Colin Firth shifted the pounds to play a prisoner of war in upcoming movie The Railway Man.
However, with filming having long ended, it looks like the slimline Colin Firth may be here to stay.
Colin Firth, 52, was looking trim as he attended his newest director Woody Allen’s jazz band performance on the French Riviera on Sunday.
The actor has been cast in Woody Allen’s latest film, which is yet to begin shooting, alongside Emma Stone, Marcia Gay Harden and Eileen Atkins.
Colin Firth has been cutting a slimmer figure in recent months after losing weight to play Eric Lomax, a real-life Scottish soldier who was subjected to torture by the Japanese during World War II in Burma.
Colin Firth shifted the pounds to play a prisoner of war in upcoming movie The Railway Man
Although filming finished quite some time ago, Colin Firth is yet to return to his usual size.
The actor may like his trimmer fame, or perhaps he is required the keep the weight off for another film.
This year, busy Colin Firth has several films in the pipeline, including Devil’s Knot, with Before I Go To Sleep, Genius and the Woody Allen project, which is as yet untitled.
The Railway Man sees Colin Firth play Eric, who was tortured by Japanese Kempeitai military police when he was sent to work on the Death Railway after being captured in Singapore in 1941.
Colin Firth plays the elder Eric, who is convinced by his wife Patti (Nicole Kidman) to find peace for his trauma by tracking down the Kempeitai interpreter, Nagase Takashi, who attended his interrogations and beatings years earlier.
War Horse star Jeremy Irvine plays the younger Eric and also had to lose weight for the role.
Jeremy Irvine admitted he walked to lose the weight in an interview with GQ magazine: “I’d walk all day through the Cambridgeshire countryside with my script to burn calories. I think I scared my mum a bit.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, Helen Fielding’s first novel in 14 years, is to be published later this year.
The novel is Helen Fielding’s third about the hapless singleton, following Bridget Jones’s Diary, which was published in 1996, and sequel The Edge Of Reason in 1999.
The books sold more than 15 million copies in 40 countries and were adapted for the movies starring Renee Zellweger in the lead role, Colin Firth as Mark Darcy and Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, which will be published on October 10, is set in present day London and ‘represents a totally new phase in Bridget’s life’.
An extract released by publishers showed that Bridget Jones is still prone to mishaps.
She writes after sending a text message: “You see, this is the trouble with the modern world. If it was the days of letter-writing, I would never even have started to find his address, a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp and gone outside at 11.30 p.m. to find a postbox.
“A text is gone at the brush of a fingertip, like a nuclear bomb or Exocet missile. Dating Rule No 1: Do not text when drunk.”
Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy, Helen Fielding’s first novel in 14 years, is to be published later this year
A statement from publishers Jonathan Cape said: “Bridget is older, she is still keeping a diary, but she is also immersed in texting and experimenting with social media, with an emphasis on <<social!>>.”
Jonathan Cape publishing director Dan Franklin said: “As a comic writer, Helen is without equal. Over 15 years ago she gave a voice to a generation of young women with the original Bridget book.
“Now they’ve grown up and she’s doing it again….this time with all the joys and complications of social media.”
Bridget Jones, who filled the pages of her diary with her failed efforts to find love and measured her life in the amount of cigarettes she smoked, units of alcohol she drank and number of calories she lost or gained, started life as a weekly column in The Independent in 1995.
Best-selling English author Helen Fielding recently wrote that the dating scene had become even more difficult for women thanks to the advent of email, Twitter, Facebook and texting.
Writing in the margins of her novel Bridget Jones’ Diary for a charity book sale, she said that she thought that finding a partner is “so much worse now”.
Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth recently dashed hopes that a third Bridget Jones film would be hitting the big-screen soon.
“Unfortunately, it might be a bit of a long wait. I wouldn’t say that it’s completely dead in the water, but the way it’s going you might be seeing Bridget Jones’ granddaughter’s story being told by the time we get there,” he quipped.
Until recently no fashionista would be seen dead in seasonal patterned sweater, but now the kitsch style is a must-have for designers and celebrities alike.
How did Christmas sweaters become so popular?
They might be embroidered with reindeer, or snowflakes, or a cheerful Father Christmas.
Knitted from variety of garish woollen hues, they look as though they are being worn to please a kindly but sartorially clueless grandmother.
Once any self-respecting young adult would have been horrified to open their wrapping paper and find they had been gifted such a garment.
But somehow Christmas sweaters have become not just acceptable, but cool – the gaudier the better.
Fashionable chains like Urban Outfitters and Topshop stock entire ranges of sweaters gaily adorned with holly, fir trees and so on.
High-end designers have got in on the act, too. Ralph Lauren sells a snowflake-patterned turtleneck for $1,277. One yellow-and-pink Stella McCartney creation featuring two prancing deer retails at $1,230.
Celebrities as diverse as Kanye West, Cheryl Cole, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Matt Damon, Samantha Cameron and Snoop Dogg have all been pictured in various woollen improvisations on the theme.
Quite why trend-setters have decided that Andy Williams and Bing Crosby crooning festive ditties before a roaring fire, represent the ne plus ultra of style is surely one of fashion’s more baffling mysteries.
For most people in the UK, the arresting visual impact of the Christmas jumper first registered when Renee Zellweger’s protagonist of the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary was introduced to her suitor, Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy, as he wore a roll-neck affair adorned with a giant reindeer’s head.
In North America, the trend was already getting well under way. Ugly Christmas sweater parties – in which attendees compete to wear the vilest seasonal pullover – are thought to have first been held by students in Vancouver around the turn of the millennium.
The craze quickly spread across the continent. Undergraduates would scour their parents’ wardrobes and second-hand clothes shops looking for the most hideous festive tops they could find.
A mini-industry of retailers sourcing or manufacturing especially tasteless garments quickly mushroomed.
Adam Paulson, a 30-year-old from Crown Point, Indiana, discovered this could be a profitable enterprise when he formed the online store uglychristmassweaterparty.com in 2006 with two friends.
“The more stuff on the sweater, the more glittery and jangly it is, the more it will sell,” he says.
But somewhere along the line the Christmas jumper phenomenon ceased to be about looking as dreadful as possible – a sort of yuletide version of Halloween – and became something that esteemed fashion designers and High Street shoppers alike could buy into.
Until recently no fashionista would be seen dead in seasonal patterned sweater, but now the kitsch style is a must-have for designers and celebrities alike
The change in emphasis has been attributed to the rise of that much-maligned archetype, the hipster – the young urban bohemian, attired in self-consciously quirky thrift-store clothes. Their visual aesthetic – tight jeans, over-sized glasses, garish second-hand T-shirts – was exemplified in the films of Wes Anderson and, in the UK, parodied in the Channel 4 satire Nathan Barley.
This subculture, growing in enclaves like Portland, Oregon, Williamsburg, New York and London’s East End, was quickly appropriated by the mainstream.
The hipsters’ fondness for all things twee and retro – baking cupcakes, riding fixed-wheel bikes, using Polaroid cameras instead of digital – meant Christmas jumpers could be re-cast as modish.
“The whole hipster movement definitely helped,” says Adam Paulson.
“It started off with college-age kids. Now it’s work parties.”
In the UK, where ugly sweater parties had never quite caught on in the same way, the onset of the phenomenon was perhaps more sudden.
The popularity of Danish thriller The Killing – whose heroine, Sarah Lund, sported an array of knitwear, some of it snowflake-patterned – added to the garment’s allure.
But even now, it isn’t enough just to buy any old Christmas jumper, says former Clothes Show presenter Caryn Franklin.
To look fashionable, she says, one had to be doing it for the right reasons.
“It’s hipsters that can wear it – they give it some edge,” adds Caryn Franklin.
“The cooler brands like Topshop or Urban Outfitters can do it. But If Marks and Spencers were selling them, they wouldn’t have the same credibility.”
It’s this idea that a simple pullover must be accessorized with a raised eyebrow has turned some against Christmas jumpers.
“It’s not the jumpers I mind, it’s the claim of <<irony>>,” writes Guardian fashion columnist Hadley Freeman, casting the UK’s fondness for such garments as proof that many British men are “ashamed of genuine emotion”.
But Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, author of Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity Is Changing Pop Culture for the Better, believes there is nothing ironic at all about patterned woollens.
Instead, he argues Christmas jumpers and, more generally, the hipster preference for everything retro and vintage are deeply rooted in a longing for the heartfelt and the sincere.
While individuals might insist they are wearing a sweater ironically to give themselves an emotional get-out, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald believes that deep down they are expressing a longing for the comforting certainties of a traditional Christmas.
“Nostalgia is a huge hipster virtue,” he says.
“This isn’t about irony, it’s about kitsch.
“This is about looking back to something nostalgic – <<Oh, my mom used to wear sweaters like that>>. It’s only people who are afraid to express the fact that they enjoy it who say it’s ironic.”
If Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is correct, even the most achingly fashionably urban trendsetters are still hoping for a cosy family festive season.
It’s enough to make you buy a new jumper to celebrate.
