Back in the mid-90s, shortly after I saw Four Weddings And A Funeral – when I, along with half the females in this country, developed a profound soft spot for Hugh Grant – I went to see the adaption of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure, purely because he starred in it. The rest of the cinema audience had clearly come for the same reason, and we all made a collective excitable giggle when he appeared on screen. But those giggles died down pretty fast, because this was no Four Weddings. Grant plays a predatory, charismatic gay theatre director named Meredith who callously toys with the minds of women and the bodies of men. “What he wants is hearts,” someone explains to one of Meredith’s devastated victims.
For too long, it seemed this was Grant’s problem: all he wanted was hearts. He was terrific in An Awfully Big Adventure, and yet afterwards he reverted to romantic comedy landfill, playing dippy Englishmen who had tics instead of personalities, with diminishing returns: Nine Months, Two Weeks Notice, Mickey Blue Eyes, Did You Hear About the Morgans? (No, and for good reason, too.) Richard Curtis tried to help by writing increasingly washed-out versions of the character he played in Four Weddings, resulting in the execrable Love Actually.
As of 2016, the only movies Grant had made in which he was clearly enjoying himself were the ones in which he played unlikable characters: Bridget Jones’s Diary, as the emotional fuckwit Daniel Cleaver; and About A Boy, as the emotionally stunted adult who lives off Daddy’s riches. But when you’re young(ish) and pretty, playing the villain means you are not the star. And anyway, the foppish English chap shtick worked so well for Grant that, even after he was arrested in 1995 for getting a blowjob from Divine Brown, a sex worker, he trotted out that character again when doing the US TV talkshow rounds – and prurient 90s America forgave him. So he continued to go for hearts.
Soon, Grant became as known for hating his job as he was for romcoms, peaking with the time in 2007 when he hurled what was described as “a family-sized tub of baked beans” at a paparazzo. There are few things more dull than a successful actor who is grumpily disdainful of his job, as Daniel Craig continues to prove; but with Grant his frustration was especially annoying to us fans, because it felt like a problem of his own making. Who knows, maybe his looks meant meatier roles weren’t open to him, or maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of taking second billing; whichever, he kept making movies he obviously couldn’t stand. As much as I enjoyed Music And Lyrics, his 2007 romcom with Drew Barrymore, he was operating not so much on autopilot as in a quasi-coma.
Which brings us to Grant’s deeply enjoyable renaissance, which continues this weekend with the second part of A Very English Scandal, the BBC’s excellent dramatisation of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, in which Grant plays the predatory, charismatic gay politician. Almost a quarter of a century later, Grant has at last been allowed to pick up where he left off with Meredith. Not so long ago, Grant was swearing off acting ever again, but in the past two years he has produced the best work of his life, starting with his excellent turn in Florence Foster Jenkins, as Meryl Streep’s devoted husband, followed by his even better one as the malevolent Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2. For the first time in decades, Grant is enthusiastically embodying his characters. Maybe this is because he suddenly produced five children in the space of seven years (and is now due to marry the mother of three of them), and realised he had to stop dicking around and earn some money. Or maybe it’s because his once merely handsome face is now more interesting, so he’s getting better parts (a privilege, it has to be said, not afforded to women). Probably it’s a bit of both.
It took teaming up with Alfred Hitchcock for Cary Grant to show that the same qualities that made him such a convincing romantic lead – the charm, the suavity, the persistence, the unknowability – could be turned into something decidedly more sinister. Hugh Grant knew this all along; he was just waiting for someone to let him prove it. In A Very English Scandal, he has finally got the role he’s been working towards all his life: the most English actor since Cary Grant – one who understands how to capture the lightness of this country, but also its darkness.