Colin Firth

Colin Firth is an English actor whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining English-and-American film roles — particularly his 2011 Best Actor Academy Award win for Tom Hooper's The King's Speech. He was born Colin Andrew Firth on September 10, 1960, in Grayshott, Hampshire, England, into an English-academic working-class family. His father David Norman Lewis Firth was a Nigeria-born English-history-and-religious-education teacher (who served as a Nigerian Methodist Church missionary across Colin's early childhood), and his mother Shirley Jean Lewis was an Iowa-born English-religious-education-and-Hinduism teacher.

His early childhood across India and Nigeria (across which his parents served as missionary educators) shaped his early-career biographical narrative. His education at the Drama Centre London (1980–1983) launched his early-career path. His 1983 first English theatrical debut and his subsequent 1984 first English feature-film appearance in Marek Kanievska's Another Country (in which he played Mr. Bennett — a fictionalized Cambridge spy ring contemporary of Guy Burgess) launched his early-career English film public profile.

His 1995 lead role as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the BBC TV miniseries Pride and Prejudice — across which he performed the famous lake-scene shirt-soaking sequence — launched his mid-1990s English TV public profile. His 2001 reprisal of a Mr. Darcy-derived character in Sharon Maguire's Bridget Jones's Diary (alongside Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant) — and his subsequent reprisals across Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) — produced his 2000s American romantic-comedy public profile.

His 2009 supporting role as gay university professor George Falconer in Tom Ford's A Single Man earned him his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination at the 2010 Academy Awards. His 2010 lead role as King George VI in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech won him the 2011 Best Actor Academy Award. His subsequent feature-film career has produced multiple American films — particularly Tom Hooper's The Railway Man (2013), Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) and the 2017 sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and his 2024 lead role as Senator Joseph McCarthy in Bennett Miller's Capote spinoff. He married Italian producer Livia Giuggioli in 1997, and the couple has two sons.

His name Colin derives from the medieval English diminutive of Nicholas (from the Greek Nikolaos meaning "victory of the people"). Colin has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since the 1980s.