Helena Bonham-Carter is convinced her co-star Colin Firth will win this year’s Oscar for Best Actor. Even the bookies have him as the odds-on red-hot favourite to scoop the honour for his performance as George VI in The King’s Speech.
It would be a career-crowning moment for 50-year-old Firth, who is expected to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles with his wife Livia Giuggioli, a striking Italian brunette who is the mother of their two children, Luca and Matteo. Theirs is a sweet love story. He fell in love with Livia ‘at first sight’ on the set of the TV dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo 15 years ago. He was the star and she a production assistant.
But the actor’s new-found acclaim will also be celebrated by another woman. Now living a life of sometimes eccentric seclusion in rural Canada, this is the love that Colin Firth left behind as he rose to fame. Former actress Meg Tilly, also 50, was for five years Firth’s partner, and although they never married, both thought they were the love of each other’s lives.
The pair met in 1989, and for a long time they lived together in her long cabin, with no television, deep in the woods of British Columbia. At the time, Meg was one of the more intoxicating big-screen beauties, Oscar-nominated for her role in the film Agnes Of God, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Today she shuns the limelight, preferring to bake pies and write books. Her hair is streaked with grey, and she often complains that she is stouter than she would like to be. Her husband, Don Calame, is a genial but unglamorous type who writes fiction for adolescents. She hardly ever talks about Firth, apart from to say that they ‘remain friends’. Indeed, few of her neighbours have any idea of their connection.
But they are connected for life through their son Will, now a young man of 21. On her online blog, Tilly writes of her joy at Firth’s success this week at the Golden Globes. ‘Our happy hats off to a member of the family,’ she says. ‘We are so pleased for you! Hearty jigs are being danced. Tonight, we shall all lift a glass of wine to toast your continued success! Jubilant hugs and kisses from all of us. Onward and upward!’
So, what is the truth about the woman who once captivated Colin Firth? And why did he walk away from his infant son, and from the love of this intense, delicate-featured woman?
Meg Tilly’s many friends in her small fishing village just north of Vancouver are very protective of her. Her life before Firth, though, was disturbing and tough. She grew up poor in rural Canada — so poor that she remembers eating a squirrel, finding it frustratingly bony. Once, when desperate for food, she even cooked rattlesnake.