About halfway through my conversation with Richard Curtis, the writer and director of Love Actually tells me the most Richard Curtis story I’ve ever heard. It was his 50th birthday, and his partner (now wife) Emma Freud had thrown him a surprise party in her office. (Curtis doesn’t like surprises – and had been promised there wouldn’t be any.) “As I walked towards the office, I saw Claudia Schiffer and a member of McFly entering the building, and I thought, I’m really screwed now,” the 67-year-old says. When he went inside, “there were all these people and, in the corner, fuming with anger, was Hugh Grant. Just wondering why the hell he was there.”
We’re on the subject of big, romantic gestures because, well, it’s Richard Curtis. The man who wrote the “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy” scene between Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. Who had Andie MacDowell and Grant (again) declaring their love for each other in the pouring rain, in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Who wrote the much-maligned Love Actually scene where Andrew Lincoln tells his best friend’s wife, played by Keira Knightley, “To me, you are perfect,” with a series of cue cards at her door. But more on that later.
