His mother, Shirley Jean (née Rolles), was a comparative religion lecturer at King Alfred’s College Winchester (now the University of Winchester), and his father, David Norman Lewis Firth, was a history lecturer (also at King Alfred ’s) and education officer for the Nigerian Government. Firth and other young British actors who were becoming established film actors such as Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Bruce Payne and Paul McGann were dubbed the ‘Brit Pack’. As something of an in-joke, when the novels were adapted for the cinema, Firth was cast as Jones’s love interest, Mark Darcy. Firth had a supporting role in The English Patient (1996) and since then, has starred in films such as Fever Pitch (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Relative Values (2000), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Love Actually (2003), What a Girl Wants (2003), Hope Springs (2003), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Nanny McPhee (2005), Where the Truth Lies (2005), Then She Found Me (2007) with Helen Hunt, The Last Legion (2007) with Aishwarya Rai, And When Did You Last See Your Father.
