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."