'Four Weddings' with a difference

Richard Curtis, the screenwriter who admitted recently that his most successful films, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary, were basically the same, is set to confound his critics by turning out a movie with a difference.

At first, the casting of Hugh Grant in Love Actually, another romantic comedy in which a somebody falls for a nobody, sounded horribly familiar. But movie insiders say that is where the similarities end.

"The new film will have 10 different plot lines and Grant's is just one of them," said Adam Dawtrey, European editor of Variety magazine. "This is a multi-story concept, stylistically like a Robert Altman film."

In the film, Curtis's directorial debut, Grant plays the British prime minister, a bachelor who falls in love with his tea lady on his first day in the job.

The film is being financed by Universal Pictures and Canal Plus, and will be made by Working Title Films in London. Shooting is expected to begin later this year.