Jane Austen's Men: Mr. Darcy

Men.

Sometimes we love them, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes the muscles start to look as tasty as ice cream cones. Sometimes they’re really cute and can make you smile.

And sometimes you just want to poke them with a stick to see how they’ll react.

With so many remakes of Jane Austen based movies over the years, Jane Austen fans have plenty of men to drool over. Take Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, for example. He’s hunky, seems reasonably intelligent, and has the good sense to fall in love with an intelligent, interesting, and spirited woman named Elizabeth Bennet. If I’m being perfectly honest, it doesn’t hurt that he had money in a time when money was scarce. His pride and prejudice make him seem at first like a bit of an ass, but when Elizabeth tells him off after his rather insultingly worded proposal he shapes up. Mostly.

There have been several actors that have portrayed Mr. Darcy through the years, even Laurence Olivier in an early wartime version. The quintessential, classic Mr. Darcy is Colin Firth (picture in the sidebar). Or maybe I should say that Colin Firth is Mr. Darcy. He starred in the A&E/BBC miniseries (which I have on DVD and videotape still) version of Pride and Prejudice.  After Elizabeth finally agrees to marry him, and he looks tenderly down at her and says “my dearest loveliest Elizabeth”, I melt into a little puddle, no matter how many times I've watched it. When Helen Fielding wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary, she had Colin Firth’s representation of Mr. Darcy in mind, so of course he was the only one who could be Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones movies. I don’t even know the name of the Mr. Darcy in the Keira Knightly version: that’s how completely forgettable he was (sorry, dude, whoever you are).