 The pair met on the set of the 1995 movie, Nostromo, and married two years later. The couple have two sons, Matteo, born in August last year, and three-year-old Luca. Firth also has another 13-year-old son, Will, who lives in America with his mother, actress Meg Tilly. "My life revolves around my family," he says. "But, obviously you do wonder if you're giving them enough time." It's a particular worry for the hard-working star, who says he becomes "completely absorbed" in his roles, and none more so than his latest. In Trauma (pictured), he plays a man who enters a nightmare world after waking from a coma to discover his wife, Elisa (Naomie Harris) has been killed in a car crash. Firth's character, Ben, owns an ant farm and, though it meant sharing his scenes with dozens of creepy crawlies, the star took it in his stride. "I'm no great lover of them, but I'm not phobic," he says of the spiders and ants. "I think I just have a fairly normal revulsion to being covered in ants. I got to quite like the spider actually," he adds with a smile. Happily, his next bunch of co-stars are far more pleasing on the eye. Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Firth are all reprising their roles in the eagerly-awaited Bridget Jones sequel, The Edge Of Reason. And though he can't say too much about the film, he does reveal that fans are in for a treat. "The script is very, very funny," he smiles. "It's strange, but I don't actually remember even signing up for a sequel, but somehow I seemed to have ended up in it. "I think myself and Hugh would have been the bad guys if we hadn't have agreed to do it. "But though a sequel is fraught with danger and most of us were sceptical about doing another Bridget Jones, any fears we did have were allayed the minute Renee opened her mouth," he laughs. "I thought, 'She's great. This is going to be fun', and it is." And whether he likes it or not, the next Bridget Jones instalment won't do anything to dent that sexy image he's desperately trying to shake off. But he should count himself lucky. If the Pride And Prejudice programme-makers had had their way, we would have seen a whole lot more of Mr Darcy. "I still find it amusing that what the public doesn't know is that the original screenplay for Pride And Prejudice called for Mr Darcy to jump into the pond nude," he reveals with a chuckle. "But of course, we couldn't do that because it was for the BBC on Sunday evening." | 
