gravity before I turn 50 and it’s all downhill.’ ”
The actor whipped himself into shape, physically and mentally. And the result is one of the most lauded performances of the year.
“I’m thrilled by the way people are reacting to this film, partly because this film is small, personal and I didn’t feel like I was part of some big scene, some huge film,” he says from London. “To be given a whole day in the life of a man, playing a character who is never off-screen, and be working with such a small group of people and do it in just 21 very intense and intimate days, and then have people love it? That’s as good as it gets.”
But he’s been here before — the acclaim, the high profile. He knows better than to let it go to his head.
“This is happening as I continue my day job. Filming another movie (“The King’s Speech”) that’s just as intense, with just as long hours. So while I’m glowing from the fact that people are saying lovely things about this film, I’m in the middle of working on the next one, which keeps your feet on the ground.”
COLIN FIRTH despises the festive season so much he can’t listen to the radio in December – because Christmas music makes him furious.
The actor plays Ebenezer Scrooge’s cheerful nephew Fred in Disney’s 3D movie A Christmas Carol, but insists he’s actually more like the famous grump since he struggles to get into the holiday spirit every year.
He explains, “I have a profound loathing of Christmas – it’s sad really. At this time of year, I am careful not to switch on the radio because those novelty jingles make me homicidal and plunge me into the heart of Scrooge territory. I think Christmas turns us all into Scrooge. Everyone is trying to throw happy stuff at you, and that’s when I come over all humbug.”
But he insists the film adaptation of Charles DICkens’ story is the perfect remedy for people who hate the festivities.
He adds, “I think A Christmas Carol is the best season story you’ll find, because after its darkness, fear and regret, you’re ready for a bit of joy by the end. Scrooge is an anti-hero for some reason – people admire this terrible old curmudgeon. Kids may be scared of the story, but you have to tell them it has a happy ending and that the ghosts are, in fact, acts of kindness to encourage Scrooge to change.”
NEW YORK — He’s earning some of the most illustrious reviews of his 25-year film career for playing an anguished gay widower in A Single Man.
Too bad Colin Firth gets zero recognition at home from his sons, Luca, 8, and Matteo, 6.
“My now-8-year-old, when he first came to visit a film set when he was about 3, saw a crane with a camera on it and was fascinated. Every time we went past a construction site, he asked, ‘Is that where you work?’ He so wanted to believe that I was a construction worker. I did not want to break his heart that no, actually, I put on makeup and frocks for a living.”
The actor does plenty more than just play dress-up in A Single Man, now in theaters. Firth’s performance as George Falconer — a haunted, lonely and finicky middle-aged British professor in the 1960s coping with life alone after his partner of 16 years (Matthew Goode) dies in a car crash — earned him best-actor honors at the Venice Film Festival in September. And it has landed Firth, 49, on the short list for what would be his first Oscar nomination.
“It’s about time,” said Firth’s close friend Stanley Tucci, who co-starred with him in the 2001 HBO film Conspiracy. “There’s a real subtlety to Colin and what he does. It’s one of the reasons he hasn’t gotten these accolades sooner. We know he’s very handsome, but there’s so much depth and intelligence there, too.
“There’s never any kind of selfishness in his performances. He’s always supporting the film as a whole.”
Firth already has legions of devoted fans, thanks to his portrayal of dashing Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, plus his dual turns as tall, dark and handsome lawyer Mark Darcy in both Bridget Jones comedies.
In A Single Man, based on a short story by Christopher Isherwood, Firth meticulously and methodically plans his own suicide because he cannot envision a future without Jim. If Robin Williams’ turn in The Birdcage was a gaudy Pucci scarf, then Firth’s George is a somber, austere Jil Sander suit.
“He’s not a queeny guy. Why would he be? He doesn’t define himself by his sexuality. He’s too secure,” Firth said. “He’s dealing with a lot of things, but not that. It didn’t occur to me to play that up.”
Golden Globe-nominated actor Colin Firth discusses his role in the new film ‘A Single Man,’ directed by Tom Ford.
promoting “A Single Man”
WOW ! Colin is nominated for the Golden Globes. and winners will be announced on the 17th of January. I’m crossing hands for him to win !!!
New photo shots were added to the gallery. and Colin looks smoking!
what do you ladies (and guys) think ?
COLIN FIRTH was so deeply invested in the tragic character he played in A SINGLE MAN he is still struggling to “shake off” deep feelings of sadness.
The British actor plays a gay college professor who loses his partner in Tom Ford’s adaptation of the 1964 novel of the same name, and he admits playing a man so entrenched in grief had a lasting effect on him.
He tells Moviefone.com, “I haven’t quite snapped out of it yet. There are some stories that really do haunt you, and the same way that (character) George haunted Tom (Ford) when he read the book, he stayed with me.
“I know he doesn’t exist, he’s a fictional character, but I still feel a great tenderness about the idea of him. It’s hung around; I’ve found it very hard to shake off.”
Fashion designer-turned-director TOM FORD felt obliged to send an apology to COLIN FIRTH after suggesting the actor needed to slim down before stripping off for their new movie A SINGLE MAN.
Firth portrays a gay professor in Ford’s directorial debut and sheds his clothes for one scene, in which his naked body is seen floating in water.
But Ford feared he had offended Firth during recent interviews to promote the movie when he candidly explained to the press how he’d advised the Bridget Jones’ Diary actor to hire a personal trainer and get in shape before production began on the project.
The filmmaker admits he can’t actually remember his exact words, but was horrified when he read his comments in the media.
So he decided to reach out to the star and say sorry in case he had hurt his feelings.
Ford says, “It’s terrible. I emailed Colin about this… because you have to be so careful what you say to the press. The email to Colin said, ‘Sometimes in life I can be a little overly blunt.’ So I probably said (to the press), ‘Colin, you’re fat’ – but I’m not sure I actually said that! I don’t know and now people have picked up on it!”
But Firth admits he didn’t take offence: “He (Ford) tended to handle me in ‘honey’ terms like, ‘You look really great as you are, but if you want to get a trainer to come to your house every day I’ll pay for it and it’s fine.’ That means you’re fat!”
Firth was glad of the encouragement: “I guess he did me a favour, giving me one final push in the war against gravity. I’m in my late 40s so it was probably quite helpful.”
The actor didn’t hit the gym however, telling WENN, “I just ate less.”
WATCH the Interview on BBC
It’s being called the rebirth of Colin Firth – what critics agree is a striking performance by the British actor in a new film called A Single Man.
Fifteen years ago Firth became an international heartthrob for his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in a British TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.
He spoke to Talking Movies Tom Brooks about how different this new role is.
