Colin Firth makes his ‘Father’ proud

When Colin Firth found out that Blake Morrison’s 1996 best-selling memoir “And When Did You Last See Your Father?” had been adapted into a screenplay, the 47-year-old actor didn’t need to read the script to know he wanted to star in it.

“It was a favorite book of mine,” says Firth, perking up in his seat during our chat at the Regency Hotel in New York City. “I was one of the people evangelizing it around the mid-’90s, and it’s one of the few books that I’ve read more than once.”

Lucky for the British actor — whose big break came  playing brooding yet dreamy Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC television version of  “Pride and Prejudice” before becoming the quintessential-good-guy-romantic-lead in Bridget Jones’s Diary — he was director Anand Tucker’s first choice, too.

The movie, set in the English countryside, takes us through Morrison’s childhood and adolescent memories of his father, a larger-than-life personality who often annoys and belittles his bookish son, and eventually succumbs to cancer.

“At the end, you wish you said all those things, and you wish you appreciated them and the memories,” says Firth.

He describes his own father — a retired history lecturer at Winchester University College and a one time education officer for the Nigerian Government (Firth spent some of his childhood in Nigeria) — as very different from the man in the  movie. While they both had doubts about their son’s passions, Firth’s father spent more time worrying whether his son would become disappointed in his career choice rather than indulging in “the kind of bullying narcissism” of Blake’s dad. Firth adds that his father has gone to see the movie three times within its first week of release. “[The story] made me want to do things differently with my family,” says Firth, who has three sons (Will, with actress Meg Tilly, and Luca and Mateo with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Livia Giuggioli) and tries to see them as much as he can.

“We all have father issues, even if you don’t have a father, and whether you’re a boy or a girl,” he says about the human tendency to blame our parents for any and all of our emotional baggage.

Yet the movie is a big wake-up call for making amends with emotionally distant loved ones before it’s too late.

“If you’ve got business to do with your parents, now is the time,” Firth says.