He’s as British as Worcester sauce. So why does Colin Firth want to be Italian?

(Don’t dare suggest he’s having a Brexit hissy fit)

THERE are not many Italians named Colin, but their ranks will be swelled after yesterday’s news that Colin Firth is to take Italian citizenship.

What, you ask, the Colin Firth? As in skinny-dipping Mr Darcy? The Colin Firth who, in films from Pride And Prejudice to Bridget Jones’s Diary, always plays the most palpably English chaps, stoically at ease in stately homes and their winkleshrivelling lakes?

Colin Firth, as British as Jermyn Street shirts and Worcestershire sauce, is going to become an Italian? Yes. Or rather, si.

Comrade Colin — who was once described by an actor colleague, too, too cruelly, as ‘a ghastly, guitar-playing, redbrick socialist’ — is in a huff about Brexit.

Horrified

In a sweeping ‘that’ll-show the-ungrateful-fools’ move, he has applied to Italy for joint citizenship. If Mrs May doesn’t watch her step, it is possible he might rip up his British passport. Then we’d be sorry!

Far from the quintessentially pukka type of fellow you might think he is from his many film roles, 56-year-old Firth is one of life’s foot-stampers.

If you are looking for the male equivalent to Emma Thompson, the high mistress of political correctness, Colin’s your man.

And there is less of him these days than there used to be. He has recently lost a stack of weight. Please don’t mention the words ‘mid-life crisis’.

Rupert Everett, who worked with Firth in the early Eighties and uttered that naughty comment about him being a ‘redbrick socialist’, recalls that his young co-star was a ‘grim Guardian reader in sandals’.

If you were not careful he would, said Everett, whip out a guitar and start strumming hippie songs. One of his flowerpower favourites was the sugary Peter, Paul & Mary ballad Lemon Tree, about the sour taste of love, a song to make any sane mortal thirst for hemlock.

Quite against the popular image we might have from his acting, right-on politics surge through the veins of this grandson of missionaries. He considers himself such an ‘enthusiastic European’ that he has decided to go the whole hog and become a Continental in all its bureaucratic reality.

You thought Italy had an immigration problem with lots of African boat-people applying for citizenship?

Well, the problem just worsened by one, and the petitioner is this floppyfringed, Oscar-winning son of the pretty village of Grayshott, Hampshire — about as English a place as you can get.

Not that his entire childhood was spent there. Colin’s parents were academics and the family also lived in Nigeria and the U.S. That peripatetic background may explain his Mediterranean yearnings.

As Mail diarist Sebastian Shakespeare reported yesterday, Firth was ‘horrified by Brexit and is worried about the consequences’ — ah, savour that hint of a superior mortal pitying us misguided clots our mistake in cutting adrift from the EU superpower.

This is not the first time Firth has ventured into the political arena. Before the 2010 General Election, he lent his name to Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat campaign, even appearing in a video with the party’s then wildly popular leader.

Cleggy, who I’m sure secretly fancied himself as a ravishing Mr Darcy (remember that boasting from Mr Cleggover about his 30 sexual conquests in a magazine interview?), was in heaven.

We were shown footage of Colin and Nick at a vegetarian cafe, earnestly discussing politics over espresso. Which was the film star and which the young political leader of the coming age? My dears, it was hard to be sure.

And yet, as can happen when luvvies stray into politics, the affair soured. Colin became disenchanted when Mr Clegg and his MPs placed ministerial perks before principle and broke their election promises on university tuition fees.

‘I can no longer support the

Lib Dems!’ wailed Colin, all spaniel eyes. Exit, stage Left.

Now he has done the same on Brexit. ‘I can no longer support Britain!’, or something like that. Well, OK, he is going to have dual citizenship, for the time being.

But the Italians will require him to submit himself to the embassy in London’s Mayfair, place one poignant palm on the green, white and red flag of the Republic of Italy, and say: ‘Giuro di essere fedele alla Repubblica e di osservare la Costituzione e le leggi dello

Stato.’ (‘I swear to be faithful to the Republic and to observe its constitution and laws.’)

Set aside the idea that the Republic’s Constitution and laws are, to put it sotto voce, mildly erratic. He will no doubt utter the line beautifully, for he speaks fluent Italian.

But before you ladies become too eggy round the eyes and start sighing, know that he learned the language after meeting his molta bella wife, Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli (and he insists he’s applying for dual citizenship to have the same passports as his family). Colin is, as they say in Italian restaurants, riservato.

And riservato is pretty much his acting shtick. He excels at playing upper-middle-class British men, perhaps a little dull round the edges and intellectually blunt, but inside as solid as old fruit cake.

Constrained

Firth characters are not open books. They are constrained by their manners and a decent sense of awkwardness about emotion. Think of Harry in Mamma Mia!, George in A Single Man, Geoffrey Thwaites in St Trinian’s, Jamie in Love Actually, Mr Brown in Nanny McPhee and even the more complicated Bill Haydon in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (written by that other surprising Euro-luvvie, John le Carre).

How are we to square those performances with the more — shall we say? — Latin temperament of this new recruit to the fatherland of Mussolini and Berlusconi?

Henceforth, Colin will need to stiffen his spine when the Italian national anthem Fratelli d’Italia strikes up. It is a rather magnificent tune, since you ask, but the words are not for the faint-hearted.

The chorus translates as: ‘We are ready to die, we are ready to die, Italy has called! Yes!’

And that is not ‘die’ in the actors’ sense of losing a stage audience.

Italian patriots can be just as vehement — and Euro-sceptical — as those in Britain. Do you think dear old Colin realises this?

Shrivelled

But for how much longer will he be ‘dear old Colin’? Might we not go off him, now that he is flirting with a foreign state?

The danger signals were already there when he lost all that weight. The Colin we saw in Bridget Jones has shrivelled to something very much leaner and meaner-looking. He has put himself on a regime under the beady eye of Daniele Boido, fitness guru (and Italian!).

Boido believes in enemas and strict diets eliminating animal proteins, sugar and bread. He exists on raw fruit and veg and aloe vera juice. Not a man to get downwind of too often.

His clients are urged to start their days with fiveminute sessions of violent shaking to ‘unblock’ their energy, followed by deep breathing and meditation.

As Colin Firth’s character in The King’s Speech might have said: ‘B. . .b . . .b . . .blimey.’

It could have been worse. Firth could have become Belgian

But for those of us who have loved his film and stage roles, it is a sadness that our Colin, as we may no longer quite be able to consider him, has come over all peculiar.

We must return, as so often, to the words of Peter, Paul & Mary’s Lemon Tree, which tells of a lost love, and with a small tweak of gender recall its prophetic lines: ‘One day he left without a word. He took away the sun. And in the dark he’s left behind, I knew what he had done. He’s left me for another, it’s a common tale but true. A sadder soul but wisernow, I sing these words to you . . .’