MR DARCY'S DILEMMA: TO BE A STAR OR FLEE FROM IT ALL 

THE DESERT in southern Tunisia is cold and brown. Cliffs of mud throw deep shadows over hobbled camels and Bedouin tents as the sun dips. In the middle of a  valley floor, a bright yellow plane, nicknamed Rupert Bear, sits like a gigantic nursery toy. It belongs to Geoffrey Clifton, Colin Firth's character in Anthony Minghellaís  film of the Booker winning novel, The English Patient. Firth hops around between takes all earnest politeness and gawky hand gestures that would sit better on a younger man. His hair is blondish, and h is beige flying suit oddly unflattering. He is the picture of an uncomplicated Englishman of the late thirties.

Firth places great store on the contrasting powers of light and dark. He believes he is perceived as a simpler fellow on this set because he is blonde and that his Darcy in the BBC's Pride And Prejudice owed much of its mystery to black hair dye. It takes time to see that Clifton is yet another of those particular Firth character roles - the man whose conventional shell belies the violence of his emotions. Clifton, the jolly explorer, holds his secrets - that he works for British intelligence and is capable of murderous passion. So much for the "ordinary" and creamy Clifton; so much for Firthís frightfully decent Rupert Bear manners.

Americans on the set miss the contradictions in Firth. They take him at face value; they call him a "nice young man." They overlook the fact that he is now 35 and one of the few actors never out of work since he left drama school to star in Another Country in the West End. On stage, he played Bennett, the tortured homosexual schoolboy based on Guy Burgess. In the film, he played Judd, the communist driven by hatred off militaristic snobbery. It is said that he was beautiful in those days, and yet his Judd is played without vanity, played always under the note and against the emotion - an extraordinary achievement from a 23-year-old in his first film. "You can't come out on stage and act grief-stricken," he says at one point. "That's histrionic. I think when you come on stage trying to be happy and then fight against grief, that's moving." (Minghella says: " Colin is delicate." Is that the same as subtle? I ask. "Subtlety is nothing to do with acting - it's how you put your fingers down on the piano keys - he's delicate.")

He is no longer beautiful, as he was, for instance, in Valmont, his first "big" film. Even so, his face is oddly neutral most of the time - it is his eyes which give meaning to the dark, flat voice and much of the time, he holds them away. What he withholds in conversation becomes, in time, as revealing as what he withholds when he acts. In this interview, each moment of letting go is followed by a day of withdrawal in which he pulls back, as distant as if we had never met. "If my confidence was challenged," he says later, "I'd withdraw."

It is another clue. There's a pattern. After Valmont, he withdrew to Canada, to live with Meg Tilly, his co-star and mother of his only child, Will, aged five. After Pride And Prejudice, he refused all interviews and went , when not filming, to Rome to his Italian girlfriend. "All this sudden attention threw me. I thought I knew where I was professionally. I didn't think this was on the cards." It is as if each possibility of success has led to flight.

Is it success he fears? He counters with his starring in the West End at 22. "For a while I felt I had to be excessively modest so people didn't think I was above them. I forgot to return a phone call and now it was because I was thought arrogant, not because I was scatty and always had been. Then I realised nothing had changed. I was working, that's all there was to it."

He is not difficult to be with - not moody or hostile, as some actors are. He simply measures himself out very carefully, weighing all confidences. It is a question of waiting, of listening to the spaces between words, and then making connections. Here, for instance, is a list of actors he admires: Albert Finney, Donald Pleasence, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Duvall. Not one has had a straight line to their lives.

SO HE wants success, but when it came again (with Darcy), he fled from it. Ambivalence, uncertainty, the fear of being defined - they all play their part. "There's no reason why the Darcy thing should perpetuate itself,"he insists. "I'm not going to do that again. I'm not going to be that again. No, I'd be bored shitless."

He also says that it is important to remember the paradoxes of an actor, the constant doubt and self- aggrandisementî is one he mentions - but also "the use of a spurious truth and honesty in this deception" Given that he never believes entirely in either, it is not surprising that he feels he is pulled two ways - the longing to be with his son, now living in Los Angeles, and the need to leave.

He is the grandson of missionaries in India, with all the contradictions of service and always being an outsider that that brings. One grandfather was head of a theological college and his own teacher parents met there. That Indian heritage was ever-present in his childhood in Africa - a childhood in which he remembers Christianity as being taken for granted, the word "sin" not coming up, but always a sense of the existence of "right and wrong" of ethical values.

Interesting, too, that the roles of which he has been proudest have involved both the challenge of moral values and the destruction and healing of "ordinary" men - A Month In The Country, in which he played a Paschendael survivor whose longing for the vicar's wife was declared only by his burning eyes and the way in which he folded her rose into his book, and crushed it. Another, Robert Lawrence in Tumbledown, the journey of a Falklands "hero" shot and paralysed.

In the end, we talk for hours. Slowly, his voice becomes richer, the hands more graceful and expressive. It becomes clear that he cannot explain, even to himself, the contradictions and polarities in his life. He can't talk about his relationships - or why they always go wrong - because he doesn't understand them himself. He is restless: he came back to England but often feels he doesn't belong. "Wherever I am, people always say, 'You're always away.' You feel like the invisible man. I'm never here, I'm never there, So where am I?"

The only moments of passion are when he talks of his small son on the other side of the world - of how he has had to fight against the temptation to be entertaining and just learn to "be there," of fighting "the obstacle within" as in acting he fights against obvious emotion, and of learning to put aside his temper.

His loathing of sending his son to school - into the harsh, sharp-voiced structure of an institution - must surely spring from his own experiences. Hard to imagine how frightening it was for the five -year-old Firth, just back from Nigeria, to stand in the concrete playground of the tough local school in Hampshire and hold his own. He bridles at any suggestion that his busy parents - with their own respect for education and books - might have shielded their sensitive son beneath the wing of private education. And , as I have come to expect, withdraws.

Without always realising it, he keeps coming back to the question of values. "Being in this job without your own values is death," he says. "What values?" I ask. "The two values which keep recurring are honesty and courage and somehow you can't have one without the other. I'm constantly asking myself is acting putting on frocks and chasing one's ego or is it something more?"

He both longs and fears for the chance to take on a huge Shakespearean role - to put his stake down on the hill of men and to have his courage and worth tested.

"I remember talking to Robert Lawrence, who I played in Tumbledown, and knowing that something happens in war when the adrenalin flows and thereís only going for it in a bestial sort of way. Just occasionally a part comes along which provokes that recklessness in me and yes, Hamlet would be one. But you get eaten up by it - and I'm afraid. I don't want to be lost to the world."
 

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