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.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Austin Powers,’ As the Spy Faces the Limits of His Sex Appeal)

Vanessa Kensington [played by Elizabeth Hurley]: "If you were the last man on earth and I was the last woman and the future of the human race depended on it, I would still refuse you!"

Austin Powers [played by Mike Myers]: “So what's your point, Vanessa?" — Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), screenplay by Mike Myers, directed by Jay Roach

This post is dedicated to a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!), who regards Ms. Hurley as a prime example of a species he refers to as the DHBB—i.e., “Dark-Haired British Beauty.”

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.

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Hurley, on Real Male ‘Royals’)

“That's tricky for me, but I would say I would marry Prince Charles, misbehave with Prince Harry...I'd have to kill Prince William!"—Elizabeth Hurley, playing “Shag, Marry, Kill" for host Andy Cohen on “Watch What Happens Live,” quoted in Zach Johnson, “Elizabeth Hurley Says Her Friends Nicknamed Hugh Grant ‘Grumplestiltskin’ and Rates Their Sex Life—Watch!,” E!Online, March 11, 2015

As Austin Powers might say: “Oh, behave!!!”

A friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!!) has long classified Elizabeth Hurley among his Dark-Haired British Beauties (DHBBs), a comely cohort that also includes the likes of Helena Bonham-Carter, Julia Ormond and Kate Beckinsale.

These days, Ms. Hurley is joining Bonham-Carter in portraying a female member of the British royal family—though in this case, it’s not the real-life loyal, affectionate “Queen Mom” that netted Bonham-Carter an Oscar nomination in The King's Speech, but Queen Helena, the far more catty, conniving center of the fictional TV series The Royals.

I’ve only seen Ms. Hurley in two films, so I can’t say if she has ever appeared more convincing than she did in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, when she (unsuccessfully) urged on the title character the importance of dental hygiene. And I’m not going to sit there and see if she is plumbing hitherto-unsuspected thespian talent in her new role, for three reasons: 1) I’m not a soap-opera fan; 2) as a strong believer in the American Revolution, I see no magic in the notion of royalty; and 3) the Anglophilia Level of this Irish-American runs at about -20.

The Royals’ provenance (the E! Channel, home of Keeping Up With the Kardashians) has led numerous American TV reviewers to scold their British counterparts. The consensus among these critics seems to be that the British have Shakespeare, while we have Sleaze—and, in an application of the Monroe Doctrine to reality TV (or, in the case of The Royals, a cousin), the Old World should keep its grubby mitts off the territory of the New World.

My friend, the President of the DHBB Admiration Society, will probably react with equanimity to the news that Ms. Hurley is 49. “She’s aging well” is an oft-repeated mantra of his about Attractive Women of a Certain Age. (He’s never said this in the presence of such women, however—I have a feeling that they would only hear the first two words, not the third, before getting peeved.) The picture I’m attaching to this post, then, is a form of free public service to see if any of my other readers agree with him about the woman who is now playing Queen Helena.

I say, Old Chap (or so I'm told men of a certain class say in Albion): I really do admire her pluck! In the United States, the best a woman of her age group can aspire to is Cougar Town; in Great Britain, it’s nothing less than Buckingham Palace.

Ah, but there’s the rub: There already IS a Woman of a Certain Age lodged there: the former Camilla Parker-Bowles. Ms. Hurley may have had her sights set on marrying Prince Charles, according to the above tongue-in-cheek quote, but he’s already taken. Moreover, Camilla—though probably ranking lower in the looks department than Ms. Hurley--also managed to supplant a woman who, by most people’s measures, was considerably more attractive than herself.

In other words, Prince Charles, though part of a saga that, at times, sounds trashier than anything that could be concocted for The Royals, appears to have found love. Who’d have thought it?