Englishman Colin Firth on becoming a Scots hero

THE SCOTSMAN
Monday 30th December 2013
by SIOBHAN SYNNOT


http://kitharingtonrph.tumblr.com/post/30289735453/colin-firth-gif-hunt

Oscar clout has enabled Colin Firth to make his pet project, a harrowing testament to human cruelty that is also a tribute to a remarkable Scot

Can an Oscar change your life? Or just hang a burden of expectation around the neck that can induce paralysis? Renée Zellweger, Halle Berry and Adrien Brody never made it back to the A-list after their wins. Hilary Swank has two awards, which is also the number of films most people can name that star Hilary Swank.

Two years ago, when Colin Firth held the statuette in both hands for The King’s Speech, he fretted, “I have a feeling my career has just peaked,” then promised the academy a night of celebratory bad dancing. It took a little longer for the film industry to respond: “One day I had three bad scripts on my desk,” he says, “the next day I had 300.”

Firth’s Oscar has had a nomadic existence since 2011, travelling around the houses of friends and family, or off to his sons’ school for show and tell sessions, where anyone can pose with it. It’s not yet been used as a door stop, but “it definitely opens doors. There are two ways of dealing with such an immense piece of good fortune. One is to feel pressure and say you have to do everything right – and you won’t. Or you can say ‘I’ve got that in the bag, I can do what I want,’ and if you want to reach somebody to get the collaboration on something, then they’ll talk to you.”

The Railway Man is the first beneficiary of Firth’s new clout. Based on Eric Lomax’s memoir of being forced to work on the Burma-Thailand train line known as the Railway of Death, it is a war drama wrapped in a love story. Firth has wanted to make this film for years, but the money only arrived when he received his golden gong.

Firth films usually centre on earnest men who are a little inhibited and awkward about revealing passion. Eric Lomax was different. For a start, he was always openly enthusiastic about his love for trains. The infatuation began when Lomax was growing up in Edinburgh towards the end of the golden age of steam. He loved their precision, their romance and their craft, but later the enthusiasm became bitterly ironic when he was conscripted to help build the jungle railway made famous in the film The Bridge On The River Kwai.

As a signals officer in Singapore, Lomax was just 23 when the Japanese overran that city and made him a prisoner of war. Lomax survived, but only just. Malnutrition, disease, heat and cruelty killed more than 100,000 Asian labourers and some 16,000 British, Australian, Dutch and Americans who hacked out tracks in soil, but Lomax was subjected to especially shocking punishment when the Japanese discovered he had helped build a basic radio and had drawn a detailed map of the terrain.

Each day he was forced to stand to attention in the blazing sun with four other officers. When night came, they were each beaten systematically. One particular voice lodged like shrapnel in his mind. Nagase Takashi translated back and forth during the beatings and torture, and advised him to confess before execution. “He was centre-stage in my memories,” Lomax wrote in his book. “My private obsession. He stood for all the worst horrors.” The trauma continued to haunt him for decades, costing him his first marriage, and casting a long shadow over his second.

As the sun sets on a midwinter Sunday afternoon, mine is the last of a small handful of interviews with Firth. I can’t help but notice that the Today programme just beforehand sent three women; one to ask the questions, and two apparently to watch Firth, who is looking very sharp with his Harry Palmer glasses, a beautifully cut suit, and the sort of good hair you see adorning the heroes on the covers of Barbara Cartland novels.

Our seating arrangement is all business – a couple of high-backed chairs and a table, ignoring the chummy sofa by the hotel window because Firth doesn’t get too comfortable in interviews. “It’s not the saltmines”, he allows, but he’s not a big fan of the process and its scrutiny. Yet he met Lomax many times at his home in Berwick-upon-Tweed to discuss the book, the film and, inevitably, to draw out and relive some of Lomax’s traumas. A bit like being a journalist then? Firth flinches slightly at the comparison. “I wasn’t there to write about him, I was there to portray him,” he says. “I wasn’t there just to pry into the painful things, but to see who he was, how he processes things. It’s about trying to inhabit his perspective.”

His first meeting with Lomax and his wife Patti was tentative. “I’d been told not to expect a man who was old in his mind, but when you see a frail man in his 90s, you fall into that trap of speaking a bit louder at first. Then I realised this man was as present as anybody at any age. He was formidably articulate, very sharp and very witty.”

It was difficult for Lomax to meet new people by this point, but he took a liking to Firth, who has a droll wit and a gently persistent curiosity. However, the former PoW had no idea that this polite actor was also one of Britain’s biggest stars until he saw a picture of Firth on the front page of a newspaper. “We must’ve gotten someone famous!” he said to his wife Patti, who gets an equally glam doppelganger, as she’s portrayed by Nicole Kidman in the movie.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.scotsman.com/what-s-on/film/englishman-colin-firth-on-becoming-a-scots-hero-1-3249762

Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine: The Railway Man Press Conference - TIFF

Colin Firth: Caffeinated and impassioned in Toronto

DETROIT FREE PRESS
by Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY

TORONTO - Colin Firth doesn't mind aging himself. "I've been coming here since the late '80s, when it was so much smaller," says the Oscar winner regarding the International Film Festival, which runs through Sept. 15. He's been here for The King's Speech and A Single Man - winning an Oscar for the former and being nominated for the latter.

And this year, Firth is headlining the war drama The Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and co-starring Nicole Kidman, based on Eric Lomax's autobiography of the same name.

In the film (no U.S. release date yet) and the book, Firth's Lomax is taken captive during World War II and sent to a POW camp by the Japanese, where he is forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway and suffers almost unspeakable atrocities.

"What happened was so brutal that you can't tell adventure stories about that stuff," says Firth. "Once you understand what individuals did for each other, it's probably more heroic than you can imagine." He spent time with Lomax, an experience he says was critical to developing the role.

"You do what you can. Our tools are very limited. You're employed to represent experiences that are beyond your understanding. I've never been through anything approaching that. My courage has never had to be summoned for anything like that. I can only offer my imagination."


READ MORE HERE: http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/2776525

Toronto Film Festival 2013: Colin Firth stars in The Railway Man

THE TELEGRAPH
By Dalya Alberge1:30PM BST 06 Sep 2013

As a British prisoner of war, Eric Lomax endured unspeakable torture and terror at the hands of his Japanese captors. Forced to stand for hours in the burning sun, he was half-drowned by a water-hose placed in his nose and mouth, his arms were broken and his ribs cracked in savage beatings, and he was made to sleep in a cage covered in excrement. That was his punishment for being caught with a radio that he helped to build. Two fellow prisoners similarly accused did not survive the beatings.

Almost a year after his death aged 93, the harrowing but inspirational story of atrocities that he and thousands of British servicemen suffered in captivity and on the notorious Thai/Burma “Death Railway” is now told in a major British film. The Railway Man receives its world premiere this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, attended by his widow, Patti, and its Oscar-winning stars, Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman. But its producer and co-writer, Andy Paterson, doubts that Lomax would have joined them had he been alive. He believes that, after a lifetime of nightmares and flashbacks, Lomax would have found the film’s portrayal too realistic. The horrors remained raw – even after facing his demons, both psychological and real, in confronting, then forgiving Takashi Nagase, the interpreter who presided over his torture.



After the war, like many POWs, he was unable to talk about his experiences. But he realised that future generations needed to be told and, in 1995, he published his powerful memoir – The Railway Man – a bestseller that reminded the world of the sacrifices of the “forgotten army”.

Paterson observes: “He was able to make sense of it – not just for himself, but so others might comprehend it … But we still occasionally glimpsed what Patti called ‘the shutters coming down’. If you [probed] … too deep, you’d encounter the silence.” At his home, Paterson and Firth noted the absence of a radio. Paterson recalls. “He looked at us and said ‘I think I’m allergic to radios’.”

They worked extremely closely “to understand what he went through … very different from writing down events,” Paterson adds. They wanted the script “right” and “there was a moment when he said, ‘this is what it felt like’. Then we knew the script was right.”

Like other veterans, Lomax was critical of David Lean’s fictionalised film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. He criticised the well-fed POWs. The Railway Man went out of its way to find thin extras, and Jeremy Irvine, who made his name in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, lost two stone to play a young Lomax. Firth portrays the older man.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10288754/Toronto-Film-Festival-2013-Colin-Firth-stars-in-The-Railway-Man.html

What happened to Mr Darcy? Colin Firth displays his incredibly slimline physique after losing weight for movie role

By EMILY SHERIDAN

MAIL ON LINE

PUBLISHED: 04:34 EST, 22 July 2013

UPDATED: 07:27 EST, 22 July 2013

He shifted the pounds to play a prisoner of war in upcoming movie The Railway Man.

However, with filming having long ended, it looks like the slimline Colin Firth may be here to stay.

The Oscar winner, 52, was looking trim as he attended his newest director Woody Allen's jazz band performance on the French Riviera on Sunday.

he actor may like his trimmer fame, or perhaps he is required the keep the weight off for another film.

This year, busy Colin has several films in the pipeline, including Devil's Knot, with Before I Go To Sleep, Genius and the Woody Allen project, which is as yet untitled.

The Railway Man sees Colin play Eric, who was tortured by Japanese Kempeitai military police when he was sent to work on the Death Railway after being captured in Singapore in 1941.

READ MORE HERE:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2373217/Slimline-Colin-Firth-stay-trim-actor-attends-Woody-Allens-jazz-band-performance-France.html

Colin Firth: So why has Mr Darcy gone on a diet? Actor sheds the pounds (DAILY MAIL)

After his turn as Mr Darcy, Colin Firth’s fans were, to put it delicately, rather eager to relieve him of that wet shirt.

These days, however, they are more likely to want to sit him down for a proper home-cooked meal.

The Oscar-winning actor, 52, seemed far slimmer than usual as he attended a launch party thrown by designer Tom Ford in Mayfair, with his face and neck looking a little gaunt.

But fans can rest easy about his health – his weight loss is for a movie role.

Firth, who looked smart in a suit and black-framed glasses, has shed pounds to play a prisoner of war in upcoming film The Railway Man.

It is based on the true story of British officer Eric Lomax, played by Firth, who is captured by the Japanese during the Second World War and forced to work on the Thai-Burma railway.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2344781/Why-Colin-Firth-gone-diet-Actor-sheds-pounds.html#ixzz2WlTGUvdU 
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First Pics Of Colin Firth & Nicole Kidman In 'The Railway Man' NEWS BY KEVIN JAGERNAUTH SEPTEMBER 24, 2012 5:08 PM (INDIEWIRE)

A couple of early stills have dropped from their upcoming "The Railway Man," which certainly points to the sunnier end of some tough subject matter. Based on the memoir by Eric Lomax (played by Firth), with a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce ("Millions," "24 Hour Party People") and "Burning Man" director Jonathan Teplitzky behind the camera, the true story tells the tale of a Scottish second lieutenant who was captured by the Japanese in Singapore during the war, and shipped off to a camp in Thailand, where he suffered terrible tortures, and was forced to help build the infamous bridge over the River Kwai, as seen in David Lean's epic (Jeremy Irvine will play the young Eric). Years later, he still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, until his second wife, Patricia Wallace (Kidman), helped him to seek out closure by writing to his former captor (played by Hiroyuki Sanada).

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/first-pics-of-colin-firth-nicole-kidman-in-the-railway-man-20120924#

Colin Firth: Wonderful pics from the set of THE RAILWAY MAN

These pictures are from the wonderful facebook page COLIN FIRTH FANS (I go there all the time)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Colin-Firth-Fans/118478761523822

There are lots more pictures on Colin Firth Fans.  I don't know how she got all of these but they are wonderful.  I didn't put up half as many as I tried to steal from her.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=390706360967726&set=a.378654332172929.80726.118478761523822&type=1&theater

Colin Firth: Nature of torture for Firth AAP, The West Australian June 25, 2012, 12:12 pm (THE WEST)

Firth said trying to find forgiveness for something which is arguably unforgivable was a complicated journey. Torture, he has come to realise, is closely linked to a feeling of shame on the part of the victim.

"It's profoundly intimate in a very traumatic way," he said. "You're very exposed, it involves humiliation, and those are very hard things to get beyond."

It is clear Firth has a deep respect for Eric Lomax, a World War II prisoner of the Japanese who survived the horrors of the Burma-Thailand Railway and late in his life told his story in the best-selling book The Railway Man, the basis for this film.

"I think the people who do manage to share it in some way are sometimes the lucky ones - those who manage somehow to find a voice by whatever conduit have done something really quite powerful," Firth said. "The experience is quite beyond our comprehension really."

Co-star Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai, 47 Ronin) hopes his role of a brutal torturer will educate young Japanese people who have been taught nothing of the horrors Imperial troops inflicted on their prisoners in Burma and Thailand.

"When I read the script the first time I felt shocked, I was moved and I cried," he said. "I thought this role must be played by a Japanese-born actor and we should tell the story for our generation."

He said filming at Hellfire Pass in Thailand where so many prisoners of war died was a very spiritual experience but after filming the "deep" torture scene on the Gold Coast he said the ocean views and relaxed beach walks provided a welcome emotional balance.

Firth said he had no idea how he was going to approach the torture scenes until he saw how his co-star was doing it.

"That opened everything up and transformed it and I found it an extraordinarily powerful experience," he said.

He was also full of praise for Nicole Kidman, who plays his wife. "Some things are just easy," he said, laughing.

"An awful lot of this movie I just had to imagine how things were possible but that I did not have to imagine, she did the most beautiful job."

Filming for The Railway Man will continue for three more weeks at the set of a POW camp built in the Numinbah Valley, behind the Gold Coast, and at the old railway yards in Ipswich.

READ MORE:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/-/entertainment/14033266/nature-of-torture-for-firth/