arthur blake

It's a familiar script. The United States Davis Cup team is favored to beat Sweden on fast indoor carpet in this weekend's best-of-five semifinals on the road.


The visitors boast two top 10 players and the world's best doubles team. The injury-riddled home team is minus its top singles player and may have to tap a guy who hasn't played since January, not to mention throwing a 35-year-old veteran into both singles and doubles.

The result would seem like a foregone conclusion, except that anyone who's up on history knows what previous U.S. teams have discovered, to their sorrow, in Gothenburg.

Three times in the past 23 years, a U.S. team that outranked its opponents -- and was expected to outplay them -- has marched into the lyrically-named Scandinavium Arena in this picturesque port city on the west coast of Sweden, only to emerge dazed, battered and beaten.

Todd Martin, who played on two of those teams, said Sweden always poses a formidable challenge even when fielding a less than stellar squad. "They've always had great unity, and the crowd supports them mightily," he said. "I think that's infectious."

AP Photo/Chuck Burton

James Blake is just 4-5 in Davis Cup matches played outside the United States.
U.S. captain Patrick McEnroe and his tight-knit gang of four aim to exorcise the ghosts of Gothenburg and take another step toward breaking what threatens to be a record 12-year drought in Davis Cup titles.

"We have a lot of respect for Sweden, for their players," McEnroe told reporters Tuesday. "We know they play well in Davis Cup, especially. But, you know, what happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I think, is pretty irrelevant to this team and these guys."

Andy Roddick, James Blake and Bob and Mike Bryan do have one important distinction from past U.S. teams that came to grief here -- chemistry. They are close off the court, and all four have given McEnroe a blank check in terms of their availability. That's a marked contrast from sometimes reluctant and occasionally fractious groups of 1984, 1994 and 1997.

Roddick has missed only one Davis Cup weekend in McEnroe's seven-year tenure, that was due to injury; Blake has been a stalwart in the past three years; and the Bryan brothers lobbied heavily to be named to the team, a tactical move that has paid off in their 11-1 record despite the fact that their presence deprives McEnroe of keeping a third pure singles player in reserve.

"Togetherness" is the team's greatest asset, McEnroe said earlier this month when he named the roster. "I think it's their commitment and their energy," he said. "They just love being there. They love being with each other. They bring that kind of passion every time."

That kind of blanket statement hasn't always been true.

In 1984, captain Arthur Ashe finally persuaded Jimmy Connors to play for an entire year on the same squad as Davis Cup devotee John McEnroe -- an apparently winning, if not entirely amiable, combination.

But the weekend turned nightmarish when the American singles players went down in the Davis Cup final in Gothenburg on indoor clay without winning a set and behaved so boorishly that Ashe felt compelled to write an apologetic open letter to The Washington Post afterwards. McEnroe and Peter Fleming, the most successful doubles tandem in U.S. Davis Cup history, lost the decisive match.

Jimmy Arias, a 20-year-old practice partner on that ill-fated team, said this week that his memories of the event are of darkness and fatigue.



"It was December, and there was basically about one hour of light," Arias said. "McEnroe and Connors wouldn't practice together, and no one wanted to practice with Fleming, and the other practice partner was Aaron Krickstein. He had a stress fracture in his foot and couldn't practice, but Arthur wanted to bring him because he was the next one coming up. So I was practicing six hours a day, and I spent the whole time comatose."

Martin played on the team that lost in Gothenburg in the 1994 semifinals -- when the U.S. team unbelievably blew a 2-0 lead -- and the 1997 team that went down with shocking ease there in the final despite bringing the No. 1 and No. 3 players in the world, Pete Sampras and Michael Chang. "I can take credit for all duds in Sweden," Martin said jokingly on Tuesday.

With all due respect to Martin, the losses probably hinged more on a bizarre coincidence involving Sampras, who frequently had to be cajoled to play by then-captain Tom Gullikson during his peak years in the 1990s. Sampras was forced to default in midmatch twice, three years apart -- once with a hamstring injury (1994) and once with a pulled calf muscle (1997).

Injuries have limited Swedish captain Mats Wilander's options this time around. The fiercely competitive No. 33 Robin Soderling is out with wrist problems, leaving the ageless Jonas Bjorkman as the top-ranked player (No. 55) from his country.

Thomas Johansson is just behind him in the ATP charts but is 0-7 against Roddick and Blake lifetime, leaving open the possibility that Wilander will play the big-serving Joachim "Pim-Pim" Johansson(no relation to Thomas) instead. The only problem with that scheme is that Joachim, who had shoulder and elbow operations in 2005, has played just 13 matches over the last two seasons. He's coming off an eight-month injury rehab and hasn't played since the Australian Open.

Simon Aspelin just won the U.S. Open doubles title -- with Austrian partner Julian Knowle -- and his team beat the Bryans on the way to that title. Still, he is relatively untested in Davis Cup play and has not partnered much with Bjorkman because they favor the same side of the court.

Can the U.S. team's obvious camaraderie be a factor in solving the Scandinavium hex? Martin said he thinks it will, and speculated that all four players will be even more driven becaOff Colin Firth goes, darting around topics as unexpected as taking drugs, screwing up at school and flawed parenting. It's odd for such a famous actor to be so candid, and even odder to find a star better looking off screen than he is on � old-school rugged, softly spoken and mahogany-brown after filming the big-screen version of Mamma Mia! in Greece. The 47-year-old actor didn't like Abba: "Like most boys it wasn't my thing. I was 14 in 1974 and fancied girls to death."

Firth's confessional mood echoes his role as Blake Morrison in the film version of Morrison's autobiographical memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which evoked the relationship between Morrison and his domineering father, Arthur. In this moving, quietly powerful film Firth and Jim Broadbent, as Arthur, have just the right kind of double-edged intimacy.

Arthur couldn't be more different from Firth's "quiet, unassuming" father. "But I was a surly, pretentious adolescent, like Blake's portrait of himself. My father and I were not close in a cosy sense but I am as connected with my father as Blake was with his. The difference is my animosity with my dad was left behind in my teens. But, even now, three seconds in my parents' company and a tone of voice or trigger will bring me back to being 15."

Firth was born in Hampshire, then moved to Nigeria where his father taught. His parents have always been "eternal students" and it is a close family, he says. Firth lost his first grandparent (his grandfather, whom he was close to) at 35. "It was a shock," he says, "some part of me finding out we weren't immortal in my family."

The family returned to the UK when he was small and Firth struggled to fit in schools in Bath and Essex. "Accents were an issue," he recalls, grimacing. "It was a shock to hear aitches being dropped. I felt like a freak speaking with the accent I had. So I changed it and only started to speak like this when I was in the sixth form."

He lived in America for a year when he was 12. "I feel quite strongly about antiAmericanism. I share people's grievances about the current Administration but I remember my father and I watching the Watergate hearings. Here was a country arraigning its own leaders. America has a fantastic history of dissent."

Something went awry in Firth's teenage years. "I loathed authority but was frightened of it. My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn't smash windows or get into fights � if I did I was strictly on the receiving end. Like Blake, I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky. It wasn't Hardy or Austen for me, but Camus. I grew my hair long, pierced my ears and then got slightly stranded by the punk thing."

He loved music and joined "a not terribly good band" doing Doors covers. (A Gram Parsons fan, he nevertheless vociferously denies being a "dad rock nostalgic" and name-checks Wilco and Lambchop.) He also started to write, although "there comes a point," he says gently, "when unless you practise something you have to classify it as a fantasy, but I do think there are worse writers than me who have published novels." (Acting and writing are linked "because I quite like to do what I do to hide � by obscuring yourself you can reveal something".)

Firth Sr could cope with the long hair but not Firth's "bad choice" of friends. There was a charismatic hard nut at school who led Firth astray. Or "the misdemeanours that go along with wanting to be rock-and-roll and hippy, the music festivals, staying out late." Drinking? "I was a bit naughty in that respect," he says. Drugs? Firth looks stricken. "I'm not at liberty to go into detail about such misdemeanours. Yeah, it was all the usual stuff. If Labour Cabinet ministers can confess to some of those things, I probably can as well." How did your father find out about the drugs? Did you smoke cannabis at home? "Nahhhuhhhh," Firth mutters. "It was a whole series of things and was as much as to do with what he suspected. It wasn't one incident." The worst rows with his father "were about washing dishes and homework. There wasn't a massive meltdown," he insists.

But his teenage rebellion was concerted. "I would have gone to university had I not allowed myself to be derailed into moody adolescent laziness. I liked to characterise it then as a defiant decision to resist the system. But I was just resistant to schoolwork. If someone wanted me to read Shakespeare, I wanted to read Thomas Mann. If someone tried to make me listen to Brahms, I had to listen to Hendrix." On the morning of A-level retakes, "I thought, 'F*** it' and went back to bed, it felt like a treadmill I didn't want to be on." Firth pitched up, "like Dick Whittington", in London wanting to act and he got a job at a theatre switchboard. He read Kafka in his cubbyhole, and "stared into the abyss", until he met a casting director who smoothed his way into drama school and then to a part in Julian Mitchell's Another Country.

Sudden fame "blew me away". He didn't get on with his co-star Rupert Everett though denies all reports of 20-plus years of simmering rivalry and resentment. "Rupert got on with very few people. He found us all ghastly, naive and bourgeois. I envied his confidence. I was intermittently flamboyant but felt outside [and he puts on an LA twang] my comfort zone." They have worked "very happily" since on The Importance of Being Earnest and � coming in December � St Trinian's.

His looks and upper-class, ruffled demeanour meant he graduated from playing posh schoolboys to posh older men. There were appearances in A Month in the Countryand a controversial Falklands drama, Tumbledown. But Firth's life really changed when he emerged, sodden-shirted, from the lake as Mr Darcy in the BBC's 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The screenwriter Andrew Davies recently revealed the plan had been for Darcy to be naked. Firth had "a bit of the usual tension about getting your kit off" but thinks it remained sexy because we "rerobed, not disrobed, Austen".

He groans at the very mention of Darcy, whom he regards as "a part-time burden. It got my name recognised but it also put me in a box. Things were going well; I was building a diverse working life."

Darcy made him feel "a bit of a star" (he smiles pleasurably at that thought), his wife Livia Giuggioli would greet the sight of him dishevelled every morning with an ironic, "Oh look, it's Mr Darcy". But, Firth says, "12 years on it feels like a school nickname you can't shake. It occurred to me the other day to change my name to Mr Darcy and be done with it." I laugh but he is serious, despite parlaying the Darcy image to his advantage in the Bridget Jones movies, playing Mark Darcy, much obsessed over by Helen Fielding's lead character.

"The frustration is anything I do not on a horse looks a stretch," says Firth, smiling yet serious. "When I did Fever Pitch, to get into my own jeans to play a guy living in North London where I lived, to play a character from my own background � people considered that a stretch."

Well, it's not that bad, I say. He's about to play a Roman commander in The Last Legion and there's a scene in And When Did You . . ? in which Blake masturbates in the bath. Firth shakes his head, smiles wearily. "Every single film since there's been a scene where someone goes, 'Well I think you've just killed Mr Darcy'. But he is a figure that won't die. He is wandering somewhere. I can't control him. I tried to play with it in Bridget Jones. I've never resented it � if it wasn't for him I might be languishing, but part of me thinks I should do this postmodern thing, change my name by deed poll to Mr Darcy. Then people can come up to me and say, 'But you are not Mr Darcy' which would be different. I dare say it will be my saving grace when the only employment available to me is opening supermarkets dressed in breeches and a wig."

Away from this half-jokey fretting, Firth is socially conscious. He has campaigned to stop the deportation of a group of asylum-seekers. He is the executive producer of a documentary at this year's Times BFI London Film Festival, In Prison My Whole Life, about Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who has spent more than 20 years on death row for the murder of a policeman. (Giuggioli is producer.)

Firth is clearly an intense thinker and considers everything � family, career, politics � quite deeply. Morrison's book made him pause before teasing his two younger children (he has three; a son, Will, by the actress Meg Tilly and two younger boys with Giuggioli). He jokingly agrees with "whoever said that when he upset his children he put a dollar in a jar for their future therapy".

Firth's own father is 73 and the Blake Morrison film "made me think we let our parents die with things unsaid", but he cannot imagine a relationship with his father where "everything has been resolved", even though they are close. Firth himself isn't sure if he is a good father � "I'm not going to be writing the review on that one" � but says he tries to make himself "available" to his children. He reveals that he squeezed himself "into a bourgeois life to reach a sense of being settled".

Why? "Serenity. When I was a teenager I romanticised the idea of artistically deranging oneself, whether it was a rock star f***ing himself up with drugs or Rimbaud's conscious disordering of the senses. Being sane was a tedious, suburban thing to be. Unfortunately it's not the brilliance, but rather the screwing up, that's easy to achieve."

He broods momentarily, agonises, looks down. "Acting messes with you. Whatever it is to seek that kind of attention is combined with the ability to play different characters � so there's something fractured there. You take a person like that, subject them to all the vicissitudes of praise and attack and critique and you are going to wreak havoc with people who aren't stable."

Is he talking about himself? "Yeah . . . I didn't go off the deep end. But it gets lonely. There came a time where I wanted to settle down. Excessive praise is like a drug but it doesn't stay around for long. People can't come with you while you're up your own a***. If you want to have any companionship you have to have a little bit of generosity." So he's created "new disciplines" to maintain close relationships.

This is said in a halting mumble. It reminds me of the gruff intimacy between Morrison and his father in the film � that particularly masculine trait of revealing something heartfelt by sounding as determinedly unheartfelt as you possibly can.

use they didn't gToronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- Adapted from the novel of the same name by Blake Morrison, "When Did You Last See Your Father?" is a stylishly appointed but monotonous relationship drama that keeps going around in the same, indulgent circles.

Director Anand Tucker does well by his seasoned British cast, but his warts-and-all portrait of a middle-aged man (Colin Firth) coming to terms with the terminal illness of his tough-to-love father (Jim Broadbent) proves to be as brooding and emotionally unavailable as its headstrong protagonists.

While the film, which was also shown in Telluride, could attract some of those who made the 1993 book a bestseller when it's released across the pond early next month, it will unlikely stand out among the season's awards contenders.

Morrison's confessional memoir is seen through the eyes of its 40-year-old author (Firth), whose lifelong, strained relationship with his doctor dad, Arthur (Broadbent) is explored in a series of flashbacks, triggered when Blake must confront the severity of his father's cancer.
What follows are alternating sequences in which a 14-year-old Blake (Matthew Beard) and an 8-year-old Blake (Bradley Johnson) are exposed to various incidents of Daddy behaving badly, be it humiliating him in front of the opposite sex or having a rather close relationship with Blake's "aunt" Beaty (Sarah Lancashire), while his wife (Juliet Stevenson) is busy maintaining their medical practice.

As choreographed by director Tucker ("Shopgirl," "Hilary and Jackie") and screenwriter David Nicholls ("Starter for 10"), all this flitting back and forth in time can get awfully repetitive after a while, and the episodic results have the unfortunate results of making Broadbent's imminent death feel interminable.

Grappling with such a tricky, internally focused character, the usually reliable Firth comes across a bit heavy on the morose side, here. You'll either find yourself empathizing with his burning resentment of his father's behavior or want to give him one of Cher's "Moonstruck" slaps and tell him to snap out of it.

Broadbent, meanwhile, manages to find the ultimate compassion in the elder Morrison, despite his obvious flaws; and Stevenson, playing quite a bit older than usual as his quietly accepting wife, turns in a customarily moving performance.

Technical aspects, including cinematographer Howard Atherton's picture postcard compositions and production designer Alice Normington's thoughtful, multi-period touches, provide an immediacy and warmth otherwise lacking in Tucker's dramatically austere approach.
o as deep into the recently-concluded U.S. Open as they might have liked.

"We had a few guys who didn't embrace Davis Cup, even though they played it," Martin said of his previous experiences. "This team handles all comers together. That can affect the team and the individual. These guys love to play and they've got scores to settle for themselves and the team."