Colin Firth And The Story Of The Canadian Son He Had While Living In A Cabin In The Woods In B.C.

If you were watching the Oscars last night, and saw Colin Firth's acceptance speech, you might have caught him saying something about there being Canadian blood in his family tree. Intrigued, we did a quick Googling.

According to what we cobbled together from Wikipedia and the Daily Mail anyway, Firth met one of the loves of his life in 1989 on the set of a film called Valmont. One of his co-stars was Meg Tilly, an up-and-coming actress who had already been in The Big Chill and earned her own Oscar nomination a couple of years earlier. She'd grown up in B.C. on an island in the Georgia Straight and she and Firth moved back to Canada once he'd won her over.  They settled into a log cabin on five acres of land on the side of a mountain, in the woods outside Vancouver, which is where they were living, it seems, when their son Will was born. That's him and his mum in the photo.

The family lived there for five years while Tilly and Firth tried to keep acting. But it was hard; he had to take on jobs as a freelance carpenter and ended up spending most of his time back in England doing movies and plays. Eventually, it was too much and they broke up. Within a year, he'd won the role of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and along with it the heart of pretty much every girl we've ever met.

Most of all, of course, he'd impress Liva Giuggiolo, the Italian film producer he's married to now—and who was there last night, cheering him on as he won the Oscar for kicking the pants off the role of stuttering King George VI.

Photo: Meg Tilly and Will Firth (from HollywoodOnlineTV) 

Thanks to @Miss_Kim for suggesting we look this up during our live chat of the Oscars last night.