Naked truth of Colin Firth playing a sodden Mr Darcy

COLIN Firth may have caused even more of a stir in Pride and Prejudice if he'd stuck to the script and taken his gear off.

Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice

COLIN Firth's emergence from a lake in a sodden shirt in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice transformed the actor into a sex symbol and became so embedded in the public mind that it was recently recreated by a statue in Hyde Park.

The scene, however, might have caused even more of a stir if it had remained faithful to the script. Andrew Davies said that he wrote it so that Firth's character, Mr Darcy, would be naked. "The wet-shirt scene was intended to be a total full-frontal nudity scene because that's how guys went bathing in those days," he told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. "Darcy was a natural man but he spent all this time being constrained by polite society. He could have a few hours when he would be blissfully alone. I thought he would strip completely off and become an animal just for once. It may have been something about Colin's anxiety about his love handles or something." Firth's agent was not immediately available for comment. The screenwriter, whose most recent screenplay is a six-hour adaptation of War and Peace for the BBC, said that he was not told about the script change. "It leads to funny things like sitting next to one another, one of them soaking wet, and neither of them mentioning it." Speaking afterwards, he said that he never found out why the scene was changed. "But it's kind of nice that it turned out the way it did. The whole thing would have been different. I suspect we wouldn't have have been allowed to get away with full frontal. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't." Davies, who is also preparing a drama about Dylan Thomas for the centenary of his birth next year, said that he often has to negotiate with the BBC about swear words.   The Times