Hugh Grant

At 63 years old, Hugh Grant has this physical status:

After making his debut in the Oxford-financed film Privileged (1982), Grant dabbled in a variety of jobs, such as working as an assistant groundsman at Fulham Football Club, tutoring, writing comedy sketches for TV shows and working for Talkback Productions to write and produce radio commercials for products such as Mighty White bread and Red Stripe lager. At a screening of Privileged at BAFTA in London, he was approached by a talent agent offering to represent him. Still intending to begin his MPhil at the Courtauld Institute, Grant declined, but then later reconsidered, thinking that acting for a year would be a good way to save some money for his studies.

Soon afterwards he was offered a supporting role in The Bounty (1984) starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, but was prevented from playing the role because he didn't yet have an Equity card, which could only be earned through acting in regional theatre. To obtain his Equity card, he joined the Nottingham Playhouse and lived for a year at Park Terrace in The Park Estate in Nottingham. Richard Digby Day directed him in small roles at the Nottingham Playhouse in Lady Windermere's Fan, an avant-garde production of Hamlet and Coriolanus.

Bored with small acting parts, Grant created a sketch-comedy group called The Jockeys of Norfolk, a name taken from Shakespeare's Richard III, with friends Chris Lang and Andy Taylor. The group toured London's pub comedy circuit with stops at The George IV in Chiswick, Canal Cafe Theatre in Little Venice and The King's Head in Islington. The Jockeys of Norfolk proved a hit at the 1985 Edinburgh Festival Fringe after their sketch on the Nativity, told as an Ealing comedy, gained them a spot on Russell Harty's BBC2 TV show Harty Goes to .... In 1986 he played Eric Birling in a production of An Inspector Calls at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, directed by Richard Wilson, giving a performance that Grevel Lindop, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, described as "outstanding".

In 1985 and 1986, Grant had minor roles in eight television productions, including TV films, historical miniseries and single episodes of series. His first leading film role came in Merchant-Ivory's Edwardian drama film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster's novel. He and co-star James Wilby shared the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for their portrayals of lovers Clive Durham and Maurice Hall, respectively.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he balanced small roles on television with film work, which included playing Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere in the BAFTA Award-nominated White Mischief (1987) and a supporting role in The Dawning (1988) opposite Anthony Hopkins and Jean Simmons.

In 1988 he had a leading role in Ken Russell's horror film, The Lair of the White Worm. He was Lord Byron in a Goya Award-winning Spanish production called Remando al viento (1988) and portrayed legendary champagne merchant Charles Heidsieck in the television film Champagne Charlie (1989). In 1990 he had a small role in the sport/crime drama The Big Man, opposite Liam Neeson, in which Grant assumed a Scottish accent; the film explores the life of a Scottish miner (Neeson) who becomes unemployed during a union strike. In 1991 he played Julie Andrews' gay son in the ABC made-for-television film Our Sons. In 1991 he also starred as Frederic Chopin in Impromptu, opposite Judy Davis as his lover George Sand.

In 1992 he appeared in Roman Polanski's film Bitter Moon, portraying a fastidious and proper British tourist who is married but finds himself enticed by the sexual hedonism of a seductive French woman and her embittered, paraplegic American husband. The film was called an "anti-romantic opus of sexual obsession and cruelty" by The Washington Post. In 1993 he had a supporting role in the Merchant-Ivory drama The Remains of the Day.

Grant later jokingly called many of the productions of his early career "Europuddings, where you would have a French script, a Spanish director and English actors. The script would usually be written by a foreigner, badly translated into English. And then they'd get English actors in, because they thought that was the way to sell it to America."

At 32, Grant claimed to be on the brink of giving up the acting profession but was surprised by the script of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). "If you read as many bad scripts as I did, you'd know how grateful you are when you come across one where the guy actually is funny," he later recalled. Released in 1994 with Grant as the protagonist, Four Weddings and a Funeral became the highest-grossing British film to date with a worldwide box office in excess of $244 million, making him an overnight international star. His entry in The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema states:

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards and, among numerous awards won by its cast and crew, it earned Grant a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. It also temporarily typecast him as the lead character, Charles, a bohemian and debonair bachelor. Grant saw it as an inside joke that the star, due to the parts he played, was assumed to have the personality of the screenwriter (Richard Curtis), who is known for writing about himself and his own life. Grant later expressed:

In July 1994, he signed a two-year production deal with Castle Rock Entertainment and, by October, he became founder and director of the UK-based Simian Films Limited. He appointed his then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley, as the head of development to look for prospective projects. Simian Films produced two Grant vehicles in the 1990s and lost a bid to produce About a Boy to Robert De Niro's TriBeCa Productions. The company closed its US office in 2002 and Grant resigned as director in December 2005.

Before the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Grant had reunited with its director Mike Newell for the tragicomedy An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), which was labelled a "determinedly off-beat film" by The New York Times. He portrayed the supercilious director of a repertory company in post-World War II Liverpool. Critic Roger Ebert wrote, "It shows that he has range as an actor" but the San Francisco Chronicle disapproved on grounds that the film "plays like a vanity production for Grant". Janet Maslin, praising Grant as "superb" and "a dashing cad under any circumstances", commented, "For him this film represents the road not taken. Made before Four Weddings and a Funeral was released, it captures Mr. Grant as the clever, versatile character actor he was then becoming, rather than the international dreamboat he is today." His next role was as a cartographer in 1917 Wales in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995).

Grant's first studio-financed Hollywood project was opposite Julianne Moore in Chris Columbus's comedy Nine Months (1995). Though a hit at the box office, it was almost universally panned by critics. The Washington Post called it a "grotesquely pandering caper" and singled out Grant's performance, as a child psychiatrist reacting unfavourably to his girlfriend's unexpected pregnancy, for his "insufferable muggings". Grant himself has been highly critical of his performance in Nine Months, stating in a 2016 interview:

Next in 1995, he starred as Emma Thompson's suitor in her Academy Award-winning adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee. In 1995 he also performed in Restoration; Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote that Grant is "having a fine and liberating time playing a supercilious court portrait painter", and Kevin Thomas of Los Angeles Times said he has "some delicious moments" in the film.

He made his debut as a film producer with the 1996 thriller Extreme Measures. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel each gave the film three out of four stars, with Siskel writing "Hugh Grant's work in Extreme Measures is a refreshing standout."

After a three-year hiatus, in 1999 he paired with Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, which was written by Richard Curtis and produced by much of the same team that was responsible for Four Weddings and a Funeral. This new Working Title production displaced Four Weddings and a Funeral as the biggest British hit in the history of cinema, with earnings equalling $363 million worldwide. As it became exemplary of modern romantic comedies in mainstream culture, the film was also received well by critics. CNN reviewer Paul Clinton said, "Notting Hill stands alone as another funny and heartwarming story about love against all odds." Reactions to his Golden Globe-nominated performance were varied, with Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek criticising that, "Grant's performance stands as an emblem of what's wrong with Notting Hill. What's maddening about Grant is that he just never cuts the crap. He's become one of those actors who's all shambling self-caricature, from his twinkly crow's feet to the time-lapsed half century it takes him to actually get one of his lines out." The film provided both its stars a chance to satirise the woes of international notoriety, most noted of which was Grant's turn as a faux-journalist who sits through a dull press junket with what The New York Times called "a delightfully funny deadpan".

Grant also released his second production output, a fish-out-of-water mob comedy Mickey Blue Eyes, that year. It was dismissed by critics, performed modestly at the box office and garnered its actor-producer mixed reviews for his starring role. Roger Ebert thought, "Hugh Grant is wrong for the role [and] strikes one wrong note and then another", whereas Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said, "If he'd been on the Titanic, fewer lives would have been lost. If he'd accompanied Robert Scott to the South Pole, the explorer would have lived to be 100. That's how good Hugh Grant is at rescuing doomed ventures."

While promoting Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks (2000) on NBC's The Today Show in 2000, Grant told host Matt Lauer, "It's my millennium of bastards". Small Time Crooks starred Grant, in the words of film critic Andrew Sarris, as "a petty, petulant, faux-Pygmalion art dealer, David, [who] is one of the sleaziest and most unsympathetic characters Mr. Allen has ever created". In a role devoid of his comic attributes, The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Grant deftly imbues his character with exactly a perfect blend of charm and nasty calculation." In 2000, Grant also joined the supervisory board of IM Internationalmedia AG, the powerful Munich-based film and media company.

In 2001, his turn as a charming but womanising book publisher Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones's Diary was proclaimed by Variety to be "as sly an overthrow of a star's polished posh – and nice – poster image as any comic turn in memory". The film, adapted from Helen Fielding's novel of the same name, was an international hit, earning $281 million worldwide. He was, according to The Washington Post, fitting as "a cruel, manipulative cad, hiding behind the male god's countenance that he knows all too well".

In 2002, Grant's "immaculate comic performance" (BBC) as the trust-funded womaniser, Will Freeman, in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's best-selling novel About a Boy received raves from critics. Almost universally praised, with an Academy Award-nominated screenplay, About a Boy (2002) was determined by The Washington Post to be "that rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishised coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings". Rolling Stone wrote, "The acid comedy of Grant's performance carries the film [and he] gives this pleasing heartbreaker the touch of gravity it needs", while Roger Ebert observed that "the Cary Grant department is understaffed, and Hugh Grant shows here that he is more than a star, he is a resource". Released a day after the blockbuster Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, About a Boy was a more modest box office grosser than other successful Grant films, making all of $129 million globally. The film earned Grant his third Golden-Globe nomination, while the London Film Critics Circle named Grant its Best British Actor and GQ honoured him as one of the magazine's men of the year 2002. "His performance can only be described as revelatory", wrote critic Ann Hornaday, adding that "Grant lends the shoals layer upon layer of desire, terror, ambivalence and self-awareness." The New York Observer concluded: "[The film] gets most of its laughs from the evolved expertise of Hugh Grant in playing characters that audiences enjoy seeing taken down a peg or two as a punishment for philandering and womanising and simply being too handsome for words-and with an English accent besides. In the end, the film comes over as a messy delight, thanks to the skill, generosity and good-sport, punching-bag panache of Mr. Grant's performance." About a Boy also marked a notable change in his boyish look. Now 41, he had lost weight and also abandoned his trademark floppy hair. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman took note of Grant's maturation in his review, saying he looked noticeably older and that it "looked good on him". He added that Grant's "pillowy cheeks are flatter and a bit drawn, and the eyes that used to peer with 'love me' cuteness now betray a shark's casual cunning. Everything about him is leaner and spikier (including his hair, which has been shorn and moussed into a Eurochic bed-head mess), but it's not just his surface that's more virile; the nervousness is gone, too. Hugh Grant has grown up, holding on to his lightness and witty cynicism but losing the stuttering sherry-club mannerisms that were once his signature. In doing so, he has blossomed into the rare actor who can play a silver-tongued sleaze with a hidden inner decency."

He was paired with Sandra Bullock in Warner Bros.'s Two Weeks Notice (2002), which made $199 million internationally but received poor reviews. The Village Voice concluded that Grant's creation of a spoiled billionaire fronting a real estate business was "little more than a Britishism machine".

Two Weeks Notice was followed by the 2003 ensemble comedy, Love Actually, headlined by Grant as the British Prime Minister. A Christmas release by Working Title Films, the film was promoted as "the ultimate romantic comedy" and accumulated $246 million at the international box office. It marked the directorial debut of Richard Curtis, who told The New York Times that Grant adamantly tempered the characterisation of the role to make his character more authoritative and less haplessly charming than earlier Curtis incarnations. Roger Ebert claimed that "Grant has flowered into an absolutely splendid romantic comedian" and has "so much self-confidence that he plays the British prime minister as if he took the role to be a good sport". Film critic Rex Reed, on the contrary, called his performance "an oversexed bachelor spin on Tony Blair" as the star "flirted with himself in the paroxysm of self-love that has become his acting style".

In 2004, he reprised his role as Daniel Cleaver for a small part in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, which, like its predecessor, made more than $262 million commercially.

Gone from the screen for two years, Grant next re-teamed with Paul Weitz (About a Boy) for the black comedy American Dreamz (2006). Grant starred as the acerbic host of an American Idol-like reality show where, according to Caryn James of The New York Times, "nothing is real ... except the black hole at the centre of the host's heart, as Mr. Grant takes Mr. Cowell's villainous act to its limit". American Dreamz failed financially but Grant was generously praised. He played his self-aggrandising character, an amalgam of Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest, with smarmy self-loathing. The Boston Globe proposed that this "just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant", and critic Carina Chocano said, "He is twice as enjoyable as the preening bad guy as he was as the bumbling good guy."

In 2007, he starred opposite Drew Barrymore in a parody of pop culture and the music industry called Music and Lyrics. The Associated Press described it as "a weird little hybrid of a romantic comedy that's simultaneously too fluffy and not whimsical enough". Though he neither listens to music nor owns any CDs, Grant learned to sing, play the piano, dance (a few mannered steps) and studied the mannerisms of prominent musicians to prepare for his role as a has-been pop singer, based loosely on Andrew Ridgeley, member of 1980s pop duo Wham!. The film, with its revenues totalling $145 million, allowed him to mock disposable pop stardom and fleeting celebrity through its washed-up lead character. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Grant strikes precisely the right note with regard to Alex's career: He's too intelligent not to be a little embarrassed, but he's far too brazen to feel anything like shame."

In 2009, he starred opposite Sarah Jessica Parker in the Marc Lawrence's romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans?, which was a critical failure and box office disappointment.

Grant was featured in the Wachowskis' and Tom Tykwer's epic science fiction film Cloud Atlas in 2012, playing six different dark characters. In the same year, Grant lent his voice to the Aardman stop motion animation The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. He reunited with Lawrence again for a dramedy film The Rewrite (2014), starring opposite Marisa Tomei. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews, while Grant's performance was praised by many critics; director Quentin Tarantino has stated that the film is one of his favourites of the year and called Grant a "perfect leading man".

In 2015, he had a supporting role as Alexander Waverly in Guy Ritchie's crime thriller The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Entertainment Weekly described his performance as "the only bit of fun" in the film, and Glenn Kenny of Rogerebert.com gave the film a mixed review but stated that "while it can't be said that Hugh Grant saves the movie, his return to prominence in the last half-hour, after a plot-seeding-walk-on earlier in the movie, peps things up considerably".

In 2016, Grant played St. Clair Bayfield, partner of the title character, in the film Florence Foster Jenkins, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Meryl Streep. His performance drew raves from film critics as "career-best" (Screen International), "one of his best performances in years" (Indiewire), "best work of his career" (Variety) where he "goes deeper, darker and riskier" (Rolling Stone). Rafer Guzman of Newsday said "Surely the 55-year-old actor has just sealed his first-ever Oscar nomination." Carrie Rickey of Yahoo! Movies commented that Grant "deserves the Globe, an Oscar nomination, and the recognition — finally — that he is unique and irreplaceable among modern actors". He was nominated for his first individual Screen Actors Guild Award and also earned nominations for a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Critics' Choice Award, a Satellite Award and a European Film Award. Several critics put his work among the best acting performances of the year. Most award pundits predicted Grant would receive his first Academy Award nomination for his performance, but he was not nominated.

His next appearance was as Phoenix Buchanan, a villain in the family film Paddington 2, which was a commercial and critical success. The Guardian described his performance as "scene-stealing", while IGN commented "Grant continues to make an astonishing comeback in his career, once again by playing into his expert comedic abilities as Phoenix Buchanan, who dons each of his ridiculous disguises with a kind of egotistical obliviousness that Grant is perfect at pulling off." Grant went on to win London Film Critics' Circle Award for Supporting Actor of the Year and was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance. Grant's performance was ranked as the 22nd greatest movie performance of the decade by IndieWire in 2019.

In 2018, Grant returned to television screens after 25 years, as Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC One miniseries A Very English Scandal, which marked his second collaboration with director Stephen Frears. The miniseries, and in particular Grant, were widely and highly praised. Digital Spy's review stated that "There's always been a bit of the devil in Grant's best turns, and in Thorpe, a man with a fully-realised dark side, he's found his richest part in years". The New Statesman wrote, "Hugh Grant is Thorpe, and everything about his performance is exactly so. It's the role of Grant's life, and he performs it even more brilliantly than he did Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2." The Sunday Times stated, "It's become tediously predictable to praise this drama but, as Thorpe, Hugh Grant really has proved he's getting better as he's getting older". The Guardian called him "utterly captivating", and The Boston Globe wrote, "Grant is a revelation". The New Yorker stated, "Hugh Grant gives a brilliant performance as Thorpe, whose arrogance, charm, and profoundly evasive nature he captures with subtlety. A quarter century after Grant established himself as everyone's crush with his romantic-comedy début, in Four Weddings and a Funeral ... the actor, who is now in his late fifties, has turned out to have a gift for conveying what happens to an individual when charm curdles into something considerably darker." For his performance, Grant was nominated for several awards, including the Primetime Emmy Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Golden Globe Award, British Academy Television Award.

In 2019, Grant played another against-type role, in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen, his second collaboration with the director following The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Grant plays Fletcher, a seedy and unscrupulous private investigator, which he called "a fun bit of casting" referring to his Hacked Off campaigning. He has stated he based his character on tabloid reporters who "used to be my enemies and now they're my friends". Even though the film received mostly mixed reviews, Grant's performance was praised. Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter called Grant "a beating comic heart" of the film, adding that "he weighs up every wry line with relish, and Ritchie makes strong use of his deadpan comic talents." Joe Morgenstern of Wall Street Journal also highly praised his work, writing, "[I]n a word, Mr. Grant is sensational. In two more words, he's absolutely hilarious; it's some of the best work he's done on screen."

In 2020, Grant starred in HBO miniseries The Undoing, opposite Nicole Kidman and Donald Sutherland. The miniseries was premiered on 25 October 2020 to mixed reviews, though Grant's performance was widely acclaimed. Film critic Caryn James said Grant has the "richest part" and added, "He sharply defines Jonathan as a slippery character, and walks the line expertly to keep us off guard. How much should we trust Jonathan? When he starts confessing some secrets, is all or any of it true? With this role and that in the recent A Very English Scandal, Grant has become expert at bringing his charm to darker characters." Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com was less impressed with the series but called Grant's performance as the "series-best". Grant received a Screen Actor Guild Award, Golden Globe Award and Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for his performance.

Grant reunited with Guy Ritchie for the action Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre alongside Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza with a released date yet to be announced. He is also set to star in the fantasy adventure film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and the Jerry Seinfeld comedy film Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.

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