Cinema: Hugh Grant’s Sorry Now

It is life imitating art as Hugh Grant strides up the road toward a popular bar in the heart of London’s Notting Hill, the neighborhood, just around the corner from a travel bookstore suspiciously like the one he runs in Notting Hill, the movie. No cameras are rolling, no colorful extras mill about, but the sunglasses do little to disguise his identity, given that the rest of the Hugh Grant package–the blue shirt and khakis, the bounteous hair he repeatedly refers to as “floppy”–is reassuringly intact. And so is that Hugh Grant awkwardness; he somehow manages to walk straight past the restaurant before realizing his mistake, doubles back, comes in through a door with a sign on it advertising (What else?) Notting Hill and says sheepishly (How else?), “Sorry. You’d think I’d know how to get here.” No need, of course, to apologize. This is Hugh Grant. One can forgive him pretty much anything.

At least that’s what he and the Notting Hill team are banking on. A sort of sequel to Four Weddings and a Funeral, at the time of its 1994 release the most successful British film ever made, the new movie follows the first in only the following ways: both were written by the gifted comedy writer Richard Curtis; both star fabulously inaccessible (to Grant) American women–in this case Julia Roberts; both feature appealing groups of friends in varying states of lovelornness; and both allow Grant to be the most lovelorn of all, a romantic hero in the deer-in-headlights mode that made him so popular in the first place. As Four Weddings director Mike Newell puts it, “Everyone wants Hugh to be the charming, beautiful, bumbling guy they know from Four Weddings.” And on that, Notting Hill delivers.

But therein lies the Hugh Grant problem–for there’s been a bit of a problem. Even in a profession notable for its make-’em, break-’em lift-offs and plummets, Grant’s career has had a greater sizzle, louder fizzle than most. Can anyone remember what he has done since Four Weddings? There have been a few films, either financial flops, like Extreme Measures; mistakes, like Nine Months; or period dramas more memorable for the performances of others, like Sense and Sensibility. Oh, and there was his most unforgettable role of all–international whipping boy of 1995 after that “lewd act” with a certain Miss Divine Brown in a BMW off Sunset Boulevard.

After these experiences, Grant, now 38, appears to be older, wiser and more rueful–but only in an utterly boyish kind of way. Of Divine Brown–and the headlines like CAN HOLLYWOOD EVER FORGIVE HUGH?–Grant says, “The day after all that happened, the head of Disney was calling me up to beg me to be in 101 Dalmatians. Hollywood never had a problem with it.” Newell agrees: “People loved him, they forgave him. Once you’ve got that relationship with the [audience], they’re going to come and see you.”

The London-born, Oxford-educated Grant believes his rise, and hence his fall, was media generated. “This extraordinary Hugh Grant creation comes into existence and becomes more and more bizarrely different to me,” he says. “It’s this bungling, floppy-haired, upper-class twit–and I really don’t think that bears a resemblance to me, especially not with my new hair grease.” He runs his fingers through his hair for about the 80th time. “In the end all you can do is have a laugh.”

And go back to doing what comes naturally. After Notting Hill comes Mickey Blue Eyes, out in August from Simian Films, the production company he and his girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley formed in 1995. In this light comedy, produced by Hurley, he plays an art auctioneer who happens to fall in love with a New York mobster’s daughter (Jeanne Tripplehorn). The film allowed Grant and Hurley, in the name of research, to hang out with genuine Mob types in Brooklyn. “They really adored Elizabeth,” says Grant. “They say, ‘My name’s Uncle Mikey, if there’s anything I can do for you, anywhere in the world, you come to me.’ Some of these tabloid editors here should be looking over their shoulders.” And the role lets Grant hone his dazed-and-confused act. While he disputes that he has been typecast, he concedes that he is looking forward to working on the new Woody Allen film in July, in which he gets to play a villain.

Even there, though, his role is a “smoothie charmer,” for onscreen and off there is no getting away from the fact that Grant was born to be the perfect dinner-party companion; he flirts, he pays attention, he jokes about his “Austin Powers teeth,” he gives the term self-deprecating a whole new meaning. People forget, for instance, that before Four Weddings, he appeared in a string of what he calls “Europuddings”–but Grant is delighted to remind us. “I was always a champagne baron for some reason,” he says. “I did Judith Krantz’s Till We Meet Again. I was the villainous half-brother Bruno, who rapes Courteney Cox and steals all the family champagne and gives it to the Nazis–fantastic. And there’s a very good one based on the Barbara Cartland novel Cupid Rides Pillion. I was the highwayman. When I’m uncomfortable in a role, my voice goes high, so it’s quite amusing to see me jump out of the bushes with all my sexy gear on and say”–he squeaks–‘Stand and deliver!'”

He’s even happy to riff on his 12-year relationship with Hurley, the often scantily clad Valkyrie to whom he seems content to play the hapless chorus boy. “Elizabeth made me buy a house,” he confesses, “and we spent two years having idiot, pretentious, criminal bozos decorate it. It’s now completely hideous, and I’m quarreling with her because I don’t want to live there. The shower smells of dead people; I hate it.” Instead, he hangs out in their old flat around the corner. “I go there and watch the football and drink beer. But I think that’s healthy, isn’t it? Maybe not.”

For a man publicly adored for his boyishness, it must be hard to take on the trappings of adulthood. Perhaps that is why, despite signs of a comeback, Grant still pretends he is not fully committed to acting. “There’s the ever increasing prospect of just…stopping,” he says. “It would be such bliss.” He dreams of taking up writing again. In his lean years he wrote book reviews and comedy sketches; he even worked on a novel. “It was called Slack,” he says, “and it was about someone with no job, strangely enough.”

People who know Grant have heard this talk of quitting before. “He said that the first day I met him–that acting was no profession for an adult,” says Curtis. “Maybe it is bull____,” Grant admits, “but it is a sort of fantasy.” It is also the one thing that audiences would probably never forgive.