Quote of the Day (‘Grumplestiltskin’ Grant, Showing His Surly Side to Ashley Graham and a Worldwide Audience)

Ashley Graham: “What’s your favorite thing about coming to the Oscars?”

Hugh Grant: “Well, um, it’s fascinating. The whole of humanity is here. It’s vanity fair.”

Graham: “Oh, it’s all about Vanity Fair. It’s let loose and have a little fun. What are you most excited to see tonight?”

Grant: “To see?”

Graham: “Yeah. I know that you watch a few of the movies. Are you exited to see anyone win? Do you have your hopes up for anyone?”

Grant: “No one in particular.”

Graham: “Okay. What are you wearing tonight, then?”

Grant: “Just my suit.”

Graham: “Your suit? You didn’t make your suit! Who designed it?”

Grant: “I can’t remember…My tailor.”

Graham: “That’s okay. Shout-out to your tailor! So tell me, what does it feel like to be in Glass Onion? It was such an amazing film, I really loved it. I love a thriller! How fun is it to shoot something like that?”

Grant: “Well, I’m barely in it. I’m in for about three seconds.”

Graham: “But still, you showed up and you had fun, right?”

Grant: “Uh, almost.”—Hugh Grant and Ashley Graham quoted by Michael Ausiello, “Oscars: Hugh Grant Shuts Down Ashley Graham in Mesmerizingly Awkward Red Carpet Interview,” www.tvline.com, Mar. 12 2023

Movie fans who only know Hugh Grant as the bumbling but winning lead in rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually had a chance to see him without a script at the Oscars on Sunday night. This recent spectacle will not exactly burnish his reputation as a charmer.

Former flame Elizabeth Hurley, who still remains on good terms with the English actor, revealed to talk-show host Andy Cohen eight years ago that Grant’s peevishness had earned him the nickname "Grumplestiltskin" among her friends. His dialogue above with supermodel Ashley Graham should tip you off how he acquired that surly sobriquet.

You will get no argument from me about the general inanity of the so-called "red carpet" (or, this year, "champagne-colored carpet") chatter before the industry’s main event of the year. Nor will you hear me disagree that what transpired between Grant and Graham was still better than Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock in last year’s controversial telecast.

But, from the moment that Ms. Graham mistook Grant’s reference to William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian satire of human vainglory for an allusion to the glitzy magazine famous for its Oscar parties, it was all downhill. The actor’s lifted eyebrows at the end of their exchange said far more than his clipped answers about his contempt for the whole circus.

Reaction to this tense interview on social media was swift, and mostly against Grant.

Much the same division of sentiment followed after he acted as presenter with Four Weddings and a Funeral co-star Andie McDowell. Some called his description of how he looked without moisturizer funny; others thought it tasteless.

I voted for “tasteless.” In fact, when I first heard Grant’s description of his face, I thought I must have been mistaken, that he was resorting to the stuttery style of speaking that had endeared him to so many.

Clearly, he had ad-libbed while on stage, as you might have guessed from Andie McDowell’s surprised reaction to what was meant to be a compliment to her appearance.

Richard Gere was banned as a presenter for 20 years after ad-libbing at the 1993 ceremony, but at least he did it for a good cause: a protest against the Chinese government for its mistreatment of Tibet. What should the Academy do about Grant’s tacky, raunchy joke?

“The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them,” Humphrey Bogart reportedly said. Maybe.

But entertainers owe each other what all human beings owe the rest of humanity: courtesy. That attitude exudes grace and is more essential to what we call “class” than something ephemeral and maybe ill-gotten like money.

Over the weekend, it was missing from Grant’s repertoire. I guess we will find out soon, once he’s had some time to consider what he did and to craft an apology, if it was ever really part of his carefully crafted persona.

(The image accompanying this post, of Hugh Grant at a charity fundraiser held in South Bank, London, was taken Mar.15, 2011, by Julien Rath.)

Quote of the Day (Hugh Grant, on His ‘Horrible’ Experience as a Film Producer)

“I did a bit of that [producing], and it’s actually horrible. I don’t know if you’ve done it, but it’s like driving a car from the back seat. You’re just tearing your hair out while someone else is driving, saying, ‘No, no, no, slower, go right.’”—English actor Hugh Grant quoted in Lacey Rose, ““No One Wants to Be the Good Guy’”:Hugh Grant, Richard Madden, Billy Porter and The Hollywood Reporter Drama Actor Roundtable,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2019

(The image accompanying this post, of Hugh Grant at a charity fundraiser held in South Bank, London, was taken Mar.15, 2011, by Julien Rath. Judging from Grant's smile, his producing experience was long behind him by this point.)

This Day in Crime History (Death of Jeremy Thorpe, Fallen Politico in ‘A Very English Scandal’)

Dec. 4, 2014—Jeremy Thorpe, who lost his chance at becoming a power broker in English politics when his hiring of a hitman to take out his homosexual lover was exposed, died at age 85 of Parkinson’s disease.

Hugh Grant, who played Thorpe in the BBC One miniseries, A Very English Scandal, summed up, with characteristic wit, the difference between how different countries might handle such embarrassing situations, in a December 2018 interview with Michael Schneider of Indiewire:

“If you imagine a Russian plotting a murder it would probably go quite well. Or a Saudi. Or an American. The Mafia do a good job. But [here] it’s English because it’s such a failure!”

English political sex scandals, to elaborate on Grant’s distinction, differ not so much in number as in kind from their American counterparts. American scandals tend to involve someone at the office (Monica Lewinsky) or an affair that shocks a politician’s “base” (e.g., Protestant fundamentalists—at least, before Donald Trump).

In contrast, English sex scandals involve the Establishment closing ranks—even if not necessarily very successfully—behind one of its own. It all comes to naught when really, really wild circumstances come to light.

In the Profumo scandal of 1963, for instance, it involved a Secretary of War sleeping with a call girl who was also intimate with a Soviet military attache—opening up the possibility of state secrets being shared with the Kremlin through pillow talk.

The case of Thorpe revolved around nothing with such high national-security implications, but it was certainly more bizarre and, as Grant implied, seriocomic. 

It not only involved the head of a rising political party employing the services of a contract killer to off a young stable hand-turned-aspiring male model, Norman Scott, whose services the politico had employed for—er, a rather different purpose—but that said killer botched the job—catching up with Scott on a remote country road, all right, but wasting his ammunition on the young man’s dog, a Great Dane named Rinka, only to have his gun jam when he aimed it at Scott.

Four, maybe even three, decades later, after national attitudes had relaxed, Thorpe might have told Scott to do his damnedest with his account of their homosexual relationship. But, though homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1967, it was still considered political kryptonite. 

At a time when he was maneuvering the Liberal Party as a potential junior coalition partner in the government—maybe even enough to win him a Cabinet seat—Thorpe felt he had to squelch the scandal at all costs. With payments to ensure Scott’s silence no longer effective, he allegedly felt stronger measures, like murder, were in order.

But the fall from political grace was sharp. Having become the youngest leader of any British political party in a century when he took over the Liberals in 1967, Thorpe now became the first British Member of Parliament to stand trial for murder. Having tripled the party’s vote count, he was now forced to yield the mantle of Liberal leadership.

In an elemental sense, Thorpe survived his legal ordeal, in no small part due to the judge in the case, who instructed the jury that Scott was "a hysterical, warped personality… a neurotic, spineless creature, addicted to hysteria and self-advertisement"; that the prosecution witnesses were not trustworthy because they could sell their stories to the press; and that the jurors were entitled to consider the entire career of Thorpe. The jury, not surprisingly, acquitted Thorpe. 

The contrast between a patrician defendant and low-class accuser was as stark in the Thorpe case as it was in Profumo’s, but it could not save either man from the loss of power. 

Even after the acquittal, voters turned Thorpe out of office in 1979. He tried tenaciously and repeatedly to win appointment to another position, but it was not to be, and eventually Parkinson’s sapped his energy and will.

Had Thorpe’s career not gone into the ditch, he might have effected a remarkable comeback for a party that, under David Lloyd-George, had been instrumental in the first decades of the 20^th century in paving the way toward British social-welfare legislation, leading the nation through the tumultuous Great War, and affecting the destinies of new nations such as Ireland and Iraq. 

The Liberals, whose crash in the 1920s had coincided with the rise of the more militant Labour Party, would have stood, under Thorpe, as a potential centrist alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. But it all came asunder with Thorpe's fall.

 

Flashback, June 1995: Hugh Rues ‘Divine’ Scandal

The arrest of Hugh Grant for lewd conduct with a prostitute bearing the nom de amor “Divine Brown” in late June 1995 could not have come at a worse time. Only the year before, he had shot to fame—and invited premature comparisons to an earlier British actor named Grant—with his performance in the hit rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral (see my prior post on that film). Now, he was out to promote his follow-up, Nine Months, and though this film had little of the effervescent wit and unexpected poignancy of the earlier one, hopes were still high that the floppy-haired charmer would lure hordes of women and their dates to the cinemas.

All those hopes came crashing down when the actor was caught on Santa Monica Boulevard in his parked white BMW convertible with Ms. Brown (known, before entering the world’s oldest profession, as Estella Marie Thompson). Countless people—not just Grant, but also the actor’s publicist, director Chris Columbus, and top execs at studio Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation—gulped and awaited the inevitable public shaming and derision, unsure how it would affect the movie.

In the golden age of Hollywood, back in the 1930s and 1940s, Grant would never have found himself in this predicament. Acute observers from that time, John O’Hara (in his fine 1966 novella,”Natica Jackson”) and Clifford Odets (in his problematic but compelling 1949 drama The Big Knife), showed how assorted PR agents and fixers would converge on a scene not merely scandalous but deadly to make sure that everything was mopped up.

Those PR professionals could have taught Olivia Pope of Scandal a thing or two about managing the moral muck-up. And surely, Grant was not remotely in the same league as Errol Flynn, whose autobiography was an exercise of truth in advertising if there ever was one: My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

But these old pros and the studio system that kept them in full-employment mode were long gone. Now, Grant would have to fend for himself as the public came to grips with the biggest gap between a screen persona and a real-life actor since the sexually inept but endearing Woody Allen of Play It Again, Sam was revealed as sexually aggressive enough offscreen to take up with the adopted daughter of the (biological) mother of his child. (Yeah, I know that sounds crazy. But don’t forget that this was a guy who wrote, directed and acted in a film called Bananas.)

Among the comics making great sport of Grant’s acute embarrassment was David Letterman, in one of his most hilarious Top Ten lists, “Top Ten New Hugh Grant Movies.”  (My favorite title on the list was No. 2: “Don Juan de Buttafuoco.”)

But it was left to Letterman’s late-night rival, Jay Leno, to land a much-coveted interview nearly two weeks later with the actor, where the Tonight Show host got to ask the question on the minds of so many: “What the hell were you thinking?”

More than a few guys were among this group. For the last year, since the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral, these lads on both sides of the Atlantic had taken special notice of Grant’s companion, Elizabeth Hurley—a model/actress that a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!) has placed among a select group that he terms DHBBs (i.e., “Dark-Haired British Beauties”). It was incomprehensible to these males how Grant could prefer the company of Ms. Brown to Ms. Hurley. Imagining what Ms. Hurley must have said to him upon hearing the news—indeed, how quickly she would leave him—became a kind of parlor game.

Grant’s response to Leno’s question, simple and direct, won over a public increasingly in the midst of non-apology apologies such as “If anyone is offended, I apologize” or “I didn’t inhale.” “I did a bad thing,” he answered.

Leno, for one, appreciated Grant’s demeanor. In later years, he would tell the London Independent that there were only 18 celebrities worth having on a chat show, one of them being Hugh Grant.

Not that the manning up before millions of viewers didn’t take something out of Grant. Over the years, he would have a harder and harder time concealing his peevishness about peddling his movies.

Earlier this year, for instance, on Watch What Happens Live, host Andy Cohen admitted to guest Hurley that viewers had found her onetime boyfriend a mite cranky.

“My friends used to call him Grumpelstiltskin!, “she laughed.

Twenty years ago, “Grumpelstiltskin” undoubtedly felt like screaming, but his bravura acting job before the media ensured that he would survive the scandal with his career—and (at least for five years) his relationship with Hurley--intact.  He would, in fact, more recently, receive considerable public sympathy—and even substantial damages—from scandalmonger Rupert Murdoch as a result of the News of the World phone-hacking cause celebre.

Flashback, March 1994: ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral,’ ‘90s Rom-Com Classic, Opens

I could, I suppose, never get around to noting the 20^th anniversary this month of the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the comedy that became the highest-grossing British film in history. But it would be more than an oversight: overlooking it in this space would feel downright unjust.

Quite simply, I can’t think of another rom-com from that time that gave me such all-around pleasure. Quite a few in the cast and crew would go on to have other moments of triumph, but to my mind, none would ever again appear in a work that shone so brightly—including the male lead, Hugh Grant.

Till then, Grant had been known primarily for dramatic fare (though his role as composer Frederic Chopin, confused and sputtering about force of nature George Sand, in Impromptu, had given a hint that he possessed broader range). Screenwriter Richard Curtis has claimed that the actor won the role of Charles, the inevitable best man at weddings who never gets to the altar himself, after more than 70 actors had auditioned for it. That might be an exaggeration, but it seems impossible now to imagine anyone else in the role. 

In a retrospective on the film in Britain’s The Guardian, Catherine Shoard wryly observed that Grant represented “an aspirational version of Curtis, with glossier hair and deeper cheekbones.” True, perhaps. The implication is that Grant won the role because of his looks, but Curtis has been adamant that he was reluctant to see him in the role because he was too good-looking. 

It was good the screenwriter overcame his resistance. While possessing the requisite looks that would make female viewers melt, Grant caught every nuance of wit and awkwardness of his commitment-phobic bachelor. The dark looks and effortless wit invited inevitable comparisons to an earlier Briton with the surname Grant—Cary—though with enough stammers to make him more approachable than godlike.

The comment by a female friend of mine about Grant—“he’s adorable!”—summed up pretty nicely the feminine reaction to the actor (until the news broke a couple of years later of his encounter with Divine Brown, anyway). His presence surely accounted for this sleeper hit's appeal to one half of its audience. But the film also caught the frequent male yearning for The Woman Who Got Away. (See, for instance, Bernstein’s reflection in Citizen Kane, 40 years after the fact, of seeing a woman in a white dress, carrying a white parasol, on her way to New Jersey on the ferry: “I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”)

The actress who ended up playing “that girl” in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Andie MacDowell, has come in for a fair amount of criticism from fans of the film. Kate Nagy, posting on the “Heroes and Heartbreakers” blog last year, offers a sort-of defense of the actress. (To sum up her argument: Yes, MacDowell was bad, but the script offered little to no room for development, anyway.)

There are a couple of ways to approach this question. First, was MacDowell talented to begin with? The answer to that, in the affirmative, had been given five years before, in Sex, Lies and Videotape.

Second, were there actresses who could have played the part better? This last one becomes more interesting, though also trickier. After the successful art-house film Enchanted April, director Mike Newell could pick from a large pool of actresses ready to play the American beauty Carrie in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The one he originally cast, Jeanne Tripplehorn, had to withdraw for personal reasons, but there is no certainty at all that she would have been better than MacDowell. (She did not, after all, display much chemistry with Grant a couple of years later when they were paired in Mickey Blue Eyes.)

Another early candidate for Carrie is more intriguing: Marisa Tomei. The one trait that Curtis’ script mentions about Carrie—her fairly sizable list of lovers—was meant to convey not that she was promiscuous but that she was a spunky free spirit. Tomei could have embodied that effortlessly (see, for instance, her Oscar-winning role in My Cousin Vinny) and might have inspired Curtis to tailor more material for her talents.

The fact that Curtis didn’t create in Carrie the kind of vivacious heroine of Thirties romantic comedies such as Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard or Jean Arthur comes from the time and craft he spent on the subsidiary characters who swirl around Charles, in some of the most memorable scenes in 1990s cinema. These include Rowan Atkinson's exceptionally nervous minister; Kristin Scott Thomas' Fiona, the cynical aristocratic friend who can’t help carrying a torch for Charles; David Bower as Charles' deaf (and ribald) brother David; and John Hannah, whose Matthew, eulogizing his male longtime companion, started a rush to the bookstores by reciting W.H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.”

Curtis took up directing after Four Weddings and a Funeral. With the film he released last fall, About Time, he has announced that though he’ll remain active in the film industry, he will no longer helm any pictures. This may be just as well, since, in his two subsequent vehicles for Grant—Notting Hill and Love Actually—the sentimentality that remained under control in his collaboration with Newell became unchecked, with no other creative force to balance out his creative choices with a dash of vinegar.

But, along the way, Curtis had still managed to write a script that, if not perfect, was so consistently winning that nobody noticed the difference. My own favorite scene in the Oscar-nominated Four Weddings and a Funeral involves Charles and Carrie. MacDowell doesn’t have to do much here, but Grant nails Charles’ hilarious—and humanizing—tongue-tied eloquence definitively:

[Charles comes running after Carrie]

Charles: “Ehm, look. Sorry, sorry. I just, ehm, well, this is a very stupid question and... , particularly in view of our recent shopping excursion, but I just wondered, by any chance, ehm, eh, I mean obviously not because I guess I've only slept with 9 people, but-but I-I just wondered... ehh. I really feel, ehh, in short, to recap it slightly in a clearer version, eh, the words of David Cassidy in fact, eh, while he was still with the Partridge family, eh, ‘I think I love you,’ and eh, I-I just wondered by any chance you wouldn't like to... Eh... Eh... No, no, no of course not... I'm an idiot, he's not... Excellent, excellent, fantastic, eh, I was gonna say lovely to see you, sorry to disturb... Better get on...”

Carrie: “That was very romantic.”

Charles: “Well, I thought it over a lot, you know, I wanted to get it just right.”