Firth: I'm cursed by Darcy

Oh dear. Here I am preparing for my audience with Colin Firth and it seems I am about to inherit a hostile interviewee.

I'm peeking through the door, watching a large, ageing German lady - whose palpitations have probably not reached such a frenzy since she saw the Fab Four that night in Hamburg - interview Firth before me, and she has uttered the dreaded D-word. "Ooooh," she swoons, syntax all a-scrambled. "It is so nice to be meeting at last the real Mr Darcy."

Poor old Firth. How much must the poor man suffer? His heart sinks, he fixes that black-eyed look betraying neither joy nor pain (regulo five - smouldering) and lets out a sigh. "I dare say if I did spend my waking hours reading my own fan mail I probably would feel Darcy was following me around," he deadpans. "But I've got family and friends and children and none of them call me Mr Darcy."

It's actually seven years since Firth appeared in Pride and Prejudice, in a role that, hitherto, was only a minor character in romantic literature. No Heathcliff, that's for sure. But then came Firth, rising from the fishpond before a surprised Elizabeth Bennet. The world changed. Firth and "Darce" have been conjoined ever since. And, as if to underscore the awesome slaying power of this twin-headed hydra, only this summer the drama was replayed on BBC2 to surprisingly good ratings. adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and is between interviews. "But it's not very funny unless you know him, and I can't really explain it" (he adds that Firth is "a bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh").

If the ghost of Darcy is ever to be laid to rest, then Firth isn't doing himself any favours with his latest role. In the film he plays Jack Worthing, a Victorian gent who - dashing, repressed, and reliably tight of trouser - is cut from the same finely tailored cloth as you-know-who.

Firth and Everett go way back, having made their screen debuts in the 1984 film Another Country. "We used to hate each other. From my point of view he was just so red-brick universityish, kind of communisty, always strumming on a guitar," says Everett. Hard to believe faced with the man sitting opposite in a sombre, dark suit.

"I was allowed to lead a life largely outside of convention for a very long time, so I have now embraced the bourgeoisie with gusto," laughs Firth.

Of course, he was not born into Darcydom at all. Though he did spend his early years in Nigeria as a faux-colonial child (his parents taught abroad), he has never been anywhere near a public school, let alone a university. He "sort of fell" into acting in Winchester as an escape from his secondary modern.

"I think that often actors represent what they're not," he says. "You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common."

Of the 30-odd films he has made, Firth has played a variety of roles ("I haven't only been a string of repressed Englishmen in suits"). And while his parts have not always been showy - it takes a minute to remember he was cuckolded in both The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love - the toffs have been offset by things like the Falklands War drama Tumbledown, the chilling Final Solution reconstruction, Conspiracy, and his turn in the screen version of Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby is one of his best friends).