No more Mr Nice Guy: how Hugh Grant transformed himself into an edgy national treasure

Hugh Grant arriving at the high court in London on 27 April 2023 for the hearing about the Sun hacking his phone. Photograph: James Manning/PA

This week sees the release of Heretic, Hugh Grant’s 45th feature film. Few critics would have predicted that length of career after his pouting 1982 debut in Privileged, a pretentiously shonky whodunnit featuring several of his fellow Oxford students. For the next decade he wasn’t so much a fringe actor as an actor with a floppy fringe, invariably cast as a posh, slightly foppish Englishman, doomed to be forever brushing his lustrous hair back from his finely chiselled features.

Then 12 years on everything changed with the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. More accurately, the floppy fringe remained, but now it was employed as comedy cover for a strikingly diffident kind of romantic hero. Overnight Grant was catapulted into the realm of international fame, going on to co-star with his haircut in a series of not wildly dissimilar romcoms.