When the film
Bridget Jones's Diary
was released
in 2001, the fame of its three main protagonists, Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, took a quantum leap despite the fact that none of them were unknown to moviegoers.
The funny thing is that somehow her two male interpreters reflected in fiction part of who they were in her private life.
The sensible, educated and familiar Mark Darcy played by Colin Firth was not far from the perfect British gentlemanly manners of the actor born in Grayshott (England) of a father professor of history, mother professor of comparative theology and educated at the elite Winchester school. .
And the funny, spontaneous and unfaithful Daniel Cleaver played by Hugh Grant was the perfect fit for the interpreter who was born in Hammersmith, west London, who had already shown in his real life his talents as a seducer and that the irony, sarcasm and distinctive facial expressions that are part of his personal DNA and his acting career.
Almost two decades after the premiere of the famous film that has become the epitome of doubts, complexes and sentimental crises of women in their thirties, Firth and Grant face a change of decade.
They both turn 60 years apart - the first was born on September 10 and the second on September 9, 1960 - and their lives outside of fiction seem to have turned radically in recent years until they can imagine a new version of the movie with the roles swapped.
Their personalities remain intact, but their personal realities are quite different.
Hugh Grant's first media love was the actress and model Liz Hurley, their romance began when he was 25 and she was 21 just shooting a film by Spanish director Gonzalo Suárez,
Remando al viento.
Their relationship was as intense and free as the reason for a crisis that the couple failed to break up sounded sounded: on July 27, 1995, the actor, in full swing of popularity, decided to take a night ride in his BMW through the streets of Los Angeles. and he was caught by two policemen after hiring the services of a prostitute who performed fellatio on him in the car.
The arrest and the corresponding photographs appeared in media around the world and some doubted that Grant's romantic roles could be maintained but few that this was the end of his relationship with Hurley.
They were wrong.
The couple appeared together shortly after on the red carpet for the premiere of the film
Nine Months
and she not only continued her romantic relationship but also produced two films of her boyfriend,
Crossing the Boundary
and
Mickey Blue Eyes
.
They were together 13 years and separated, without breaking a friendship that lasts today, in May 2000.
His later sentimental life has been intense but not scandalous and, above all, the actor has always maintained discretion on this aspect.
For seven years he was a partner of Jemima Goldsmith, a friend of Diana of Wales and the ex-wife of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan.
Later he had five children by two different women.
His first daughter, Tabitha was born in 2011 from his relationship with Tinglang Hong, a Chinese-born woman he met in Chelsea.
In September 2012 John was born, whose mother is the Swedish producer Anna Eberstein and in December of the same year Felix, again from Hong.
Comings and goings with two women who ended a solid relationship with the Swedish producer, with whom he has had two other children, a girl in 2015 and a boy in early 2018, and with whom he broke his fame of everlasting single when he married her in May of that same year.
Grant has reinvented himself in all areas.
About the marriage he went so far as to affirm, a few months after getting married that "it is very nice."
“I should have done it sooner.
I am very lucky indeed.
My wife is incredible, I adore her, ”he acknowledged in an interview on
Today
.
Her friend and ex-partner, Liz Hurley also gave her version of her as a father: "She is charming and very sweet. Having these children has transformed her from being a very miserable person to a reasonably miserable one. It has improved her,.
Colin Firth's life, however, has changed in a way that he himself could not have expected.
He made his debut as a stage actor and his British phlegm and his knowing how to be on stage led him to the cinema.
Fame came to him for his performance in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice and later he was part of the cast of such titles as
The English Patient
,
Shakespeare in love
,
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
,
The King's Speech
, which He was worth an Oscar and the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire that Elizabeth II awarded him, excited by the interpretation he had made of his father, George VI.
He had two discreet relationships with actresses Meg Tilly, with whom he had a son, Will, who is now 30 years old, and Jennifer Ehle, and in 1997 he married Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli.
Until 2018, their marriage was one of the most solid and stable in the cinematographic world.
The couple lived on horseback between Great Britain and Italy and wasted complicity when they could be seen together at a premiere or in the company of their two children, Luca and Matteo, who are currently 18 and 16 years old.
She was a successful businesswoman and he was an established and Oscar-winning actor who had made his British style his hallmark.
The phlegm and know-how of the English gentleman was amply demonstrated when it was learned that the couple had filed a complaint in Rome against the Italian journalist from the agency Ansa Marco Brancaccia for alleged harassment and threats.
The reason: that the reporter began to harass Giugglioli after having an affair with her while she was married to Firth.
The infidelity had taken place years before and the actor, far from ending their relationship, rebuilt his marriage and publicly supported his wife in the face of his ex-lover turned stalker.
Firth kept the type and continued to speak that he felt Italian by adoption, a country from which he obtained nationality without giving up British, a fact that some attributed to the turbulent scene in the United Kingdom after the Brexit referendum and that the Italian Ministry of the Interior justified by "the love" that the actor showed for the country and for being married to an Italian.
The pressure got the better of the marriage and they ended up divorcing at the end of last year.
Now Colin Firth is a single man and in his career he has even dared to sing and dance with Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan in
Mamma Mia
, the film that recalled the successes of the Abba group.
Both Colin Firth and Hugh Grant face the decade of their sixties with the professional and private successes and failures that life has been putting in their way and that now seems to have exchanged the roles for those who hooked up with a comedy,
Bridget's Diary Jones
, who changed the perspective on the sentimental crises of women around the world.