Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen, review – A lesson in self-deprecation from Britain’s most charming rogue

Every contributor in this retrospective is in awe of Hugh Grant – apart from the man himself

The actor confesses it irks when people claim he always plays the same character (BBC/Bafta/Debra Hurford Brown)

From Sandra Bullock to Andie MacDowell, everyone in this cosy, if hagiographic profile of Hugh Grant is determined to shower him with praise. But the actor himself is having none of it. Relentlessly self-mocking, he is the first to admit he made a lot of “strange, Euro-pudding films” in the early years of his career.

Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen (BBC2) begins with his birth at Hammersmith hospital in 1960 (“where I subsequently had about 800 of my own children”), canters through his Richard Curtis romcom years and ultimately winds up with his move to television in the award-sweeping A Very English Scandal.

At school, he says, “I was badly behaved and pretentious,” and when he first started acting, he accepted roles in anything, no matter how “crap” the project was. Lest we forget the Nineties period classic The Englishman Who Went up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.

In fact when Grant received the screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral the film that would first unite him with Curtis, he told his agent: “There’s been a mistake, you’ve sent me a good script.”

After Four Weddings – which marked him out as an actor able to play both a heartthrob and a bumbling public school boy who is, er, um, frightfully charming but also, gosh, hopeless with women – Grant’s life blew up. He remembers the first million-dollar offer he received over the phone, and of course there was the much-papped red carpet appearance with Elizabeth Hurley in That Dress. The world fell in love.

Then, as if in a movie, there was the inevitable fall from grace. In 1995, Grant was arrested for participating in “lewd conduct” in public with a Los Angeles sex worker, Divine Brown. Hurley, Grant’s long-term girlfriend at the time, later said of the incident: “I felt like I’d been shot.”

The only mention of this indiscretion is when Grant recalls his film Nine Months: “It did well, but it might have done better had I been better, and had I not been arrested the day before it came out. I screwed it up.” It feels like a cop-out to gloss over this time so quickly, especially given Grant’s own willingness to bring up his arrest during his recent baiting of online trolls.

After that little speed bump, we’re told to avert our eyes and are escorted quickly away to the gushing parlour. “It’s not hard to kiss Hugh,” swoons Andie MacDowell. Sandra Bullock, meanwhile, demands that everyone refer to Grant as a “national treasure”.

Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ (Rex) (Rex Features)

There’s a rare bit of proper insight when Grant reflects on the womanising Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones – “If I’m going to be accused of playing myself, that would be the closest” – and when he confesses it irks him when people claim he always plays the same character: “I slightly ground my teeth for those years,” he says.

But those years are over. “Getting older and uglier has made the parts, you know, more varied,” he once said. And it’s true – he was (perhaps too) convincing as a washed-up, narcissistic actor in Paddington 2. And he practically went method when starring as the jowly Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal, proving he is capable of playing someone other than, well, Hugh Grant.

Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen is an amiable, inoffensive hour’s viewing. As a retrospective, it serves its purpose – but it does leave you wondering who the man is beneath all that self-deprecation.