“I’M REALLY not posh,” Hugh Grant is fond of saying in interviews, aware, perhaps, that the characters he has played during his long career tend to be a bit, well, posh.
And although it’s true that Hugh’s exmilitary father ran a carpet business in Chiswick, his mother was a teacher, and that he only attended upper-crust Latymer Upper School (where fees are £7500 a term) on a scholarship, his family history is still, as genealogist Antony Adolph has pointed out “a colourful Anglo-Scottish tapestry of warriors, empire-builders and aristocracy.”
Nothing wrong in that, of course, quite the reverse in fact. Hugh’s grandfather, Colonel James Murray Grant, DSO was decorated for bravery and leadership at Saint-Valery-en-Caux during the Second World War, and his father was an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders for eight years in Malaya and Germany. Hugh is even distantly related to Sir Walter Raleigh.
But we live in an age when any hint of privilege is frowned upon. And yes, Hugh spent much of his early career playing diffident posh boys, but his range is much greater than that. Indeed there is an argument, one his friend the screenwriter Richard Curtis would happily make, that Hugh is one of the most gifted actors of his generation.
The problem is that Hugh has the unhappy knack of sometimes giving the impression he really can’t be bothered, something his teachers at Latymer never tired of telling him.
He certainly had a mischievous streak. “I used to do a lot of impressions of teachers, and I got caught smoking. I was badly-behaved and pretentious,” he recalled. But he also played rugby, cricket and football for the school and also represented it
