Colin Firth Age, Height, Partner, Net Worth & Biography

Colin Firth is an English actor best known as Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and as King George VI in The King’s Speech, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Born on September 10, 1960, in Grayshott, Hampshire, England, Firth, 66, has built a career that moves between classic British drama, romantic comedy and action films, always with a quiet, understated style.

Quick Facts

Who Is Colin Firth?

Colin Firth is an actor whose best work is often the most restrained. He does not shout or show off; instead, he lets a character’s feelings appear in small changes of expression, in a pause, in the way he listens to another actor. That style made him the definitive Mr. Darcy for a generation of viewers. In the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Firth played Darcy as a proud, awkward man who learns to be open, and the famous scene of Darcy emerging from a lake in a wet shirt became a cultural moment in Britain. Fifteen years later, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The King’s Speech (2010), in which he played King George VI, a man who must overcome a stammer to speak to his nation at the start of the Second World War. It was a performance of great sensitivity, and it showed how much Firth could do with a character who struggles to speak at all.

Firth has also shown a comic and romantic side, as Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones films, a deliberate echo of his Mr. Darcy, and as the romantic lead in Love Actually and Mamma Mia!. He has played action heroes in the Kingsman films, as the gentleman spy Harry Hart, and he has taken on dark, complex roles in A Single Man and The Railway Man. He is one of the few British actors who can move between a period drama, a romantic comedy and a spy film without losing his credibility, and he has done so while keeping a low public profile and a reputation for professionalism.

Early Life & Background

Colin Firth was born in Grayshott, Hampshire, England, the eldest child of David Norman Lewis Firth, a history lecturer, and Shirley Jean Firth, a comparative religion lecturer. The family lived in Nigeria for a time when Firth was a child, while his father taught in the country, and he attended schools in England, including St Christopher School in Letchworth and Barton Peveril Sixth Form College in Eastleigh. He was drawn to acting as a teenager, joining the National Youth Theatre, and he studied at the Drama Centre London, where he learned a rigorous, physical approach to acting.

After drama school, Firth worked on the stage and in small television roles, including in the film Another Country (1984), in which he played the schoolboy Tommy Judd, and in the television series Tumbledown (1988), in which he played a soldier wounded in the Falklands War, a performance that earned him a BAFTA nomination and showed his ability to play a man under pressure. He worked steadily through the 1980s and early 1990s, in films such as A Month in the Country and Valmont, but it was Pride and Prejudice in 1995 that made him a household name in Britain and, later, around the world.

Career

After Pride and Prejudice, Firth worked in a wide range of films, including The English Patient (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Love Actually (2003). He played the husband in The Importance of Being Earnest and the father in Nanny McPhee, and he took on more serious roles in A Single Man (2009), directed by Tom Ford, in which he played a gay professor grieving the death of his partner, a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He followed it with The King’s Speech, which won him the Oscar, the Golden Globe and the BAFTA, and which remains the defining film of his career.

In recent years Firth has played Harry Hart in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), a role that showed his action-hero side, and he has appeared in The Railway Man (2013), Genius (2016), 1917 (2019), Supernova (2020) and Empire of Light (2022). He has also worked in television, including in The Staircase (2022), in which he played Michael Peterson, a man accused of murdering his wife, a role that brought him an Emmy nomination. He is known for choosing projects carefully, for working with directors he respects, and for a private life that he has kept largely out of the media, despite his fame.

Facts About Colin Firth

• He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The King’s Speech in 2011.
• He played Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
• He was nominated for an Oscar for A Single Man in 2010.
• He played Harry Hart in the Kingsman films.
• He was married to Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli from 1997 to 2019, and they have two sons together.

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