The family Colin Firth left behind: How he will always be in debt to the reclusive beauty who bore his first son
By Alison Boshoff
Last updated at 11:33 PM on 21st January 2011 Helena Bonham-Carter is convinced her co-star Colin Firth will win this year’s Oscar for Best Actor. Even the bookies have him as the odds-on red-hot favourite to scoop the honour for his performance as George VI in The King’s Speech. It would be a career-crowning moment for 50-year-old Firth, who is expected to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles with his wife Livia Giuggioli, a striking Italian brunette who is the mother of their two children, Luca and Matteo. Theirs is a sweet love story. He fell in love with Livia ‘at first sight’ on the set of the TV dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo 15 years ago. He was the star and she a production assistant.
Success: Colin Firth holds his award for best actor in a motion picture drama for 'The King's Speech' at the Golden Globe Awards earlier this week
But the actor’s new-found acclaim will also be celebrated by another woman. Now living a life of sometimes eccentric seclusion in rural -Canada, this is the love that Colin Firth left behind as he rose to fame.
Former actress Meg Tilly, also 50, was for five years Firth’s partner, and although they never married, both thought they were the love of each other’s lives. The pair met in 1989, and for a long time they lived together in her long cabin, with no television, deep in the woods of British Columbia. At the time, Meg was one of the more intoxicating big-screen beauties, Oscar-nominated for her role in the film Agnes Of God, for which she won a Golden Globe. Today she shuns the limelight, preferring to bake pies and write books. Her hair is streaked with grey, and she often complains that she is stouter than she would like to be. Her husband, Don Calame, is a genial but unglamorous type who writes fiction for adolescents. She hardly ever talks about Firth, apart from to say that they ‘remain friends’. Indeed, few of her neighbours have any idea of their connection. Family affair: Actress Meg Tilly in the 1983 film The Big Chill before she met Colin Firth six years later in 1989 and lived in a log cabin in British Columbia But they are connected for life through their son Will, now a young man of 21. On her online blog, Tilly writes of her joy at Firth’s success this week at the Golden Globes. ‘Our happy hats off to a member of the family,’ she says. ‘We are so pleased for you! Hearty jigs are being danced. Tonight, we shall all lift a glass of wine to toast your continued success! Jubilant hugs and kisses from all of us. Onward and upward!’ So, what is the truth about the woman who once captivated Colin Firth? And why did he walk away from his infant son, and from the love of this intense, delicate-featured woman? Meg Tilly’s many friends in her small fishing village just north of Vancouver are very protective of her. Her life before Firth, though, was disturbing and tough. She grew up poor in rural Canada — so poor that she remembers eating a squirrel, finding it frustratingly bony. Once, when desperate for food, she even cooked rattlesnake. As a young teenager, she was beaten and sexually abused by her stepfather and other men, and has recalled hiding on the roof of their house, and being sent to live for days in a kennel outside for ‘bad behaviour’. These are experiences she has lately confronted to write two extremely graphic novels about paedophiles. An early career as a ballerina was ruined by a serious back injury after a dance partner dropped her, so she went on to try acting. On the set of her first film, Tex, she met producer Tim Zinnemann (son of High Noon director Fred), with whom she started a romance. -Zinnemann proposed marriage after Tilly was cast in the film Amadeus, as he didn’t want her to go to Czechoslovakia to film without making the commitment to him. At the time, she was 21 and he was 40. Though the Amadeus role fell through, more -followed: alongside Glenn Close and Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill and a starring role in Agnes Of God with Jane Fonda. After her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Tilly was hailed as one of Hollywood’s most exciting talents. She and Zinnemann had two children, Emily and David, and she retreated from acting to focus on her marriage. But it soon foundered partly, she has said, because she was just too young. First child: Colin with his son from his relationship with Meg, 21-year-old Will, (left) at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 At this point, enter Colin Firth. Six months after the collapse of her marriage, Tilly returned to acting in Valmont — a period drama based on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. During filming, she captivated her 29-year-old co-star, a nice boy from Hampshire. ‘It is a very special movie for me,’ he said at the time. ‘I was probably in love with Meg from the moment I met her, but it took her a while to be convinced. ‘I don’t think I consciously wooed her. But we had scenes of passion together, and we filmed in Paris and Bordeaux — dangerous places in which to film with a beautiful woman.’ Firth decided his future lay with Tilly and they lived in her home in Los Angeles at first before moving to a home outside Vancouver. She wanted to raise her children somewhere ‘normal’. She found a log house on five acres of land around an hour north of the city, near Maple Ridge. ‘It was in thick woods on the side of a mountain, and it felt like there might be no one for miles and miles,’ said Firth. A writer who interviewed Tilly ‘couldn’t believe quite how wild it was’. Their son Will was born in 1990, and although Firth was ‘engulfed’ by the experience, the pair made a pact not to have any more children, to avoid damaging Tilly’s career. But as it worked out, for two years neither of them acted. Firth took ‘odd jobs as a carpenter and so on’ to keep their finances ticking over. Eventually, when Will was two, he decided to return to the UK in order to use London as a base for making movies and doing theatre. During non-work periods, he would return to family life in Vancouver. However, the strain was considerable. Firth’s sister Kate said: ‘He absolutely adores Will, but he had to choose between family life in an isolated log cabin, and working. Colin’s a city person who needs his friends — people he’s been close to since he was at school.’ Star: Colin poses with current wife, Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli during the unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame earlier this month It took another year before a decisive split came. ‘We just couldn’t make it work,’ Tilly said, years later, ‘with him having to live in England for his career, and me here. ‘There was too much separation. For a marriage to work, it requires commitment and a lot of work.’ Friends say that she was ‘crushed’ and ‘blindsided’ when Firth told her he was moving out for good. Firth’s friends and family say that he, too, was painfully affected by the split. Sister Kate says that although her brother saves his tears for acting — he has admitted to finding it impossible to cry in his personal life — he was extremely troubled. Separating from Will was, Firth says, the most painful moment of his life, even though he knew that he would see the boy again. He took care to stay in touch with Will and Tilly’s other children, with visits to Canada and frequent phone calls. Every bedtime, he would call Will and his half-siblings to read them a bedtime story. And barely a year after the split with Tilly, Firth found the success he had been seeking. He landed the role of Mr Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, and with it came a year-long romance with his co-star Jennifer Ehle (who played Elizabeth Bennett). But by the time the drama was televised in 1995, he and Jennifer had split up. Firth was in South America filming Nostromo, where he met Livia. They were married on a hillside in Tuscany in 1997 and settled in his small flat in Hackney before moving to a grander house in Barnsbury, North London, where they had children Luca and Matteo. There’s no doubting that Firth loves having a stable family life. Since settling down with Livia, his career has gone from strength to strength. Colin Firth in hit film The King's speech in which he plays George VI as he struggles to overcome a stammer There were hit British films Bridget Jones, Mamma Mia and Fever Pitch. And after being cast by fashion designer turned director Tom Ford in his film A Single Man, Firth has now been elevated to the status of international film star. Meanwhile, back in Canada, his son Will passed through the education system, while Tilly decided to retire from acting and concentrate on a career as a writer. Her first novel, Singing Songs, caused quite a stir because of its subject matter — sexual abuse within a family — and she was forced to deny the story was about her. ‘I was terrified somebody would find out the truth,’ she admitted later, ‘so I figured out ways to blur the edges. I changed sexes, birth order — one child taken away here and added there. At that point, only one family member was speaking to me.’ The following year she married John Calley, a film executive 30 years her senior. They relocated to LA, where he ran Sony Pictures and she continued to write. But she and Calley divorced in 2002. She returned to Canada and wrote Gemma, a novel about a girl abducted by a paedophile. It was only then that she felt able to tell the truth about the harrowing -subject matter of her books. She told a Canadian paper: ‘When you are able to step forward, you see it’s not your dirty secret: it’s theirs.’ She continues to write, for hours every day, often in longhand, and shows husband Don her work as she goes along. Recently, her son from her first marriage got married and Will moved to London. She writes in her blog about sobbing at the airport once he was safely out of view. Will looks just like Colin Firth — tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of dark wavy hair. He is -quietly training to be an actor, like his father and mother. Firth says that Will gets on beautifully with his much younger half-siblings, who are nine and seven. ‘With my younger sons, the relationship with Will has worked out very well. It’s a huge age gap — they probably see him as an uncle.’ Firth doesn’t generally bring Will along on his trips for the awards season. -Perhaps he is seeking to shield him from the weight of attention which will attend his launch into the profession. Meanwhile, Meg Tilly has recently been tempted out of retirement to play a minor role in three episodes of the sci-fi TV drama Caprica — in part because it’s filmed in Vancouver, not far from her home. Who knows whether she will return full-time to the profession; but with her ex-lover at the very peak of his professional powers, you couldn’t blame her for feeling just a little intimidated.
|
<\/u><\/a> 
<\/u><\/a> 
- участник сейчас на форуме
- участник вне форума