All hail the renaissance of Hugh Grant, freed from decades of romcom hell

In the past two years he has produced the best work of his life, including his latest turn in A Very English ScandalBack in the mid-90s, shortly after I saw Four Weddings And A Funeral – when I, along with half the females in this country, developed a profound soft spot for Hugh Grant – I went to see the adaption of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure, purely because he starred in it.

The rest of the cinema audience had clearly come for the same reason, and we all made a collective excitable giggle when he appeared on screen.

But those giggles died down pretty fast, because this was no Four Weddings.

Grant plays a predatory, charismatic gay theatre director named Meredith who callously toys with the minds of women and the bodies of men.

“What he wants is hearts,” someone explains to one of Meredith’s devastated victims.

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