COLIN FIRTH 

He was always given the flamboyant roles and was to comment later that his career proper usually found him playing repressed or sensitive souls. Among the leading roles he took in his second year were Tartuffe, King Lear and Hamlet; and the last-named brought an offer to take over the leading role, the Guy Burgess character, in Another Country (83), when Daniel Day-Lewis left the cast. The originator of the role, Rupert Everett, caught Firth's performance and recommended him for the role of Judd in the film version, Another Country (84), that is, his best friend -- played in the original by Kenneth Branagh -- since Everett was to repeat his stage performance. Julian Mitchell wrote the screenplay from his play and very fine it is, as it evokes the far-off days of English public schools when cricket and homosexuality were the chief preoccupations, as bounded by matters religious and military. It keeps till the end Guy's conversion to communism, as fitting for someone who has decided to live as an open gay; Judd is an open Red from the start, and he would seem to be the only hetero in the whole school. Firth's good nature and common sense contrasted well with Everett's petulance, and the whole, as directed by Marek Kanievska, was as successful on screen as on stage.

Firth returned to the play to finish the run and then took a role in another movie, Nineteen nineteen, that of the young Paul Scofield, when he was a pupil of Freud. As directed by Hugh Brody and written by him and Michael Ignatieff, this was chiefly about a reunion of two ex-pupils- Maria Schell was the other - reminiscing with flashbacks. Produced by the British Film Institute and Channel 4, this arid piece sat over a year on the shelf before finding deservedly few bookings late in 1985; in the meantime Firth had played Armand Duvall to Greta Scacchi's Camille (84) for CBS television. "Incredible cast," he said (it also included John Gielgud and Ben Kingsley, as the older Duvall), "wonderful story, dreadful script." He joined the National Theatre to play the lead in a version of Schnitzler, Another Country, and had important parts on British television, in a film Dutch Girls (85) and a mini-series based on a novel by J.B. Priestley about the great days of the music halls, Lost Empires (86), which marked one of Olivier's last performances.

Although Warner Bros agreed to distribute A Month in the Country (87), it was another of the 'little' films which seem to constitute an entire indigenous output, again made with the co-operation of Channel 4. Pat O'Connor directed, with a bias towards thoughts unspoken and feelings undisclosed, though at other points Simon Gray's screenplay does a clumsy job on J.L. Carr's novel. The film is at its most remarkable in its central double portrait of two veterans of the Great War, who in 1919 seek their own private missions in a Yorkshire churchyard. One (Kenneth Branagh) is excavating, a comfortable man who is not only a hero but a homosexual, the other (Firth), uncovering a wall-painting, is tortured by memories of 'over there'. Both actors are superlative, Branagh unselfishly so, as Firth has the longer, more disturbed role.

Firth played Desire Under the Elms at the Greenwich Theatre and was then cast in a much-discussed BBC movie, Tumbledown (88), as Robert Lawrence, the Scots Guards officer who had almost half of his brain blown away in the Falklands conflict, and who felt compelled to indict the British army brass for the mistakes made therin. While making it, became obsessed with Argentina, so was pleased when an offer came to film there. Apartment Zero (89), in fact a British film, in English, written and directed by a local man, Martin Donovan, who had trained in Europe. Firth admitted that he was pleased with the result, "because I expected not to be. Despite odd pretences the film has, ultimately I was pleased because I found it very truthful to the experience I had in Argentina." He played a bachelor who, lonely after his mother is taken to hospital, advertises for a lodger. What he gets is someone who is the antithesis of himself -- a laid-back, hunky American (Hart Bochner) who may be a mass murderer. He is irritated by Firth's old-maid fussiness, but basks in his adoration, which may or may not be sexual, and which in time may cause him to turn a blind eye to murder. The result is like a pastiche of Psycho, Repulsion and The Servant welded together, but because Firth plays one who is a movie-nut above all else, the blood-boltered bodies of the final sequences may be in his imagination. Because of the movie references, the film achieved a cult following, but it should be seen above all for Firth, wittily making his paranoia secondary to pedantry.

His biggest chance for international stardom arrived with the title role in Valmont, Milos Forman's version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses; so far on screen less flamboyant than John Malkovich, the Valmont in the rival version, he is is equal at getting under the skin of his characters. He commented that Malkovich "plays a lovable rogue... I don't", and on another occasion that the role no more belonged to Malkovich than Hamlet to Olivier; but he and his fellow-players were factors in a movie always compared unfavourably to the earlier version - at least in those countries in which Orion chose to open it. Among his co-stars was Meg Tilly, with whom he began a liaison of his own.

Another foreign film in English, the Dutch Wings of Fame (90), may find as much favour as Apartment Zero. Directed by Otakar Votocek, it has the attractive whimsical idea of confontation after death of a murderer (Firth) and the over-the-hill matinee idol (Peter O'Toole) whom he has killed.