Enter the King

There’s nothing Colin Firth likes more than to talk. “I talk endlessly,” he says during a lunch that comfortably proves the point. Helena Bonham Carter, his co-star in The King’s Speech, has remarked, “The only reason I knew when we’d started filming is because he stopped talking.”

Yet Firth’s best work — and there’s much to admire among his 66 screen roles over 27 years — hinges on the drama of things left unsaid. Firth has given three turns as the taciturn Mr. Darcy: first in the BBC’s 1995 dramatization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and later as Darcy’s comic alter ego in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. He missed out on the Best Actor Oscar last year for A Single Man, in which he played a quietly grieving professor. Now he’s tipped to win for his portrayal of the stammering George VI, a figure literally unable to give voice to his feelings. Like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Firth finds himself celebrated as much for his silences as for the words that punctuate them.

(See Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth talk about their favorite performances.)

Blame it on his extraordinary face. He’s not extraordinarily handsome, though at 50, Firth easily retains a square-jawed plausibility as a romantic lead. Nor is he yet extraordinarily famous, though even before his latest clutch of awards he was nearing the degree of celebrity that simultaneously imprisons and empowers those who have it. His face, however, is exceptional in its ability to convey not only a broad palette of emotions but also the reflex, almost at a cellular level, to smother them. With wordless eloquence, Firth communicates the struggle between raw instinct and civilized restraint that defines a particular kind of Englishness.

And that is an irony that would torment many of the characters he plays. Like them, Firth is not what he seems to be. One wellspring of his talent is the outsider sensibility he brings to every part, including the most important of all: being Colin Firth.

(See TIME’s Oscar prediction for the Best Actor category.)

Putting On Accents
There’s a clue in the way he speaks the Queen’s English, with a purity that is more often found among wealthy expatriates, their accents and vocabularies preserved in the aspic of distance. Playing Darcy — Austen’s and Helen Fielding’s — solidified public perceptions of Firth as an uptight toff. He’d long before tried the role on for size in his first movie, Another Country, set in an elite private school. Firth made his debut in London’s West End in the play on which the film was based, as Guy Bennett, a defiantly gay schoolboy and, Firth says, “one of the most flamboyant characters I have ever seen onstage. If I had played him in the film, I probably would have been typecast very differently.” Instead Rupert Everett, who played Bennett in the original production, reprised the role for the 1984 film, and Firth was cast as the repressed Tommy Judd.

The schoolboys of Another Country have been born to privilege. Audiences tend to assume that Firth was too. In fact, he spent formative years outside England — and as an outsider. “It’s probably an identity I found for myself, this so-called quintessential Englishman,” he says.

(See the top 10 movie performances of 2010.)

Born in a small town in southern England in 1960, Firth soon found himself transplanted by his parents, both teachers raised in India as the children of missionaries. The family settled in Africa and then, after a spell back in the U.K., moved to Missouri. He was thrust into a St. Louis junior high school at 12 and began to learn the chameleon like skills that initially helped him blend in but would come to help him stand out.

Those skills came in handy at the English school that followed, where his schoolmates were “overwhelmingly working class,” he says. “I wouldn’t have survived in that school if I was well spoken.” He demonstrates the rustic-sounding burr that provided protective coloring. His current voice solidified at drama school and, with it, the beginning of assumptions about his Englishness. “It’s amazing how the stereotype persists. The likes of me have something to do with it,” he says ruefully. “But when I hear people talking about a typical Englishman, I wonder why they completely ignore Sid Vicious or John Lennon, who were far more flattering to the self-image of the boys I knew growing up. We pierced our ears and learned guitar. That’s what we aspired to. We didn’t think, We’ll grow up and put on a pin-striped suit.”

See the top 10 Oscar-nomination snubs.

See the 100 best movies of all time.

“It’s people a tiny bit from the outside, who aren’t completely easy in their English skin, who then communicate the unease of English people so brilliantly,” says Richard Curtis, who co-wrote both Bridget Jones movies. (Curtis, born in New Zealand and peripatetic in his youth, should know.) Despite their veneer of charm, Firthian romantic heroes, even comedic heroes, betray an inner darkness. “When we were filming Bridget, I was abroad, and they kept sending me the rushes. And I sent back a few messages saying, ‘Can Colin twinkle a bit more?'” says Curtis. “I thought his Darcy was a bit ferocious and unfriendly.” The director passed along the note, Curtis recalls, “and then Colin looked directly down the camera and said, ‘Someone tell Richard Curtis that is my f______ twinkle.’?” Curtis concedes that his leading man got it right. “If he’d stopped being tough, he wouldn’t have been left with a character.”

Firth laughs when reminded of the incident. “It is the most lethal, deadly note,” he says, unrepentant. “If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you send out frozen vibes into the world, it’s being told to twinkle.”

(See pictures of the 2011 Best Picture Oscar nominees.)

Inhabiting Outsiders
Twinkle is too feeble a verb to describe the vibrancy of Firth’s company when he’s talking about the things that interest him. Politics is one of his primary passions. Invited in December to guest-edit BBC’s flagship current-affairs radio show, Today, Firth had the show commission a study that discovered differences in the brain architecture of liberals and conservatives. “I wanted to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don’t agree with me,” he deadpanned.

With success came a growing sense of responsibility. “The thing is, if you have been given the privileges we have — if you have this many perks — surely you can help out,” Firth told the Times of London in 2007, explaining his backing for Eco Age, a green retailer and consultancy he helped found with his wife Livia Giuggioli, her brother and a family friend.

Giuggioli, a native of Italy, is the creative director of the business. A documentary maker, she was the driving force behind a polemical film, In Prison My Whole Life, about Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and death-row inmate since 1982. Firth executive-produced the film, and Marc Evans, who had worked with both Firth and Giuggioli, directed. Evans describes the couple as “naturally political, politically engaged,” with a relaxed hospitality that mixes actors, public intellectuals and activists around their table for pasta lunches. (The couple have homes in London and Italy; their two sons were born in Rome.) More recently Firth spearheaded a British adaptation of the U.S. popular-history phenomenon The People Speak. The film came out last year and showcases, Firth says proudly, “dissenters, rebels and visionaries from British history” — the kinds of outsiders with whom Firth instinctively identifies.

One historical figure with whom Firth felt little kinship was the hapless George VI. He remembers that as he prepared to star in his drama-school production of Hamlet, his acting coach advised him not to look to the Windsors for tips on how to play a royal. There’s a stolidity, a niceness, to Britain’s first family that is the antithesis of the Shakespearean idea of regality. Firth duly ignored them until he signed up to star in The King’s Speech. Then, with autodidactic fervor, he devoured histories of the period, developing an affection for its protagonists. The experience hasn’t blunted his republican impulses. Pushed by Piers Morgan on his CNN talk show to reveal his views on the institution of monarchy, Firth said, “I really like voting. It’s one of my favorite things.”

(See TIME’s review of The King’s Speech.)

That’s a dangerous admission, since any celebrity who ventures criticism of the royals risks the ire of a far more powerful institution: Britain’s notoriously abrasive tabloid press. Its columnists are liable to demand Firth’s head the moment he’s perceived as unpatriotic or too big for his boots. For the moment, Firth poses a grave problem for tabloid editors. Though his characters often lead double lives, he values his privacy but conceals little. “This [award] is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson,” he said, accepting a Golden Globe last month. In reality, no midlife crisis threatens. “I’m rather enjoying aging,” he says, and if he did get a motorbike, it would probably be a Moto Guzzi.

“My life is pretty boring from a photo-opportunity point of view,” he adds. “It would be very easy to catch me carrying a Sainsbury’s bag.” A few days later, the mass-market Daily Mail publishes a photo of Firth on his bicycle under the headline the king’s spokes. Sadly for Sainsbury’s marketing team, the plastic bag suspended from Firth’s handlebars bears the logo of a different store.

(Read “The King’s Speech Has a Royally Good Night at the BAFTAs.”)

The question for afirthionados is what Firth will do with his increased star power. He’s likely to use it to benefit causes close to his heart. But fame — or rather, the supercharged fame that has found him after decades of the common or garden variety — is unlikely to change his choices of movie projects. He’s grounded by his family and has a track record of interspersing bigger roles and films with art-house movies and quirky cameos. His next film, a production of John le Carré’s thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is an ensemble piece; his part is “more than a cameo,” he says, but definitely not a lead. Curtis says, “That lack of vanity, which means he risks things that are obscure, is also what makes him able to give such great performances, because he’s not proud.”

“I think the great joy for his friends is to see him enjoying this success with a sense of Colin, really,” says Evans. “He’s so Colin about it all. Which is to say he’s so graceful and ironic and yet heartfelt at the same time.” And never at a loss for words.

See the best movies of the decade.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.