The miniseries that converted a generation of new readers to Austen and made Colin Firth, in a wet shirt, the universal screen Mr. Darcy.
| Jennifer Ehle | Elizabeth Bennet |
| Colin Firth | Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy |
| Susannah Harker | Jane Bennet |
| Crispin Bonham-Carter | Charles Bingley |
| Alison Steadman | Mrs. Bennet |
| Benjamin Whitrow | Mr. Bennet |
| David Bamber | Mr. Collins |
| Anna Chancellor | Caroline Bingley |
| Adrian Lukis | George Wickham |
| Julia Sawalha | Lydia Bennet |
| Barbara Leigh-Hunt | Lady Catherine de Bourgh |
| Lucy Robinson | Mrs. Hurst |
Episode 4. Darcy returns unexpectedly to Pemberley, has just dived into the pond, and meets Elizabeth in his wet shirt. The scene was Andrew Davies’s invention — not in the novel — and is now perhaps the single most-watched moment in any Austen adaptation. The shirt was sold at auction in 2003 for £3,500. The pond scene was filmed at Lyme Park in Cheshire.
The production used 24 National Trust properties and 8 studio sets. Lyme Park (Cheshire) provided Pemberley’s exterior; Sudbury Hall (Derbyshire) the interiors. Lacock village (Wiltshire) became Meryton. Luckington Court served as Longbourn.
Jennifer Ehle won the BAFTA for Best Actress; the production won the Emmy for Outstanding Costume Design and a Peabody Award. The British Film Institute later ranked it #99 on its list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.
10–11 million British viewers per episode; 3.7 million Americans watched the A&E premiere. The first 12,000 VHS copies sold within two hours of release; 200,000 within the first year — a record at the time for a BBC drama.
Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels are explicitly built around the Firth performance. The 2001 film of Bridget Jones’s Diary cast Firth as Mark Darcy partly as a winking acknowledgment. Firth would joke for years that the wet shirt followed him everywhere.
Most Austen scholars consider it the most faithful screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice: six hours of running time gives Davies the room to keep the novel’s pacing, its letter-reading, and even its minor characters intact in a way no two-hour film can.
See the full table of every screen version on the novel page itself.