|
Our readers know we are nothing if not merciful. After all, why should we hold celebrities to a strict standard of public behaviour just because they are incredibly famous, mind-blowingly wealthy, and insulated from harm by a posse of publicists, managers, lawyers, stylists, and handlers of various kinds? We're none of us perfect!
Yeah, just kidding. Can someone out there please explain how Hugh Grant still has a career?
It's a pity that this site did not exist back in the summer of 1995, when Hugh Grant was arrested in a car with a prostitute he engaged to fellate him. (It strikes us as redundant that, in addition to all the pampering and reassurance he gets in the course of an average day, a Hollywood actor should also require the services of a contractor trained in that particular skill.) It was a year after the floppy-haired, adorably stammering, shamblingly charming Grant had leapt into all our hearts, thanks to the sleeper hit Four Weddings and a Funeral. Since then, Grant had taken advantage of his sudden fame by starring in several more movies that seemed to step on each other's heels scrambling into the marketplace -- the "arty" nudie flick Sirens, the period community-theatre romp An Awfully Big Adventure, and the presaging-Fiona-Apple-with-the-super-long-title The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. He was already booked on a brace of talk shows to promote Nine Months, a big, sloppy, sentimental, heart-tugging, Chris-Columbus-directed, Robin-Williams-cameo-incorporating sure-fire summer blockbuster, in which Grant would play a child therapist whose ballet-teacher girlfriend (played by Julianne Moore) unexpectedly becomes pregnant, forcing Grant's character to come to terms with his impending fatherhood. Everything was going according to plan, and then Grant decided that he needed head from a streetwalker, and that, by God, he would have it.
But it's crises like this that really test a publicist's mettle. Grant still made the TV talk-show rounds, less to flog his work, and more to make a public display out of regret over his apparently urgent need for anonymous oral gratification. Hugh paraded his contrition before Larry King and Jay Leno, famously admitting -- without trying to come up with some Eddie Murphyesque "I was just giving her a ride home" cover story -- simply that he "did a bad thing." This commentator did see Nine Months in its opening week, and was not alone in the cinema.
Is the cliché true? Is there really no such thing as bad publicity?
It would seem so, because, nearly six years on, Grant is still very much with us. He's plied his schtick in respectable movies like Sense and Sensibility, in middlebrow fare like Notting Hill and Mickey Blue Eyes, and in floptastic floppy flops like Extreme Measures and Restoration. In short, he's been enjoying the average, undistinguished, typical Hollywood career that serial crap merchants like Nicolas Cage and John Travolta wish they had. Hugh Grant's not burning up the pop charts. He's not languishing in the Costneriffic depths from which there is no return. He's doing...fine.
And, frankly, we think that's okay. Yes, Hugh Grant disgraced himself with a ho. But he exhibited some measure of dignity while answering his subpoena to the court of public opinion, and he did his time. He hasn't aggressively rebelled against his image as a receiver of prostitutional favours by, for instance, marrying some chippy on the rise and adopting a couple of kids to show all of us that he's a good family man now. Grant has stuck pretty close to his pre-scandal career path -- certainly not modulating his on-screen persona, as a bashful, neurotic Englishman, one tiny little bit -- and it seems to be working out pretty well for him. He gets to play the rakish bounder Daniel Cleaver in the long-awaited Bridget Jones's Diary, and will star in the equally anticipated About a Boy next year. He's not constantly plastered across ET Cover Stories (anymore). His parting with Elizabeth Hurley has ended his viability as a tabloid story. He's just doing his job as well as he's able and generally staying out of our way beyond that. And that's...also fine. You know?
We wish him neither well nor ill. We have no quarrel with him. He's fine. And we're fine with that.
|
