#5 Colin Firth

Number 5 on my Top Forty is Colin Firth.

Colin Firth? An actor?!?! Not quite the same genre or intensity as those in my first four posts. But, hey! It's a girl's prerogative to admire and respect a knee-weakeningly gorgeous face, is it not?

Colin Firth is a two time Academy Award-winning actor, ("A Single Man", "The King's Speech") who first came to my attention in the role of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC / A&E TV miniseries, "Pride & Prejudice".

If I were to be stranded on a desert island for the rest of time (...a girl can dream...), this would be the one and only DVD I would need to sustain me.

Aside from the fact that I believe he is the most handsome man on the face of the Earth, the thing that I admire most about him is how he has managed, throughout his career, to avoid the nasty glare of the Hollywood spotlight, and being sucked up into its vortex.

It is not enough for most actors and actresses these days to simply ply their trade in television, movies and stage, and make scandalous amounts of money for their efforts. No. For the vast majority, their sideline is to use their pedestals as soapboxes, lecturing the rest of us mere mortals on, among other things, who we should and should not support politically. Never was this quite so evident as during the 2004 US presidential election. Oprah Winfrey, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, Matt Damon, George Clooney, and on and on and on. I know more about their political affiliations than I know about their real jobs. Who are they to lecture me?? At the time of the 2004 election, Elton John, who I idolized in my younger years, even went so far as to say he “did not want this country to have to live under George W. Bush.” He declared himself to be “a great believer in the vice president" - which meant he wished President Bush dead. (The vice president automatically becomes president following the current president's death.) That's a hell of a thing to say - vile, hateful and vicious - regardless of one's political leanings. I will never listen to his music in quite the same way, ever again.

But then, there's Colin Firth.

*happy sigh*

All I know about him is hardly anything at all, and that's just as it should be. He's not prancing 18 adopted children across the screen and magazine covers, for global pats on the back. He's not saying a bunch of scandalous, outrageous things just to get his withered,wrinkly face some publicity, because all the juicy, sexy roles have dried up. He's not naming his children after pieces of fruit. He's not having a nervous breakdown on a stage. He's not opening orphanages and leaving the children to the mercy of unscrupulous, abusive management.

He's gettin' on gettin' on. He's living his life with his wife and children, and every now and then, he surfaces in a wonderful movie, gives me a face to dream about again, and then goes off to live his life, and allow the rest of us to live ours, without the strident commentary.

Bravo, Colin Firth, for rising above the fray, and staying below the radar, for not getting sucked into the Hollywood mindset that believes every utterance, no matter how trivial or ridiculous, is one the rest of us should live by. That definitely earns my admiration and respect.

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