Colin Firth

Colin Firth spent the late 1980s as one of a crop of young British actors handed period leads: A Month in the Country (1987), the television film Tumbledown (1988), Milos Forman's Valmont (1989). Then came the 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and Mr Darcy attached itself to him permanently. He has been polite about that for thirty years while quietly demonstrating how narrow a reading of him it is.

What he actually plays is repression as an event. His characters are men holding something down, and the interest lives in the strain rather than the release: the stammering monarch of The King's Speech (2010), which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, the closeted professor of A Single Man (2009), which brought his first nomination, the smooth Circus insider of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, whose charm is exactly the thing to keep watching. Even Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones films, played from 2001 to 2025, is funny because of everything the man cannot say out loud.

He is also an unusually willing sport. Mamma Mia! required him to sing ABBA and Kingsman: The Secret Service required him to become an action star in his fifties, and he did both without visible embarrassment. He was appointed CBE in 2011 for services to drama and named in Time magazine's hundred most influential people the same year. Recent work leans towards decent men inside difficult institutions, from Operation Mincemeat to Empire of Light, and it suits him better than the romantic leads ever did.