Whatever the opposite of a mid-life crisis is, Colin Firth is having one. To begin with, he features in this season's big Hollywood offering - a 3D computer-animated version of Charles Dickens' perennial classic
A Christmas Carol. If that's something of a first for Firth, so was his recent award at the Venice Film Festival, when he was voted best actor for his work in
A Single Man, the directorial debut of former fashion designer Tom Ford. Amid whispers of an Oscar nomination (which would be another first), all of a sudden a career that's been bubbling away nicely for 25 years looks set to boil over.
Firth is playing down all the attention. "There have been times when I've worked back-to-back on films and no one notices them," he says, "and then I'll do one film and people will say, 'You're back! Where have you been?'"
It's not that Firth has never been popular: you only had to witness the hysteria with which he was received during the Venice press conference for A Single Man (doubtless helped by the fact that he delivered his answers in fluent Italian). It's just that Firth has spent most of the past 14 years trying to shake off the role of Mr Darcy, who he played in the BBC's 1995 take on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice.
Since then, he has scored roles in two Oscar-winning films, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. But whether it's playing aptly named lover Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary or recreating Pride's infamous lake dip by emerging from a pond in a sopping white shirt in the recent St Trinian's reboot, Firth has been handcuffed to Mr Darcy.
Yet he denies that whenever he's done something different - from bereaved husbands haunted by grief in both Trauma and this year's Genova to his hedonistic 1950s entertainer in erotic thriller Where the Truth Lies - it's been merely to escape the role.
"I'm just going with what appeals to me on my own terms," he says.
Perhaps this is why he's found himself in A Christmas Carol, his first effects-driven blockbuster.
"It's one of them," he replies. "It's one of my favourite stories and I was extremely curious about the technique."
The technique in question is motion-capture, whereby actors are covered in sensors and their movements recorded and animated. Director Robert Zemeckis is already steeped in such technology, having employed it in his 2007 version of the epic poem Beowulf.
"It's like going back to your childhood and just playing in the playground," says Firth of the experience. "But I did want to know how they did it, and I'm none the wiser."
You might say the same about Firth's role in the film. No, he's not Scrooge, or the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present or Future (greedy old Jim Carrey is playing all four, and Gary Oldman is Scrooge's late business partner Jacob Marley, his beleaguered employee Bob Cratchit and the crippled Tiny Tim). Nope, Firth plays Fred - the mistreated nephew to Scrooge's late sister.
"I probably wouldn't have chosen to play Fred," Firth says. "I probably would've liked to play Scrooge and all the ghosts or something."
It doesn't help that, unlike Carrey and Oldman, who look vastly different from their real selves, Firth does not. "You've got this extraordinary creation of Scrooge, and then this amazing, bizarre Jacob Marley floating around, and then Colin Firth is in the middle of it all. It's a bit odd."
At least Firth was able to make a film for his two sons - eight-year-old Luca and six-year-old Mateo - although he's unsure how they'll react. "Seeing me looking like that will probably give them nightmares," says the actor, who also has an 18-year-old son, William Joseph, from a previous relationship with actress Meg Tilly.
Caring for his clan is now his main motivation to work. "The only reasons I worry about the next job are for the family now because I've got dependents," he says. "I'm ambivalent now about whether I want to work or not. I just want to be paid."
A peek into his background, however, gives no indication that money worries have ever been a problem for Firth. Born in Hampshire, he came from an academic family. His father David was a history don at Winchester University College and his mother Shirley a comparative religions lecturer at the Open University.
They had met when they were five and three respectively, both children of Methodist missionaries. Firth spent his early years in Nigeria before returning to Britain when he was five to attend schools in Bath and Essex. However, he was not a fan of learning.
"I was a schoolboy and schoolboys don't like school. I just didn't like it. I couldn't wait untilthe bell rang."
The oldest of three - his sister Kate went on to become a voice coach, his brother Jonathan an actor - Firth calls his entry into his profession "a path of less resistance for me". Although he started acting classes when he was young, his father steered him towards university - only for Firth to drop out.
"It wasn't that I was rebelling. I just wasn't proving myself to be capable. I couldn't keep track," he says. "I was being distracted by all sorts of other things. For some reason, I was not disciplined enough for it."
Instead, he veered off towards acting, studying at the Drama Centre in London's Chalk Farm. His first professional role was as Bennet in the West End production of Another Country, which led him to being cast as Tommy Judd in the 1984 film version.
A quarter of a century on, and Firth has seen his career through plenty of peaks and troughs.
"All you can do is survive," he says. "Whenever I see anybody write about an actor who's been around for a while, they always talk about this choppy trajectory, the up times, the down times - the time when it all went horribly wrong, the comebacks, the disappearances - but I think that's true of almost everybody."
Nevertheless, as he prepares to celebrate his 50th birthday next year, even he has to concede that his career is hitting an all-time high.
He will soon be on the screen in small-town thriller Main Street, the last script ever to be written by Pulitzer-winning dramatist Horton Foote.
And then there's his Venice-winning A Single Man, in which he plays a British literature professor struggling with the death of his male lover in 60s Los Angeles. Firth claims he had no qualms about working with a fashionista who had never directed a film before.
"I had no doubt at all. He was one of the better directors I've ever worked with," he says. "It was a wonderful experience."
It also seems like a vital one: it's the moment that Firth finally buried Mr Darcy.
A Christmas Carol opens on Nov 19
