HUGH’S TURNING 60 ACTUALLY!
His life off screen has been almost as colourful as the one on it, but dashing Hugh Grant can still captivate us all
In the 1990s a film generally wasn’t considered a hit unless it had floppyhaired Hugh Grant in the leading role as a charming, if slightly bumbling bachelor.
Today, as he prepares to celebrate his 60th bir thday, those famous locks now neatly cropped and flecked with grey, Hugh is enjoying making a new name for himself with more dubious characters, from disgraced Liberal par ty leader Jeremy Thorpe, to an unscrupulous baddie in Paddington 2.
Off screen his life has also altered beyond recognition. When he first found fame in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral he was dating model Elizabeth Hurley. Hugh became an overnight hear tthrob, but just a year later he was embroiled in scandal after being arrested and charged with lewd conduct when Los Angeles police found him in his car with Hollywood prostitute Divine Brown.
His subsequent humble apology saw fans quickly forgive him and soon he had a new tag – that of a loveable rogue. From then, he dated a string of women, never settling down and never seeming keen to. “I don’t mind them for about four minutes,” he once said of babies. “After that I can’t see what ever yone’s fussing about.” Fast for ward 25 years and Hugh, now married with five children under the age of nine, has clearly joined in the fuss!
“Well, I was wrong, I was just plain wrong,” he admits of his bachelor days. “And children, you know, I used to roll my eyes. People would say, ‘Oh Hugh you don’t understand it’, but they were right. It is life-changing.”
There has however always been a touch of the unconventional about Hugh and middle-age has done nothing to change that. In 2011 he became a father for the first time to daughter Tabitha, after a fleeting affair with Tinglan Hong.
The following year he had a son John with Swedish television producer Anna Eberstein. But before the baby was even born he had reunited briefly with Tinglan, who gave bir th to his third child, another son Felix, the same year.
In 2015 he and Anna had their second child, a girl and in 2018, their third child was born, with the couple marr ying later that year.
“Having children is odd, isn’t it?” he muses. “It’s simultaneously the worst time of your life and the best, but when I look through my phone at photographs taken over the past few years, I realise that I have been extremely happy.”
Born in London, Hugh’s first major role came in 1987’s Merchant-Ivor y production Maurice. Several less successful par ts followed, and at 32 he was on the brink of giving it up when the script for Four Weddings and a Funeral landed on his doorstep.
It has become the biggest-grossing British film to date and Hugh revelled in
his screen image of a charming, selfdeprecating English gent. Success after success followed in films including Notting Hill, Love Actually and About a Boy.
There was a memorable role in Bridget Jones’s Diar y and he became a star in America in a series of comedies, such as Nine Months and Music and Lyrics.
But Hugh admits he now feels relief that those days are behind him, leaving him able to tackle new, darker and more challenging roles.
“I’ve got too old and ugly for romantic comedies, and thank God,” he says, with that trademark wr y grin. “I’m proud of those romantic comedies, but it’s lovely not to be a young, handsome leading man. These days I’m getting so many new challenges.”
These include his 2018 BAFTA and Emmy-nominated appearance as Jeremy Thorpe in BBC1’s A Ver y English Scandal, his first TV role for 25 years.
Now, as he approaches his 60s, Hugh says he hopes to continue playing increasingly complex characters and credits family life with his acclaimed per formances in recent years.
“Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve got better as an actor in the last six, ten years. Why?’,” he discloses. “Sometimes I think it may be the kids, because I can do love so well now. It’s touching, isn’t it? It’s a whole new feeling.”