Вот перевод одной статьи, обнаруженной Romi конечно же - кто б сомневался!

Местами сократила. Старалась покороче, то есть.

Оригинал здесь:
Скрытый текст

LOS ANGELES JUNE 2008
It's a drizzly morning in Santa Monica. Worse, a car nearly clips British actor Colin Firth as we cross the steep on ramp that leads down to PCH. Not the most auspicious start to an interview But Firth in a display of sangfroid worthy of types he frequently portrays onscreen—we might call them reserved he has described them as quintessentially repressed —never breaks his stride. His conversation doesn't skip a beat either. "It's nice to (a) walk in this city and (b) walk in it when it's raining." Firth, 47, says Mark Darcy the lawyer he plays in the Bridget Jones films couldn't have put it more judiciously.
For our walk from his hotel Casa del Mar to Palisades Park Firth has exchanged the modish bomber jacket he was wearing when we met for a weather appropriate windbreaker. He still looks surprisingly boyish. Where his characters are ponderous stuffed shirt. Although he lives in London he clearly has a soft spot for Los Angeles. He describes the thrill of his first adult visit to the city during which he stayed at the Tropicana Motel then home to Tom Waits and the house he later rented in the wilds of Malibu. But the irony Britons often acquire along with their accents is never far away. "One of the things I do believe: absolutely unique in this town is what they call "hiking"," he says. "You know, the morning walk up the hill somewhere I was invited on one a couple of years ago. I found it an eccentric suggestion, but then I ran into everyone I knew".
His purpose this trip involves another local eccentricity motion capture. That's the computer aided phenomenon by which live actors become animated enhancements of themselves. Firth will be working with Robert Zemeckis (the director whose Beowulf turned Angelina Jolie into a slinky seven foot monster) on a remake of A Christmas Carol. The film features Jim Carrey in multiple roles as Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmases present past and future. With Carrey snapping up all those parts whom does Firth play? "I'm Fred", he says. Pressed, he describes Fred as the cheerful nephew. "He's the guy, who won't give up on his uncle. Nobody seems to remember him and I doubt I'll do anything to change that".
He may be too modest Jane Austen was not considered a huge box office draw until Firth's performance as the snobbish, but meltable Mr Darcy in A&E's l995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice made him a transatlantic heartthrob. (The same role—uptight but upright—was the basis of his character in Bridget Jones.) This spring he appeared in Then She Found Me (Helen Hunt's directional debut) as the fiery single father love interest of Hunt an adoptee determined to have her own child (That agenda is not entirely strengthened by encountering her birth mother a motormouthed talk show host played by Bette Midler) Firth gets his shot at portraying a conflicted middle aged child in When Did You Lost See Your Father? opening this month. Based on the prizewinning memoir by British author Blake Morrison the film directed by Anand Tucker, examines a son's ambivalent relationship with a dying but still larger than life parent. Firth's own mother and father are alive and he speaks of them affectionately, but he says the film roused powerful emotions. Later this summer he'll star in the movie adaptation of the musical Momma Mia alongside Meryl Streep, followed by The Accidental Husband with Uma Thurman.
We have reached the Broadway end of the palm-shaded park, site of our destina¬tion, the Camera Obscura. Firth looks faintly alarmed. Most tourist hot spots don't in¬volve dodging a clutch of aluminum walkers in a busy senior center. A century ago when these optical devices were popular seaside attractions, this camera—essentially a room with a periscope in its ceiling—was housed in its own cottage in the park overlooking the pier. Today the only entrance is through the center's lunchroom and up a flight of stairs. The camera is no place for the claus¬trophobic. In the darkened room nothing is visible except a huge, waist-high, seemingly floating image of the world outside—palms, sand, Ocean Avenue motels.
In his role as the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earning. Firth dem¬onstrated a box-size version of a camera ob¬scura to a dazzled Scarlett Johansson. The actor, still in his diffident mode, claims his research "has really all gone out of my mind". He then proceeds to explain that the movie device was probably misnamed, that it was based on a machine invented by a friend of the painters, that Vermeer didn't copy the image projected by the lenses but used it as an instrument of perspective, that the image we are seeing here is reversed, and that lenses, hence photography, make people look closer than they are. He's been pacing as he talks, unfazed by the dark, and has dis¬covered the captain's wheel that swings the rooftop periscope in a 360-degree arc. One twist, and the world at our waists is spinning. "That’s more exciting," he says.
Firth's success in portraying archetypal Englishmen may come in part from his own less than insular perspective. He's seen them from both sides. His father is a history pro¬fessor whose specialty is the U.S. civil rights movement. His mother, a missionary's daughter, grew up in India and Iowa, while his own childhood included stints in Nigeria and St. Louis. The latter, he says as we exit the senior center and head toward the beach, coincided with the Watergate hearings. "Not the most exciting experience" for an adoles¬cent, he says, but thanks to his father "I got quite fascinated in the process and the way this country has always been prepared to ar¬raign its leaders of they see something that's not right." There's an uncomfortable pause. "Well," he says "That's something they're go¬ing to have to get hack again."
At home in London Firth practices the engagement he preaches. He and his wife documentary filmmaker Livia Giuggioli, recently opened Eco, a West End shop dedicated to fair trade products and energy-efficient strategies. They also produced the film In Prison My Whole Life, about former Black Panther Mummia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia policeman. "What interested me, Firth says, speaking of the film's writer, William Francome, "was this young man's desperation to see if he could answer some questions about the political climate that surrounds a case like that. So many voices we hear from are so embedded in a position on either side that it's very difficult to get any clarity beyond the passion and the emotion that the subject raises. That doesn’t give us [as Britons] any authority; it just gives us a different view." Firth's upbringing was not all an outsider's. As a child in England he lived in leafy Hampshire, "just down the road" from Jane Austen's former residence at Chawton. Although he claimed earlier in the day to have a "numb spot" where Aus¬ten is concerned, walking has thawed him on the subject—as the novelist herself might have predicted. "They showed what she wrote on," Firth says, "and it's a little round lamp stand. I mean she had bits of paper, and she sat in a small armchair, presumably leaning slightly to the left and scribbling " He talks faster, imagining the scene. "In some ways it's a test of her in¬tegrity. She didn't write what she didn't know. There isn't a single conversation between two men alone in a room in her entire oeuvre."
The expertise that comes from insider knowledge has its charms in the movie business, too For Firth, a highlight of making Then She Found Me was working with a director who is also an actor, "I don't think anyone understands the job unless they've done it, who knows what the traps are that actors get themselves into," Firth says. An actor knows where the bullshit is—'That's a little mask you're in, that's an insecurity you're displaying.'"
Firth has been reading Ask the Dust, John Fante's novel of 1930s L. A. He was struck by the desperation of Fante's writers and actors and, he says, "the massive expectations to succeed. There's no point in even telling people back home about any disil¬lusionment—they've seen the pictures, they've seen the sunshine. As if on cue, the clouds thin Casa del Mar is just ahead, its stately facade rising above the narrow street like an image from a noir film. "It's amazing how much history there is in such a short space of time in a place like this," Firth says- He's not just referring to this ambience-drenched block. "I could live on American culture alone," he says. "I mean I'd miss an awful lot of other things, hut just let me have blues and jazz and American movies and American literature, I wouldn't consider myself impoverished " The accent may be English, but the enthusiasm is al¬most Californian. For Firth that's proved to be the best of both worlds.

LOS ANGELES JUNE 2008

Моросящее утро в Санта-Монике. И о ужас – на нашем пути на крутом спуске машина почти задевает британского актера Колина Ферта. Не лучшее начало для интервью. Но Ферт невозмутим – словно изображает типичного брита на экране – сдержан и весь в себе, и даже с шага не сбился. И даже в разговоре – «Приятно в дождь гулять по этому городу». Его Марк Дарси не мог бы высказаться более рассудительно.

Сменив пиджак на ветровку, он выглядит сущим мальчишкой. Хотя он живет в Лондоне, к Лос-Анжелесу явно неравнодушен. Но избавиться от ироничности, как и от акцента, британец не способен. Описывая давние свои визиты и посещения города, он замечает: «в одном я убедился -город придумал неповторимый, особенный вид прогулок – знаете, пару лет назад меня пригласили на утреннюю прогулку на холм. Я воспринял это как некое чудачество, но я там встретил буквально всех своих знакомых».

Его приезд имеет и другой аспект с использованием такого дива в киноделе, как превращение актера в гиганта на экране. Ферт работает с Земекисом в ремейке - A Christmas Carol.
И кого играет здесь Колин?
- Я Фред, тот самый, который не предаст своего дядю. Никто не помнит этого человека – думаю, я не стану разрушать эту традицию.

Пусть себе скромничает, но кассу Джейн Остен теперь делает благодаря его воплощению Дарси – а его роль сделала звездой по обе стороны Атлантики. Сейчас выходят его фильмы Then She Found Me и When Did You Lost See Your Father?, где он играет сына, переживающего смерть отца. Его родители живы и он говорит о них с нежностью. Потом выходит на экраны мюзикл Mаmma Mia и фильм The Accidental Husband.

Тем временем они оказались у цели – это Camera Obscura. Ферт немного обеспокоен – темное замкнутое сооружение с неясными миражами-изображениями окрестных пальм, пляжей и мотелей может вызвать клаустрофобию. А ведь он видел ее уменьшенную копию на съемках Girl with a Pearl Earning. Ферт не расположен сейчас к научным исследованиям, но поясняет, что художник не зарисовывал изображение, а лишь изучал перспективу – ведь картинка перевернута. Он прохаживается, невзирая на темноту, замечает штурвал – поворачивает его и призрачный мир переворачивается следом.
- Так куда интереснее, - замечает он.

Ферт так убедителен в ролях типичных британцев может потому, что его личность гораздо шире. Отец его – профессор истории, специалист по движению за гражданские права в США. Мать – дочь миссионеров, росла в Индии, в детстве Колин жил и в Нигерии, и в Сент-Луисе – как раз во времена Уотергейта.
«Не слишком вдохновляющее дело для юношей, но благодаря отцу я увлекся процессом и тем, как ваша страна умеет поставить на место зарвавшихся лидеров». Нарушив неловкую паузу, добавляет, «ну, урок в этом же духе не мешало бы повторить».

Дома семейство Фертов недавно открыло магазин «Эко»; они сделали фильм о бывшем лидере Черных Пантер Муммии Абу-Джамале In Prison My Whole Life.
Ферта поразило то, как такому молодому человеку, автору фильма Уильяму Франкому, хотелось получить ответы на вопросы, возникающие в подобных случаях. Столь противоречивые аргументы с обеих сторон, что трудно получить ясность, не затуманенную бурно кипящими вокруг страстями. Будучи британцами, мы не беремся судить, мы просто пытаемся выработать иной взгляд.

Ферты вполне респектабельны, и в Англии Колин рос в зеленом Хемпшире, лишь немного дальше по дороге от Чотона, жилища Джейн Остен. Вопреки заявленной ранее нечувствительности к Остен, он кажется подобрел к ней после прогулки – как предположила бы сама писательница.
«Там можно посмотреть место, где она писала, и маленькую круглую лампу. Сидела в маленьком кресле, склонившись набок немного перед листом бумаги», он ускоряет шаг, поддавшись воображению, «это своего рода тест на ее честность. Она не писала о том, чего не знала. Нет в ее романах ни одной сцены в комнате между двумя мужчинами, наедине».

Свой собственный опыт важен и в кинобизнесе, Ферт знает это, говоря о съемках фильма Then She Found Me режиссером-актрисой. «Не думаю, что можно понимать дело, если не делал этого сам», говорит Ферт, «только актер знает, что это за дерьмо – эта маска на твоем лице, она прикрывает твою неуверенность».

Ферт сейчас читает роман о Лос-Анжелесе 30-х Джона Фанте «Спроси у пыли». Его поразила «отчаянная жажда успеха», как он называет это, у его писателей и актеров. И бесполезно убеждать у себя на родине в разочарованиях – они ведь видят и картины, и весь этот блеск. «Удивительно, сколько событий в одном лишь месте, и в такой короткий срок. Я бы смог вполне удовлетвориться одной лишь американской культурой. Я имею в виду, мне бы не хватало много, конечно, но если мне оставить джаз, блюз, американское кино и литературу – я не почувствую себя обделенным».

Акцент британский, но энтузиазм вполне калифорнийский.
Значит, для Ферта этот оказался лучшим из двух миров.

Нет, как вам это? Мне почему-то показалось, что я читаю американский "Караван истории"!