Let's be rude about Hugh Grant!

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 November 2011

Not about the quality of his acting, which, of course, speaks for itself (he's not known as Huge Rant for nothing!), but about his recently announced, if delayed, proof of virility:

A story about a 'fleeting affair', which I did not quite understand from the snippet that AOL threw up at me on its sign-on page, has been headlined, for the last day or two, something like 'Hugh Grant becomes a dad at last'.


Well, incomprehensible folly as it seemed (other than as - pun intended! - an ill-conceived publicity stunt), his late-night encounter on, as I remember, Sunset Strip with Divine Brown (brilliant name, I always thought, even if it might have been penned by Max Clifford) struck me as the most interesting part of his career, before or since 1995.

The angle was that he was - or was supposed to be (in that Hollywood studio sort of way) - involved pretty nebulously (i.e. where, with stars in the firmament, we are told what someone wants us to hear) with Hurley Burley at the time of his 'indiscretion'.

But how much of an actress was Liz (in any way that one chooses to understand the question), what did she do for Hugh's popularity ratings, and what charms - physical or otherwise - did she really have, except those that a post-punk use of big safety-pins compelled us to think of, and of her, in a certain way?

Were we supposed to think that Divine's form of relief was what Hugh found lacking? Or did he genuinely - no Big Machine talking - seek it out on a whim? Unlike government secrets (and whether George Michael's 'outing' was a similar police-fuelled mistake discovered), there is, alas, no thirty-year rule that will give us the answers, if we just waited!

So all that we can do is wonder whether there is any connection with the time taken for Hugh to achieve this status 'parenthood' (unless, of course, there might be a suite of other children, sequestered from the world, whom he has secretly fathered), when no issue (pun intended!) has come (pun intended!) of his sex-life until now...


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