Hollywood spotlight: The English touch

The year 1987 was a good one for big-budget American films of the kind that spawn sequels and stage shows. Three Men and a Baby, Fatal Attraction, Lethal Weapon, The Witches of Eastwick, Wall Street, Dirty Dancing and Robocop all came out in rapid succession. But in Britain, the film industry was working at a gentler pace. Two thoughtful, very English films about male friendship came out that year and helped to launch the screen careers of two actors. Maurice, EM Forster's tale of blighted love, starred 27-year-old Hugh Grant opposite James Wilby as Edwardian school friends who meet while at Cambridge. A similarly poignant story was being played out in A Month in the Country, starring Colin Firth, also 27, as an artist who is hired to restore a mural in a Yorkshire church and develops a close friendship with an archaeologist.

Both Grant and Firth won praise for their acting and both embarked upon challenging careers. But that was before they were both landed with the label of heart-throbs. It's a tag that has probably done as much to hinder them as to propel them towards glory.

Last month, both men, born only a day apart, celebrated their 50th birthdays. Confronted by reporters as the date approached, Grant joked about it: "I'm dreading it."

A natural comedian from his early days performing in revue sketches at the Edinburgh festival, Grant adopts an ironic tone about his work as well as his personal life. It has all been an accident, he assures interviewers. Hailed across the world as the perfect Englishman after his performance in the Richard Curtis film Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, Grant has also been candid about the impact of the role on his work.

"Although I owe whatever success I've had to Four Weddings..., it did become frustrating when people started making assumptions. They thought that's all I could do and that I was that character," he told Variety.

Firth, in contrast, garnered early plaudits for his TV performances in Tumbledown in 1988 and, of course, as the sombre Darcy in Pride and Prejudice in 1995, yet he took his time picking up accolades as a leading man on the big screen.

Recently though, he appeared at number 52 in the Guardian's list of the 100 most influential people in the film industry; Grant did not feature. The comparative late developer, Firth now seems set to win at least an Oscar nomination for his role as George VI in The King's Speech. "This film belongs to Firth," wrote a commentator.

"With nearly every scene granting him a wet-eyed close-up as the traumatic origins of Albert's stutter are unravelled, his act registers a pitch that Oscar voters are bound to respond to."

It has also been confirmed that Firth is to star with Gary Oldman in a film version of John le Carr's spy saga Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Working on Swede Tomas Alfredson's spy thriller will be a new departure for Firth, further broadening his range following his Bafta award-winning portrayal of a bereaved professor in A Single Man.

Until these break-out roles for Firth, the two actors had kept up some kind of equivalence, each succeeding as Jane Austen heroes after Grant played Edward Ferrars in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, then both tackling the modern-day laddy Englishness of Nick Hornby's world in adaptations of Fever Pitch and About a Boy.

Most important, they were also ready to make fun of themselves. Appearing as rivals for the attentions of Bridget Jones in the two films made from Helen Fielding's books, they happily mocked their own public images. As Mark Darcy, Firth played an illusive dreamboat named after his own TV triumph as Austen's hero; Grant's portrayal of the caddish Daniel Cleaver was an amused nod at his own popular persona.

For Observer film critic Philip French the two screen idols have, on screen, always represented two entirely different kinds of postwar hero.

"The brilliant sociologist David Riesman set out two types of behaviour: the other-directed individual and the inner-directed individual, and for me there is absolutely this distinction between these two actors. Grant is the ultimate other-directed figure, who wants to be loved rather than esteemed, while Firth is inner-directed and looks back to a much older, more grounded tradition. Together they represent these two ideas in our society."

Attempts to become a film producer with his former partner Elizabeth Hurley failed at the end of the 1990s, while a series of romcoms failed to work the box-office magic in Notting Hill or Love Actually. It may look as if Grant is now as devoted to pro-celebrity golf as he is to acting, but the star is misdirecting the crowd. In fact, he takes his acting seriously.

He has strong views on his own skills too, telling an American interviewer: "I've never been tempted to do the part where I cry or get Aids just to get good reviews. I genuinely believe that comedy acting is as hard as, if not harder, than serious acting, and it genuinely doesn't bother me that all the prizes and the good reviews automatically go to the darkest performances."

And for all the power of Firth's inner-directed subtlety, it's surely true that there are few stars who occupy such a clear place in the mind of the cinema-going public as Grant does. The danger is that his charming mannerisms are now so widely recognised that they prevent him from experimenting.

As French says: "The definition of Grant's public persona is now so precise that he needs to take into account how he is perceived when he takes on a role. Firth has a more plastic, or perhaps elastic, persona, giving him more room to move."

And, in all probability, keep on collecting the Oscars.