Finally, an excuse for a gratuitous Colin Firth feature! In the second annual Regency Awards, held by the Jane Austen Center in Bath, England, Firth’s 1995 portrayal of Mr Darcy received more than half of all votes cast. Here is, therefore, a slightly gushing but hopefully informative post on the subject of the very best Darcy from a Pride and Prejudice dramatisation – officially!

The Lake

Firstly, we should begin with some vaguely academic justifications for the 1995 Pride and Prejudice team’s showing of Colin Firth swimming in his undies, taking a bath and indulging in a sweaty fencing session. According to literary critic Cheryl Nixon, these famous scenes symbolize the emotionally tortured Mr Darcy’s ‘[chastising] the flesh for its desires.’ That’ll do nicely! Here is the lake scene again for your drooling pleasure. Wait, I mean, here it is again for your studied observation and analysis.

Andrew Davies’ ‘fleshing out’ of Darcy’s character might have even been taken further had the writer had his way. “The idea was that Darcy would jump stark naked into the lake, as chaps did back then,” Davies said back in 2003. Firth apparently vetoed the idea, sticking to the performers’ golden rule: always leave them wanting more.

The Longing Looks

The second reason why Colin Firth’s role has remained so memorable is for the long smouldering looks that gather in intensity throughout the series. Another academic, Lisa Hopkins, argues that it is not Darcy in the abstract that we want to see (not sure about that, Lisa!) Rather, we want to look at him looking at Elizabeth, and at those images that remind him of her absence. We are all, it seems, craving to be craved with an intensity that real men seldom feel. Here are some screenshots to remind you!

The Serious Stuff; Colin Firth’s characterization of Mr Darcy

Colin Firth’s great achievement was to solve what many critics have considered the central inconsistency in Mr Darcy’s character. As Cheryl Nixon put it, Firth’s Darcy is ‘a brooding loner who can neither physically contain nor verbally express his emotional battles.’ The so-called inconsistency becomes a struggle in the core of his character which is played out in full for the viewer, rather than a problematic part of the story to be skipped over. The actor explained his approach to his first ball scene thusly:

‘I’m terribly shy – terribly uneasy in social situations anyway. This is not a place I’d normally go to, and I don’t know how to talk to these people. So I protect myself behind a veneer of snobbishness and rejection.’
Firth said that Darcy was guilty of ‘silliness’ in the form of a ‘foolish, superficial social snobbery.’ Given a sheltered and in most ways privileged upbringing, he inherited a series of assumptions about the world outside of his own small circle and, when confronted by Elizabeth, these assumptions begin to crumble. Firth agreed that Darcy is profoundly changed by his love of Elizabeth, but disagreed that the change is implausible or problematic. He was therefore able to play Darcy as the perfect romantic hero – well, at least according to voters in the Regency Awards.

References are from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Sourcebook, available from Amazon.

Your drooling friend,
Lizzy