THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF PADDINGTON 2 STAR HUGH GRANT
FOUR WEDDINGS AND FUNERAL
Grant’s breakthrough role came playing posh totty in the Richard Curtis smash-hit, though the casting was not exactly to type — he was actually born into a solidly middle-class family with military connections, the son of a teacher and an artist. His creative father was also a sometime carpet salesman. Good at school, he won a scholarship to Oxford but jettisoned a promising academic career in History of Art to pursue acting. He’d notched up a respectable CV, with highlights including the Polanski-directed Bitter Moon, when he got his big break playing the bumbling, stuttering love interest of Andie MacDowell in the British rom-com. He famously turned up to the premiere in 1994 with his then girlfriend Liz Hurley on his arm wearing a teasingly revealing Versace evening gown held together by gold safety pins, igniting a media frenzy and turning Hurley into an overnight star.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY
In 1995, Hugh was at the centre of a tabloid scandal when he was caught by police with the prostitute Divine Brown. In the uproar that followed, it looked like his career playing sweet-and-shy romantic heroes was torpedoed for good. But Grant successfully turned a crisis into an opportunity, parlaying the decidedly sleazy tone that had come to characterise his public image into a string of roles in which he played dishevelled bad-boys, most famously as the incorrigible Daniel Cleaver in
Bridget Jones’s Diary — a shameless cad who wants to strip Bridget of her granny pants but never commit to her. He was the perfect foil to Colin Firth as the distant but decent Mr Darcy.
MUSIC AND LYRICS
“Enjoyably empty-headed fluff”, wrote one critic, but by the time Grant’s turn at yet another commitment-phobe rolled into cinemas in 2007 (this time opposite Drew Barrymore), it was starting to look like these performances were phoned in. “He is like a complete cynic, self-tortured and dark,” Barrymore said of her experience working with him at the time. “You’d go into his trailer and he’d be sitting there on the couch, chopping salad alone, an angry Englishman.” Grant showed up to the premiere in London looking gloomy with his then girlfriend, the British heiress Jemima Khan, on his arm. They split “amicably” shortly afterwards, and over the following few years, Hugh fathered four children with two girlfriends, Anna Eberstein and Tinglan Hong, who at one point were pregnant by the actor at the same time.
PADDINGTON 2
After a string of rom-coms, Grant was ready to quit acting. He spent the first part of this decade focused on other concerns, such as press reform. Last year, however, he returned with a bang in the critically-acclaimed Florence Foster Jenkins. In early scripts of Paddington 2, the character of Phoenix Buchanan, a faded West End star who has resorted to dog food ads, was actually written as Hugh Grant, so convinced was Paul King that Grant was the perfect man to play the role. With amusing self-mockery, Grant’s hilarious turn is a dazzling return to form.