Actor: Colin Firth

Colin Firth won Best Actor for The King’s Speech, playing George VI working with a speech therapist, and the performance is built on the physical reality of a stammer instead of a representation of one.

A Single Man brought the previous nomination, playing a man planning his suicide over one day, and it is the better performance.

Pride and Prejudice on television made him famous in a way he found difficult, and Bridget Jones’s Diary then made a joke of it with his cooperation.

Kingsman gave him a late action register nobody expected, and he trained for months for the church sequence.