It was the scene that broke VHS tapes around the world - when Colin Firth, playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, walked out of a lake with his damp white blouse and stumbled upon his sharp-tongued love interest
But Mr Darcy has something they don’t: three key personality “dimensions” – warmth/loyalty, vitality/attractiveness, and status/resources – that a group of psychologists identified in 1999, as making up the “ideal” partner, says University of Sydney psychology lecturer Dr Rebecca Pinkus.proposes that we select these particular categories, in a mate, for evolutionary survival – as a way of ensuring that our genes are passed down.
In 1940, viewers pined for the Laurence Olivier version of Mr Darcy, seen here in that year's film adaptation with co-star Greer Garson, which was radically different from both Austen's book, and later versions, chiefly because he was far friendlier, and open. There is, she adds, “a certain universalism” to his appeal, explaining why both mothers and their daughters lust after him – often at the same time.
But then, Mr Darcy has been tasked with being the miraculous solution to huge social problems since his creation in 1813. “Jane Austen really lets him say very little in the course of the book, he’s sort of there, but doesn’t say a lot,” says Susannah Fullerton, president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, and the owner of a car number plate frame that reads, “I’d rather live at Pemberley”.
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