Hugh yoo, I’m back!
Grant returns, but in far more serious role
OVER THE YEARS Hugh Grant has swooned through his fair share of weddings and funerals.
Studios certainly fell in love with the British actor, who guaranteed ticket sales with his combination of self-deprecating humor, vulnerability and dapper looks. Serious cinema buffs proved more fickle.
“The people who wanted me were always the money people, much more than the important directors,” Grant told the Daily News about the rom-com heavy career before what many say is his best role to date in “Florence Foster Jenkins.”
“And so that I suppose, if I had any unit of success any metric it was how much money a film made. I was never in that whole other film world which is to do with prizes.”
That may change after director Stephen Frears (“The Queen,” “Philomena”) called to offer him an award-worthy role opposite Meryl Streep in the comic drama opening Aug. 12.
Now 55 and a father of three, Grant insists he’s semi-retired. But he may finally be nearing a divorce from type-casting.
“I got so involved with other things, particularly with politics in Britain, I’ve thought well, I’ve put show business behind me,” said Grant, who has been active in recent years lobbying for stricter press laws in the wake of the News Corp. phone hacking scandal.
“I’ve not sat there sweating and worrying about my career. . . ever.”
Based on a true story, “Jenkins” follows WWII-era New York socialite Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) as she tries an opera career, blissfully ignorant of her lack of talent.
As she nears her dream of singing at Carnegie Hall — for the troops return home from war, unaware of the shellshock to come — she’s enabled by her entourage. Chief of those dependents is her husband, St. Clair Bayfield, a British transplant crushed to have never hit acting stardom himself.
Grant says he was so terrified about sharing the screen with his three-time Oscar winning costar that he spent 15 months researching the real Bayfield’s diaries, archived at Lincoln Center.
“What became clear to me was for all his smooth sort of English aristocratic élan, he really deep down felt a failure,” Grant said.
“There it is in his letters, even after (Jenkins) died, he’s still writing to the top actors of the day, the top directors, saying, ‘I don’t know if you remember but we did a play together in Westchester and I heard you were doing “Macbeth” and if you had even the smallest part I’d be grateful.’”
With hits like “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (with Andie MacDowell, right) “Notting Hill” and “About a Boy” on his résumé, Grant is no failure — but the Oxford grad comes across in person as insecure as his character.
“I think he got bored of playing the anxious, foppish, posh Brit he plays ever so well, but perhaps because hasn’t been allowed to extend his range, he now has an anxiety about doing so,” said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, film critic for England’s Metro newspaper.
She compares her “under-rated” countryman to Cary Grant.
Grant, though, is a serial selfeffacer.
“My whole history of being an actor, is unusual and slightly disgraceful, because should something you burn to do,” he said.
When an agent first approached the then-amateur actor, he had been it be set to start an art history graduate degree, Grant certainly wasn’t burning to tread the boards. “I thought and actually I could do that for a year or two and then go and do this other degree,” recalled Grant, “so I said to the agent, ‘All right, I’ll do it for a year.’ “And one year turned into 35 years, largely because in those first jobs I was so much worse than I thought I was going to be. So I thought I would just do another one to show my friends and relations that I’m not that bad. And that’s really what’s propelled me on for 35 years.”
Even a veteran of four decades in the business is occasionally struck with awe. Particularly when filming a scene in London’s Evintim Apollo — which doubled for New York’s famous Carnegie Hall in the movie. Back when the theater was known the Hammersmith, a 9-year-old Grant used to watch movies in those seats.
“My brother and I used to smoke in the back room,” marveled Grant, “and here I’m standing on stage with Meryl Streep.”