Best known for his portrayal of Jane Austen's sartorially immaculate sex symbol, Colin Firth confesses to feeling much more at home in the stands at the Arsenal. He talks to Jasper Rees about finding his roots in the film of Fever Pitch. 

The film of Nick Hornby's autobiographical best-seller Fever Pitch features one of those witty signatures that films like to sew discreetly into their linings - like Hitchcock's walk-ons, or Scorcese's manic cameos. Hornby plays  the bemused coach of a school team which is beaten to a pulp by a side trained by the character based on himself. The teacher in charge of the winning team is played by Colin Firth, whose physical dissimilarities from Hornby scarcely need recounting. 

Where Firth is chunky, broad-shouldered, with a head of luxuriant, unruly hair - the sort of looker who could credibly play the lover of both Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange in the forthcoming A Thousand Acres - Hornby is none of the above. 

Probe a little further, though, and it becomes clear that Firth has probably never shaved so close to  his own bone. There's a rootlessness that underpins Hornby's infatuation with Arsenal, a coming-from-nowhere-in-particular (actually, Maidenhead) that made him seek out a second home in Highbury, where a family of thousands convenes on Saturdays to ride the same big dipper. That middle-class, middle-English non-belonging drew Firth to the script like Narcissus,to the  pond. For the first time in his career, he is all but playing the nomad in himself 

These days, Colin Firth lives up the road from Arsenal in Hackney, but he'd hardly claim to be dug in there. He makes regular trips to Los Angeles, less for the reason you'd expect than to visit his six-year-old son by Meg Tilly.  Firth played Tilly's seducer in Valmont, Milos Forman's commercially doomed version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and the match succeeded in life where it failed in the film. At least for a while. 

For several years they lived in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia. When they separated, Firth 
had another involvement with his leading lady in Pride and Prejudice. This time, the liaison, with Jennifer Ehle, worked better on screen than off. He was a free agent again by the time he went to Columbia to film Nostromo, where he met up with current  Italian girlfriend Livia Giuggiolli. So he's in Rome a lot these days, as deracinated as ever. 

He spent his first four years in Nigeria, where his father was teaching, and was later taken to St Louis,   Missouri, for a year. His parents were well educated but short of funds to underwrite the kind of education they had themselves enjoyed, so young Firth attended the local comprehensives in Winchester, and submissively blended in. He read a lot - loads of Homer by the age of 14 - and still does, voraciously. Hornby says he 'reads scripts as a reader rather than as an actor'. 

He trained as an actor at a school where everyone was prolier-than-thou and, to his immense surprise, found himself typecast as a toff. Another Country, the seedbed of a quartet of careers (see also Day-Lewis, Branagh and Everett) followed, and he was never again seen as anything other than officer material. He's done soldiers (Tumbledown, A Month in the Country), pilots (The Deep Blue Sea, The English Patient), and aristocrats (Valmont, Pride and Prejudice), his pedigree never in doubt. Yet Fever Pitch, a begrudging  romance about a teacher who learns to live with his own and his girlfriend's emotions, is arguably the role
that most reflects Firth's real persona. 

So is Fever Pitch your most autobiographical outing to date?  The thing that struck me most when I read the book was something to the effect that a middle-class suburban male, when he steps into a comprehensive school, steps into a cultural void. We don't have things to weep into our beer about, we don't have that sense of pride in our identity, and so we go round trying to invent it, wishing we were Charlie George or someone. 

You relate to that? 
For me rock music was the way I went at that time. I grew my hair. 

So who were you into? Genesis? 
Guilty. 

Were you as obsessive about it as Hornby was about football? 
Absolutely. I didn't alphabetise, but I did spend hours exchanging trivia about it. I would spend my  chemistry classes writing lists - lists! - which drummers have been through The Who, or Little Feat's 10 best songs. There's something about the way Nick writes that you don't have to have been there to understand it. That scene where my character Paul stands watching the game[which Arsenal must win 2-0 to win the championship] with his hand on the door handle saying,  'Enough. I'm off. I'm not watching any more of this'. For some reason that was intensely familiar, and it's very hard to know why. I know  that I adopted that position of protecting myself from disappointment by having one foot out of the door and not being able to leave. Perhaps it's even in relationships. 

Do you have your hand on the door in relationships? 
Don't know. Don't want to talk about it. 

Do all enquiries into your private life get the two fingers? 
They get a measure of evasiveness. One newspaper story, in which I was quoted saying 'I don't need a woman around' was in response to a barrage of questions about why I didn't have a girlfriend at that point-'Surely you need a woman!' It was just trying to fend that off, and it's been one of the most regularly repeated quotes ever since. I completely respect people's curiosity, and I'm actually glad of it in a way. It means you've made some sort of impact. But there should be a degree of mystery about any creative process, and I think that's the way it should stay. When you see a magician perform, it's appropriate that you should be curious how the trick is done; it's not necessarily appropriate that you should be told. 

Back in your childhood, did you always feel rootless? 
I think I always did. The family moved around a lot. There was some sort of system where you could get teaching posts abroad, and that interested my father. He went to public school and Cambridge. My mother is university-educated. I had a state education, so I felt a bit of an outsider. 

Why did you want to be an actor? It sounds like you weren't particularly demonstrative. 
I was quite, I think. I think the pendulum swung. I think it still can do that. I can be extremely outgoing and extremely shy by turns. I think a lot of actors are like that. And, in fact, a lot of the best actors I've met - this was very apparent when I was at drama school - are quite shy people, and the stage is a place where they can find a sort of external confidence. I often found that the most entertaining people, who can do all the funny voices in the canteen, were fairly Iimited on stage. 

Before Pride and Prejudice there was a measure of interest in your work, but nothing like since. How has it changed your life? 
I don't think the type of work I'm being offered has really changed. It's just there's more of it coming my way. Fever Pitch stood out from the rest. I started reading it, found myself laughing out loud, found it witty, completely without pomposity and pretension, just a very straightforward story that was not only funny but which actually dealt with issues that weren't being treated as issues. I feel spoiled by it, because every other script I've been offered feels rather contrived. 

Did Pride and Prejudice open doors in Hollywood? 
I got offered some TV because of it. 

Crap? 
The TV remake of The Shining. 

Do you care where your next five jobs come from? 
I've got different reasons for wanting them to come from different places. I would like one of the next five at least to be theatre, despite how inconvenient it is for me to do theatre at the moment. It's just that I've got a son who lives in Los Angeles and I'm very nervous about tying myself up for an extremely long commitment on low pay when my relationship with him depends on being able to go and see him or have him brought out. I would like to work in this country more. I miss working with English people. It was fantastic to do something contemporary and domestic with Fever Pitch, to come home and use a vernacular close to my own. 

How often do you see your son? 
It's hard to say. There are times when I've had him for four months at a stretch. The only time that's happened while I was working was when I was making Circle of Friends. I was playing a fairly small part and I went to Ireland  for the duration and took him. Now I can only have him over here in school holidays, so it means having to spend more time there. 

You're not so fond of Hollywood? 
I just find it a bit boring really. I find it so regimented. There's nothing social happening there. It needs to be contrived, because nothing incidental can happen very easily. You've really got to make an appointment to go somewhere, to get in your car and do it. There's a whole climate there which doesn't fire me up very much, and I don't want to pursue a Hollywood career for the sake of being there. I don't have great ambitions to be rich. Not that I scorn money. I do want to be comfortable, as anybody would, it's just not for it's own sake. I really would not turn my nose up at a Hollywood offer of a wonderful film which paid a lot of
money. But there's a real out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality. I was offered A Thousand Acres only because I happened to be there. It would never have occurred to them that I would have been happy to fly out for a screen test. 

A Thousand Acres is an adaptation of a novel by Jane Smiley that is itself a modern parallel of King Lear. Is Jess, the Edmund role that you can sort of see John Malkovich playing, a comfortable fit? 
I think I was extremely inappropriate for the part. Jess in the book is described as an Adonis, a  female fantasy figure. There is a paragraph describing his thighs as 'woven themselves braids of discreet tensions', and that could in no way describe my thighs. 

Your thighs had quite a following in Pride and Prejudice..... 
Well, they were carefully swathed in buckskin. I assure you they don't have the same effect seen in shorts. I wore Arsenal boxer shorts in Fever Pitch. I'm fairly confident my thighs won't have the same impact in that scene. 

To what extent have you taken on board this whole football thing? It's been reported that you're a 
born-again Arsenal fanatic. Nick Hornby says you've started to use the royal 'we'. 
It's a bit hard to say. Basically I've appropriated other people's lives and passions to such an extent as an actor, that I'm very good at it in terms of convincing myself - finding things suddenly mean something to me very, very quickly, and kidding myself that I've lived with this for years and years. At the same time I'm extremely sceptical of myself about it. I am a fairly dislocated person in terms of roots - where I live and where I belong. I'm always moving about, and I've got connections with at least three different countries now. I feel I've put out tenuous roots everywhere I go, and the Arsenal thing is one of those. It would be
hideously embarrassing of me to make claims to have become a fuIly fledged Gunner. I've hardly been to Highbury at all this season. But I would say that within the confines of my lifestyle, I'm taking as much of an interest as is possible. 

What's your football like? 
Not very good. I'm a rather lazy and distracted football player. I can do all right, but even if I do all right I'm still very unconvincing to watch. I was once informed that I had the knack for making the easy look difficult. I used to play in Hyde Park every Sunday. 

Was that in Daniel Day Lewis's team? 
Yeah. It was an incredibly mixed bunch of people. It was girls as well. There were some days that were fairly weighed down with luvvies. 

And what's Day Lewis like at football? 
Very good indeed. It's very hard for me to comment really. I'm the guy he would go hurtling past. 

Do you feel that you are a part of The English Patient's success? Your name doesn't get a mention in the trailer. 
Only very tenuously. I certainly don't feel at the heart of it. The problem is that it's an ensemble piece and there are five very important central characters and I'm the sixth. I dare say if I had accepted the job a bit quicker I might have been able to wangle a better billing deal. But I really couldn't give a toss. There are some things that life is too short for,  and where your name appears on the bill really doesn't make any difference to anything.