Colin Firth’s dashing Mr Darcy cooled his pent-up passion with a dive into a pond that resulted in the wet shirt that launched a million sighs in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. Ever since, directors can’t resist the urge to submerge him on screen.

Notable dunks can be found in the Bridget Jones sequel, Love Actually, Mamma Mia! and even last year’s more dramatic A Single Man, the source of the actor’s first Oscar nomination, as a closeted professor who grieves over his deceased male lover.

“You’re right,” says the British actor, resigned to his damp fate by now. “I’ve been thrown in the water in nearly every film.”

But in The King’s Speech, the film-festival favourite whose march to awards-season glory has been deemed all but inevitable by prognosticators, Firth remains bone dry.

Instead, his stuttering George VI (or Bertie, as he was known to friends and family) concentrates on untangling his tongue in time to rally his English subjects via radio as World War II is about to erupt.

However, it appears Firth doesn’t need to be doused to be desirable, since romance infused with wry humour is definitely in the air in this period-piece affair.

Rather, a bromance blossoms, one that exists between Firth’s uptight royal — forced to take the throne after his besotted brother, the Duke of Windsor, abdicates to wed an American divorcee — and Geoffrey Rush’s wily Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who refuses to be impressed by his patient’s lofty status. Or, as he so eloquently puts it, “My game, my castle, my rules.”

Their initial protocol-provoked standoff eventually dissolves into heartfelt admiration and elevates what could have been simply two men talking in a shabby office into something of a triumphant valentine.

In fact, says Speech director Tom Hooper, who has joined his two leads for what is supposed to be a three-way interview, “Helena Bonham Carter (who plays Bertie’s wife, aka the Queen Mum and mother of Elizabeth II) just sent a text: ‘Send my love to the two lovers’.”

RUSH WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOM

Apparently, their closeness continued after the cameras stopped. Firth, 50, confesses to being in mourning after Rush, 59, whose scenes were shot first so he could run off to another commitment, left him in the lurch.

“Yes, Geoffrey had to go do some meaningless play, which is his true calling,” he says. Even Bonham Carter could not console him. “Helena, who I adore, was constantly going, ‘Well, I’m not Geoffrey’.”

“He had terrible Rush withdrawal symptoms,” adds an amused Rush, whose brief time spent with Firth while they promoted 1998’s Shakespeare in Love might now qualify as foreplay.

The Oscar winner for 1996’s Shine, a native Aussie like his character, was most delighted by the scene when the monarchs pay a visit to Logue’s humble home after a misunderstanding causes a rift between the two men.

“What fascinates me about this story,” Rush says, “is that you have the most unlikely meeting of two people, an imperial figure and a colonial nobody. And they find common ground. We started calling it a bromance about halfway through.”

It dawned on Firth that it was a situation not unlike those in the third acts of most of the romantic comedies he has done.

“This is the moment where, after the fight and the refusal to acknowledge that the relationship will ever go on again, the boyfriend comes to the house and says a line that is very reminiscent of what happened in the beginning of the romance,” he says, clearly citing from the Bridget Jones playbook.

Following his advice, a suitable piece of dialogue was devised, “a fabulous one about waiting for a royal to apologise”.

drawn from history

However, TV veteran Hooper, who was drawn to The King’s Speech because of his own mixed Anglo and Australian heritage, didn’t build his considerable reputation just by playing matchmaker to actors. Instead, he has been hailed for his skill at hauling historical icons out from their textbook confines and presenting them as flesh-and-blood, warts-and-all human beings. The result is a slew of awards and nominations for such HBO biographical efforts as 2005’s Elizabeth I, 2006’s Longford and the 2008 miniseries John Adams.

“I get very few original screenplays where the character writing is anywhere near as good as when the characters are drawn from history,” says Hooper, who may next attempt an adaptation of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. “I’m tired of scripts where the character is just a function of the plot, but I am consistently drawn to iconic figures who are highly flawed. It isn’t difficult to humanise them because they have such an active struggle.”

The primary struggle for Firth was emulating Bertie’s stammer without it becoming comical. “There are all kinds of reasons why it could have undermined the whole film,” he says. Consider how Monty Python’s Michael Palin caused an uproar with his clownish stutterer in 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda. And Porky Pig certainly hasn’t done the afflicted any favours over the years.

Firth recalls one sympathetic portrait: Brad Dourif’s Billy Bibbit in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It also didn’t hurt to have the actor responsible for probably the greatest stuttering performance ever in the cast as a handy reference. Derek Jacobi, who plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, was lauded for doing justice to the malady suffered by the titular Roman emperor in the 1976 BBC series I, Claudius.

The key, Firth says, is not trying to stutter, but trying not to stutter. “The audience doesn’t want to see you trying to be anything,” he says. “All that should be on display is the character’s attempt to come out of his dilemma.”

There is also the danger of annoying the audience. “You got to feel the pain in this, but not so much that people say, ‘I’ve got to get out of the cinema’,” he observes. “You’ve got to get the idea across that it takes this guy an hour to get a word out. But you only have a 90-minute film. You’ve got to try to establish this by stealth. Tom was very careful about scoring the stutter level.”

Far easier for him was feigning fondness for Rush. Their mutual respect is evident within minutes of being in their company. These esteemed gentlemen get on so well, their director is regularly reduced to third-wheel silence as the actors dig into such subjects as whether Oscars matter (“Personally, I treasure that I got something that Jimmy Cagney got for Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Rush says) and how The King’s Speech was slapped with a restrictive R rating because part of Bertie’s cure involves rapidly repeating the f-word 42 times. (“It’s not like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas,” Firth says.)

Bonham Carter, in a separate interview, reveals that it doesn’t surprise her that Hooper didn’t inject himself more into the conversation. “Colin and Geoffrey are raconteurs,” she says. “It’s amazing that the film got made at all. When either one started an anecdote, a stopwatch came out. It couldn’t last longer than a minute. It’s no wonder Tom was forced into a position of muteness with Geoffrey and Colin in the same room.”

remove the blocks Not that anyone should mistake the filmmaker as a pushover. “Tom is a phenomenon of determination,” Bonham Carter declares. “I actually never said yes to the part since I was busy with Harry Potter,” referring to her role as the evil Bellatrix Lestrange in Deathly Hallows. “Suddenly, I just found myself in costume. That shows how forceful he is, like a tank engine.”

Let’s allow Hooper, then, to explain his theory about why his film is connecting with audiences so well. “We all have blocks that inhibit us from being our best selves with other people. Whether shyness or insecurity, we have those blocks. This is about liberating someone’s blocks.”

Yet, as Firth notes, it is Bertie alone who must deliver his radio address to his loyal subjects in the climactic sequence in the movie. His therapist can’t do it for him. “You can’t get any closer than Logue gets to Bertie in that booth in the end. But Logue can’t give the lines to him.”

That observation encourages Hooper to pipe up again. “That scene reminds me of being a director. Because no matter however much you can be there for an actor, look after an actor, talk to an actor... when the camera is turned on, you can’t help him.”

Rush chuckles, remarking, “Tom would have preferred to have lived in the silent film period.”

Best of Firth

The King’s Speech (2010)
Dir: Tom Hooper, Role: King George VI

A Single Man (2009)
Dir: Tom Ford, Role: George Falconer

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)
Dir: Sharon Maguire, Role: Mark Darcy

Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Dir: John Madden, Role: Lord Wessex

The English Patient (1996)
Dir: Anthony Minghella, Role: Geoffrey Clifton

Pride and Prejudice (1995)
Dir: Simon Langton, Role: Fitzwilliam Darcy