Hugh Grant was in his early twenties when he made his screen debut in the 1982 film Privileged, where he was credited – for the only time in his career – as Hughie Grant. Over the decades since, he has racked up more than seventy screen credits and become one of the most popular actors in the business, having his greatest success in romantic comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, About a Boy, Two Weeks Notice, Love Actually, and Music and Lyrics. He has won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, and overcome some embarrassing stories about his personal life. And along the way he even started to enjoy acting, after hating it for years.
In a 2001 interview, Grant said he found screen acting to be “incredibly tedious” and “mind numbingly slow”. He said he fell into his acting career, and was hoping to fall out of it at some point. It wasn’t until years later, when he “got too old and ugly for romantic comedies” (his words) and started being able to spread his wings with character roles that he came to “really enjoy acting”.
In the episode of the WTF Happened to This Celebrity video series that’s embedded above, we follow the journey of Hugh Grant’s career. Click play on the video to take the journey with us.
This episode of WTF Happened to This Celebrity is written (with Brad Hamerly), produced and narrated by Taylor James Johnson. Watch previous episodes below and let us know in the comments what your favourite Hugh Grant movie is!
Grant’s other credits include The Lair of the White Worm, Bitter Moon, The Remains of the Day, Nine Months, Sense and Sensibility, Extreme Measures, Cloud Atlas, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Paddington 2, A Very English Scandal, and The Undoing.