‘I thought: “I’ve engineered the death of Hugh Grant!’’’ – the inside story of Four Weddings and a Funeral
It’s been 30 years since audiences first met Hugh Grant as a stuttering serial monogamist who falls hopelessly in love with a glamorous American (Andie MacDowell) in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The low-budget romcom, directed by Mike Newell and scripted by Richard Curtis, came out of nowhere to become a global hit when it was released in 1994.
Based on Curtis’s own experiences of being a guest at a seemingly endless merry-go-round of weddings, the film follows Grant’s sweary, bumbling Charles and his group of friends – which includes his deaf brother – as they navigate love, loss and grief. From the first “fuck” uttered by Grant as he wakes up late for a wedding in the opening scene, to Rowan Atkinson’s inept priest who is unable to get anyone’s name right, and Kristin Scott Thomas’s chain-smoking, aristocratic stoicism, it is a film that is at once hilarious and devastatingly sad.
The titular funeral made WH Auden’s poem Funeral Blues, with its haunting first line, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” so popular that a pamphlet of his poetry containing it sold more than 250,000 copies. Wet Wet Wet’s soundtrack cover of the Troggs’ Love Is All Around was No 1 in the UK for 15 consecutive weeks.
Four Weddings and a Funeral catapulted Grant to superstardom and was the launchpad from which Curtis went on to make a series of winning romcoms about the British upper-middleclass. Notting Hill – in which a hapless Grant again falls for a glamorous American, played by Julia Roberts, and Love Actually, with Grant as the prime minister, were also enormous successes. We look back with the cast and director of Four Weddings to find out how a cashstrapped production became such an enduring phenomenon.
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It’s early 1992. Mike Newell, director of the films Bad Blood, DanceWith a Stranger and Enchanted April, is about to meet his agent at the Independent Talent office in London. Richard Curtis, a comedy screenwriter and co-creator of the shows Blackadder and Mr Bean, has sent in a film script inspired by an 11