Best 96 quotes of Colin Firth on MyQuotes

Actors are basically drag queens. People will tell you they act because they want to heal mankind or, you know, explore the nature of the human psyche. Yes, maybe. But basically we just want to put on a frock and dance.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

But it's interesting being directed by someone who is a very good actor. There's nothing like it. It might sound like a territorial thing about what I do, but I don't think you can understand what it is until you've done it. I know that to be a fact.

But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It's the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.

Certainly, from where I stand, I'm not a specialist in wildly different walks and voices. But I find as much variation and nuance as what satisfies me in what I do. So, I don't find this particularly different. He has his own peculiarities. You're probably talking about a cluster of Englishmen in suits but I've done quite a big cluster of guys not in suits as well, which I've occupied myself with. So, I don't find that this is the one that stands out.

Comedy - particularly the frothy and frivolous - is notoriously neglected by festivals and awards. But it's bloody hard to get right.

Directors don't get to see other directors at work - they're the only one on the set. I've met directors who've asked me what another filmmaker is like. So, there's probably nobody better placed to make all the comparisons and to pick up stuff than an actor.

Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don't think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you're a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.

Firth - all dodgy 'tache and frantic eyebrows - has got the sexual allure of a man who runs a swingers' club in Surbiton.

Forget trying to be sexy. That's just gruesome.

However good a communicator a director is, unless they've been actors, it's just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who's been an actor.

I absolutely don't care about my looks and I'm so used to them that I wouldn't change a thing. I would end up missing my defects.

I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions... the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast.

I can actually get involved in getting stories off the ground that no one would ask me to be in because I'm the wrong age, the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, or whatever. I've found it quite exhilarating to have that freedom to tell the stories that aren't just about middle-aged white English guys.

I can't bring you absolute truth in the detailed factual sense. All I can do is bring you an interpretation as I understand it. That's all you can ever get from an actor.

I do also think it eludes genre a bit - not in any groundbreaking way but you can't quite call it a comedy and you can't quite call it a romantic anything. It's not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things.

I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

I don't know if there's a problem with original ideas... I think a healthy film industry should have a good supply of good, original writing.

I don't know if this qualifies as gentle reassurance, but right now this is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson.

I don't think it's aiming at gags, I think the humour is woven into it. It's part of how the characters operate and how they deal with disaster because they're worldly enough to have a bit of irony and wryness about their own circumstances. So, I think the humour comes out of that.

I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film.

I do think I'm a character actor.

I feel more comfortable in drama. Comedy's is a high-wire act. I find it stressful. It's a precision science, in a way. And when you're filming, the thing comedy depends on becomes a much more difficult commodity. The thing you depend on is spontaneity.

If I'd loved my chemistry teacher and my maths teacher, goodness knows what direction my life might have gone in. I remember there was a primary school teacher who really woke me up to the joys of school for about one year when I was ten. He made me interested in things I would otherwise not have been interested in - because he was a brilliant teacher. He was instrumental in making me think learning was quite exciting.

I find that at almost every press junket I get that comment, "this character's different from what you generally play..." And that's OK! But I think "generally play" stems back to Mr Darcy. I'm fine with it but I tend to find that if it's a departure, which in other people's words it always is, it's always a departure from that.

If you're playing someone who's got marital problems, you have to play someone who's trying not to have marital problems. So, you've got to get into the problem first.

If you're playing someone who's impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.

I had heard all sorts of stories about Woody Allen's directing - directorial approach. And some of them turned out to be myth. But, one of them was that he doesn't rehearse and another was that he doesn't really direct, if he doesn't like it...he cuts it out of the movie, or even replaces you.

I have a great deal of respect for the craft, I don't know how much respect it has for me. But it's a precision process. Doing it on stage would be, I think, terrifying. Doing it on film has its own difficulties, because film is not conducive to spontaneity. You might have a run through and get a few chuckles at eight o'clock in the morning, but you don't keep laughing at the same thing all day long.

I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better - or a lot worse.

I have almost no memory of them [St. Trinian's films]. I don't think I've seen them since I was quite young. I was a bit frightened of the girls. I fancied them. Even though I was young, I found them attractive and rather frightening. I've always been attracted to frightening girls! I'm married to one!

I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.

I haven't had to struggle very much. I haven't paid my dues. I think I have been lucky.

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

I'll be your friend so long as you're not crap

I love you even when you're sick and look disgusting.

I'm fully aware that if I were to change professions tomorrow, become an astronaut and be the first man to land on Mars, the headlines in the newspapers would read: `Mr. Darcy Lands on Mars.

I'm not patient, and some things drive me crazy. In my work, I get incredibly upset when people don't get it right or don't respect others' needs.

I never saw myself as Mr. Ugly, but I'm not that handsome. I can sort of be made to look quite a lot better or quite a lot worse.

In filming you're waiting. You're waiting for lights. You're waiting for people set things up. And when you're not waiting, you're repeating. And neither is conducive to spontaneity, you know. Comedy makes you very, very neurotic because you think, I - but did I nail it?

I often think it can often be very difficult for comedians to revisit the same gag. I think Russell's a bit more than a comedian.

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you.

I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there's a pattern there - that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.

I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.

I think that London is very much like that. I find there's humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it's a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.

I think the dictator director is based upon stories from the past. I don't think anyone would put up with it now. There are a lot of people on a film set with egos. So, to be completely authoritarian, you'd probably have to have a reputation like Kurosowa or somebody to get away with it.