Photos and excerpts from the May 1997 issue

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Point to a photo above and click to see an enlargement. Excerpts from the interview are below.

Excerpts from the article by Jasper Rees:
Probe a little further, though, and it becomes clear that Firth has probably never shaved so close to his own bone [in playing Paul Ashworth in Fever Pitch]. 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. Photo to right is from Film Review Magazine, May 1997

JR: Back in your childhood, did you always feel rootless?
CF: 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.

Colin Firth on Fever Pitch: "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."