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Colin Firth’s ‘Ginger’ Hair Almost Ruined His Acting Career

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 03:15 PST, Oct 17, 2016

Colin Firth almost didn’t get the leading role that launched his acting career because he was “too ginger,” according to the Guardian. The 56-year-old actor almost missed out on portraying Mr. Darcy in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice.

Colin Firth, who won an Academy Award for his iconic role in The King’s Speech in 2010, launched his acting career by playing the leading part in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

But as it turns out, creators didn’t want to cast Colin Firth because his hair was “too ginger,” as revealed by screenwriter Andrew Davies. Although BBC producer Sue Birtwistle backed Firth, who was 30-years-old at the time, Davies wanted the actor to darken his hair before getting the part.

During a Conversation event at the BFI to celebrate Davies’ 80th birthday, the screenwriter revealed that he had a problem with casting Colin Firth because the actor didn’t have “those dark curls back then.”

“Sue [Birtwistle] was absolutely convinced that he would be wonderful, but we said he had to go dark and he did go dark. He’s stayed dark ever since so he must have liked it.”

Davis also added that “underneath all that” coloring and dyes, Colin Firth is “sort of fairly ginger.” But those dark curls also allowed Firth to get his iconic role of the heartthrob Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones films, according to the New York Mag.

And in the latest installment, Bridget Jones’s Baby, Colin Firth and his brilliant performance were the reason why thousands of viewers were moved to tears after the film. In the new film directed by Sharon Maguire, Bridget, played by Renée Zellweger, finds herself pregnant.

But it wouldn’t be such big news if Bridget didn’t have two one-night-stands with two different men, a charismatic dating guru Jack Quant, played by Patrick Dempsey, and her former lover Mark Darcy, portrayed by Colin Firth.

And so Bridget has a mission to find out which man is the father, so she messes around with both of them and ends up falling for both in the process. Many viewers noted that with Bridget Jones’s Baby, Zellweger reestablished herself as one of the best comic actresses of this generation.

But it wasn’t Zellweger, nor was it Patrick Dempsey and his American charisma, that moved the audience to tears. It was Colin Firth and his heart-wrenching performance that truly allowed the audience to feel the entire movie.

Colin Firth has played this easy-to-fall-in-love-with type of character ever since his breakthrough role of Mr. Darcy in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice. And if the audience didn’t fall in love with his characters, like they did in Bridget Jones’s Baby, Love Actually, and Magic in the Moonlight, they felt empathy for his character in The King’s Speech.

And even though Colin Firth played a rather uptight and isolated-from-the-world character in the original Bridget Jones’s Diary, his performance still tugged the heartstrings. That’s because, by the end of the film, his character opened his heart in order for his relationship with Bridget to work out.

In other news, the Lincoln Center Theater wants Colin Firth to star in a revival of My Fair Lady, according to the New York Post. With Bartlett Sher attached to the project as the director, the last Broadway production was over 20 years ago.

So Lincoln Center Theater is reviving the classical musical and wants to bring Colin Firth on board to replace Richard Chamberlain, who played Henry Higgins in the last Broadway production of My Fair Lady in 1994.

It’s as yet unclear whether Colin Firth has agreed to star in the revival of My Fair Lady.

[Featured Image by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images]

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