'Acting? It's miserable and boring'

On a typically bright autumn day, at the plush Four Seasons Hotel in the Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills, Hugh Grant is on particularly good form. Which is to say oozing insouciant charm, brimming with bonhomie and quick with the strain of deft self-deprecation that has become his stock in trade. Only once does a light frost develop on his cashmere-sweatered upper slopes, and that is when the subject of his celebrated bachelorhood, and the tabloid frenzy over his romance with Jemima Khan, rears its head.

'I don't feel that pressure,' he says, curtly, when asked if he feels that he is being badgered into settling down. 'I feel other pressure from the British tabloids, but I don't feel that particular pressure.' And that, he makes quite clear, is that.

Still, it's a perfectly apt question. The 44-year-old seems closer to tying the knot than he ever has before - in recent months he and Khan, who has accompanied him here, have seemed inseparable. Added to that, his latest film, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, in which he returns as arch bounder Daniel Cleaver opposite Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth, is all about the trials and tribulations of getting to the altar.

Not that Cleaver - unlike Grant, perhaps - has wedding bells on his mind. You'll be pleased to hear that the follow-up to 2001's smash hit Bridget Jones's Diary finds him as disreputable as ever. 'In fact,' says Grant, 'if he has changed, he's changed for the worse.'

In truth, despite the tabloids breathing down his neck, no one really wants Grant to get married. That would ruin everything. There is something of the cad about him that is fundamental to his enormous likeability. It's tempting to believe that, in reality, he has more in common with the gallery of rogues he has portrayed in recent years (self-centred loafer Will Lightman in About A Boy, unscrupulous property developer George Wade in Two Weeks Notice and yuppie playboy Cleaver himself) than he does with the dithering, lovelorn fops of Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill.

He is suspiciously good at playing cads. 'Yes, sweet of you to say so,' he says. 'For years everyone said, "You're always Mr Nice Guy, why don't you ever play someone nasty?" So, in fact, it's been a relief to let the real me come out.' It is hard to tell to what extent he is joking.

If there is something else Grant is inordinately good at, it is turning that insouciant charm to his advantage, drolly deflecting questions that probe too deeply. Still, if his private persona (which the 1995 Divine Brown incident suggests is somewhat murkier than his debonair exterior proclaims) is largely off limits, he can be quite candid about his professional life - even when doing so doesn't reflect well on him.

He admits, for instance, that his reprising the role of Cleaver was by no means a foregone conclusion. 'I was actually quite difficult about it,' he says. 'I'm always quite difficult but I was absolutely impossible on this one. There was a lot of coming and going about the script and my part. I won't do it unless the script, or at the very least my part, is absolutely there.

And even when it comes to shooting, I'll try everything 16 different ways.' On the set of 1999's Mickey Blue Eyes, costar James Caan nicknamed him Whippy because of his incessant worrying. 'He was like those little whippet dogs that get nervous and you got to put a sweater on them when they're cold,' said Caan.

'It has become a form of madness,' says Grant. 'On this film, on the second day, I had a meltdown. Suddenly all this neurosis got to me and I had my first ever full-scale attack of stage fright. It was very alarming for everyone concerned. I got to about take 30 before I could even remember my lines.'

What is slightly ironic here is that the scene in question directly precedes the film's only unscripted, improvised moment: another fantastically inept punch-up between Cleaver and starchy barrister Mark Darcy (Firth), his rival for Bridget's affections. 'We approached it exactly the same as the first one,' says Grant. 'Which was to make sure it was as crap as we wanted it to be. The key was to stop the stunt coordinator coming in and making it look like a film fight. We wanted it to look like two pathetic Englishmen throwing their handbags at each other.'

If Grant is happy to stick pins in himself, he is the model of gallantry when talking about co-star Zellweger - who, as the indefatigable Bridget, once again carries the entire movie on her plumped-up shoulders. 'Film acting is such a miserable experience,' he says. 'It's so long and boring and so difficult to get right. What you need, above all, is incredible willpower and strength of mind, and Renée has that. I don't know where it comes from, but she's definitely got that. And, um, big pants of course,' he adds. 'They're back.'