NEW YORK CITY—Twenty years ago, Colin Firth walked among us. He was living outside suburban Maple Ridge in a log cabin with B.C.–raised actor Meg Tilly, their newborn son, and Tilly’s two children from a previous relationship.

In October 1990, the Vancouver International Film Festival was about to show a two-year-old TV movie called Tumbledown that Firth had made in Britain before he arrived on our shores. Since there were never many international actors available to present their films at the festival, he seemed like someone who should be invited. He returned the phone call I made on behalf of the festival’s media department, and when I asked where we should go to pick him up, he said: “I will be at the statue of the horse,” referring to the horse clock in Maple Ridge’s town square.

Firth’s appearance at the festival was not considered to be much of a coup. In fact, the Georgia Straight called him one of several “substance over glamour guests”. Of course, that was several years before Firth played Mr. Darcy in the British television series Pride and Prejudice. It was also before he starred in two Bridget Jones movies and dozens of other films of varying importance, and before last year’s Oscar nomination for A Single Man and predictions that he could win it all this year for The King’s Speech (directed by Tom Hooper) had catapulted him to the A list. His next film is the anticipated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is based on one of John le Carré’s most successful spy novels.

In a New York City hotel’s interview room, Firth is told by the Straight that he didn’t seem particularly ambitious 20 years ago. Firth says that he has always wanted to get the best scripts, and that over time his luck may have changed.

“It seems like luck,” he says. “I must be doing something, and I don’t mean just acting, but it is hard to analyze. Do you think I didn’t always want to get masterpiece screenplays? If you can’t get the masterpiece, you do what you can to stay in the game, and I love working and I love the collaboration and I love telling stories. I think there is a lot of value in light entertainment as well. There can be a joy being a part of that. Sometimes I have done movies that I wouldn’t go and see. Some of them I enjoyed immensely, and some of them were more about, ”˜I hope this keeps me in the business long enough to get the one I really want to do.’”

In The King’s Speech, which opens on Friday (December 10), Firth plays Bertie, the Duke of York, a man who was raised as a royal but not with the responsibilities of his older brother, David, the Prince of Wales. As second in line to the throne of England, Bertie has fewer obligations but still has to make speeches when his brother is unavailable. That’s a problem, because Bertie stutters. The Duchess (Helena Bonham Carter) decides that he needs help and arranges meetings between Bertie and speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Bertie begins to improve but discovers his role may change. His brother is considering marriage to a divorced woman, which could lead to his abdication of the throne.

Firth grew up in England in the 1960s and 1970s but says that unlike many British citizens, he was not particularly interested in the drama of Royal Family life. He says he was only somewhat familiar with the man who became King George VI and was the father of the current Queen of England. “I knew nothing,” he says. “I wasn’t quite sure if he was George V or George VI. I recalled my mother telling me that she had great sympathy for him because of the stammers, so I knew about that and that he died relatively young and that the Queen came to the throne relatively young. We all know that she started in 1952 and she is still there. I always understood that she was very close to her father and it must have been very tough to take that job on while you were still grieving. I had a picture of that as a kid. I never heard one of his broadcasts, and I don’t think I knew that our Queen Mother was his wife. I am not a royal watcher, so when I was hired I was starting from scratch.”

He admits to having come by his feelings about the royals honestly. As befits someone who put his career on hold to live in rural B.C., he says he has never been comfortable with the status quo. And he says that he could never quite understand the attraction of the monarchy.

“I have an attitude, generally, and anything that felt like establishment or authority was not my friend as a kid. I didn’t think much of the monarchy. Some people think it’s very important to their identity and their sense of nationhood, and I am not one of those people at all. I don’t think this film altered any of my social views. To me, it is about a man caught in the crossfire of history and circumstances with pretty high stakes, and I think the reason why royalty is used for drama is because of those stakes. King Lear only had one acre of land to chop up, and you could tell that story, but it would probably be a [Harold] Pinter play.”

In the end, Firth took on the role because he could relate to Bertie’s inability to communicate. He says that there is a prejudice against people who can’t articulate their thoughts. “What I think is so painful about this character, and a lot of characters that I have taken on who find communication difficult, is that they are people with a kind of lucidity inside that is the problem. He wouldn’t be a tragic case if he really was the dull-witted man. But if you read his letters or read his quotes or hear anything he had to say, this man had an eloquence of wit and language. There is no question about it. He had irony, and he was fiercely intelligent and didn’t speak banalities. He had a sense of paradox. There was a really fine and subtle mind at work there, and for that to not be able to come out would be immensely painful. To be misjudged as stupid when you have those faculties: that is what it is entirely about. His mind was on fire.”

Firth himself would appear to know a little bit about being on fire. In the past three years, his movies have included the $600-million international hit Mamma Mia, the acclaimed A Single Man, and now The King’s Speech. Asked if at 50 he has hit his stride, the man who once admitted that he couldn’t get a theatre job when he lived in Vancouver says that you have to be cautious when it comes to predicting show-business success.

“It’s a great time, but I think it’s too random to call it a stride. If I keep getting roles like these ones, then I guess you could call it a stride, but this is a profession that notoriously trips you up. I have felt there were moments when I had my mojo but I didn’t have the script, and I may have dropped the ball a few times along the way. This success has happened to me at a time when I really enjoy the work. I feel that I am at an age that helps to make the stories interesting. I don’t relish the deterioration process, but I do find it interesting to play characters where the past counts. I have lived long enough to have one now.”