the fop’s ( many) flops

As Hugh Grant is honoured by film bigwigs, our critic asks: have they seen this flock of turkeys?

tHE late Lord Attenborough, Lord Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness and Dame Peggy Ashcroft have something in common apart from their titles and prodigious acting talent: they were all honoured with Fellowships by the British Film Institute.

So were Sir David Lean, Sir John Mills, Sir Christopher Lee, Sir John Hurt, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench and plain Ken Loach.

It is the greatest honour the BFI can bestow and the list of Fellows doesn’t just embrace legendary British actors and film-makers. Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Al Pacino are on it, too. So, as of this week, is Hugh Grant. Even his biggest fans would surely have to concede that, in this company, he is a pygmy among giants. Yet handing him his award on Tuesday evening, producer Eric Fellner described Grant as ‘extraordinary’. BFI chairman Greg Dyke added the word ‘unique’.

An early girlfriend of Grant’s, Jody Tresidder, had a few other words for him. When they broke up, she made a list of them: they included ‘cowardly, atavistic, cretinous and feral’.

But let’s stick with ‘extraordinary’ and ‘unique’. In fairness, he’s both. To parlay his decidedly limited ability into considerable fame and fortune is indeed extraordinary. And he is manifestly unique; he’s the only actor honoured by the BFI who can’t actually act very well.

He knows it and so do his peers. In 2004, when Grant issued one of his periodic threats to quit the industry, Colin Firth (who has not, incidentally, been accorded the same exalted status by the BFI) responded: ‘We can only hope and pray.’

GRANT’S standard, onenote performance as a selfdeprecating, bumbling charmer does not, by the way, extend to real life. Last year, when U.S. talk show host and satirist Jon Stewart stepped down after 16 years on the influential The Daily Show, he identified Grant as his least-favourite guest.

‘And we’ve had dictators on the show,’ he added, recalling Grant’s diva-like behaviour in 2009, when the actor threw his weight around on screen and off, and complained bitterly about the quality of a clip Stewart had shown of his latest romcom, Did You Hear About The Morgans?

‘Well then, make a better f****** movie,’ said an exasperated Stewart.

It was an excellent point. But actually, since and for that matter before Four Weddings And A Funeral made a floppy-haired star of him more than 20 years ago, how many even averagely decent films has Grant been in?

For every Notting Hill, every Bridget Jones’ Diary, every Love Actually (all, like Four Weddings, written by Grant’s talisman, Richard Curtis), there have been lots of really dreadful clunkers.

And the last picture in which he starred, The Rewrite, barely limped into U.S. cinemas. He was once one of Britain’s most bankable film stars, yet he has gone from floppy to flop.

Moreover, where would Grant be without Curtis, and Fellner’s production company Working Title? Not joining Olivier and Attenborough on a roll of honour, that’s for sure.

Here are ten disasters — artistic, financial or both — that really should have given the BFI pause for thought before it devalued its Fellowship this week.