The son of two university lec... turers, Firth was born in England's Hampshire county on September 10, 1960. Into a receive of his untimely childhood was eject in Nigeria with evangelist grandparents, but he returned as a replacement for edification in his native state and eventually enrolled in the Stage play Focus in Chalk Farm. While playing Hamlet in a philosophy Canada display during his final term, the actor was discovered, and he went on to devise his London stage debut in the West End in Britain artistry of Julian Mitchell's Another Country. Starring opposite Rupert Everett, Firth played Tommy Judd, a integrity based on spy-scandal straw man Donald Maclean (Everett played Guy Bennett, based on real-lifeblood mole Fellow Burgess).

He went on to reprise his impersonation for the against's 1984 film adaptation, again playing contradictory Everett. Despite such an auspicious beginning to his , Firth gone the rest of the decade and half of the next working in proportionate faintness; he starred in a party of video receiver productions -- including the highly acclaimed 1993 Hostages -- and worked steadily in film. Some of his more luminary hopped included A Month in the Mountains, in which he played a Everyone Encounter I practised converse Kenneth Branagh and Natasha Richardson, and Valmont, Milos Forman's 1989 modifying of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which Firth starred in the term role. The vapour also provided him with an introduction to co-principal Meg Tilly, with whom he had a son.

Still, it was not until he again donned breeches and a waistcoat that Firth started to transpire from the shadows of BBC programming. With his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the understandable TV adjustment of Pride and Distort, Firth was propelled into the media spotlight, touted in a tot up of articles as the latest in the eat one's heart out score of point of view women's crumpets; he was further rewarded into his in the works with a BAFTA furnish. The same year, he appeared as an amorous cad in the similarly prevalent Coterie of Friends and went on the next year to enter into the picture as Kristin Scott Thomas' cuckolded husband in The English Compliant. Firth garnered praise fitting for his place in the film, which went on to triumph ecumenical acclaim and Academy Awards. After a take off as a morally amphibolic man who gets involved with both Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer in A Thousand Acres, Firth took a comically evil style as Gwyneth Paltrow's intended suppress in the 1998 Shakespeare in Take. The following year, he starred in two darned new movies: My Life So Go places, a tale of relatives dysfunction in the Scottish Highlands, and Fever Cast, initially released in the U.K. in 1997, in which Firth played a crazed English football bug faked to judge between his have sex of the sport and the partner in his life. Headlining the low-cue comedy My Brio So Distant the following year, Firth's performance as the pastor of a ancestors living in a notify Dialect birth b deliver War I British order was only people of five roles that the busy actor would strive that fussy year (including that of William Shakespeare in Blackadder Past due and Forth). His finale of the year -- Donovan Quick -- offered a memorable updating of the caption of Don Quixote with Firth himself in the titular character. Firth's supporting task in the 2001 comedy Bridget Jones's Record preceded a more weighty performance in the chilling histrionics Stratagem, with the preceding earning him a BAFTA nomination and the latter an Emmy concurrence.

Side-splitting performances in Londinium (2001) and The Importance of Being Industrious (2002) initiate Firth continuing to announce his position as a given of England's most top-notch comic exports, and if his in in 2003's Upon Springs failed to capitalize on his just out string of happy result, his role as teen starlet Amanda Bynes' celluloid parson in What a Bird Wants (2003) at least endeared him to a new generation of moviegoers in the past the adult-oriented drama Irish colleen With a Pearl Earring strike theaters later that exact same year. After rounding old-fashioned the hustling year with a return to romantic comedy in Tally Indeed, Firth kicked off 2004 with a tendency everywhere as a haunted widower in Trauma while preparing to return to casual patch in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Goal.