Cut! Hugh gets the chop

He's the fop with the mop, and we can't get enough of his crops. Hugh Grant's hair has both fascinated and appalled the nation's filmgoers ever since he and his thatch hove into view in the low-budget toff drama Privileged in 1982. Even then, it was apparent that here was a hairdo to watch.

As an actor, Grant may only have one performance in him, but the time has surely long since passed when anyone went to the flicks in a state of high anticipation about his thespian abilities. No, what really captivates us - and, when the acting is particularly wooden, serves as a handy distraction - is the state of his tresses.

As the latest photograph reveals, Grant is incapable of leaving his hair alone. Gone, for now, is the short, spiky style that he sports in his new film, About a Boy, a cut that he complained made him "look like a lesbian on the female tennis circuit". Gone, too, is the mix of high- crowned Queen Mary- like frontal buns and spikes he displayed at the premiere of the same film. Instead, for his role in Two Weeks Notice, with Sandra Bullock, the actor appears to have taken inspiration from two of this country's most cherished celebrity trendsetters, Mike Baldwin and Lionel Blair.

During his Oxford days, where he trod the boards with Imogen Stubbs and The Fast Show's Mark Williams, Grant and his quiff were inseparable. The pudding-bowl that he'd been forced to endure at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, had now morphed into a flowing, Byronic bouffant that was the talk of the town.

I can remember the gaggle of giggling undergrads swooning over him as he lay on the lawn at a summer garden party like a cove from a Wode-house novel, laughing down from lazy eyelids and running a finger or two through his luxuriant locks. Every girl in Oxford longed to do the job for him.

No matter that his beyond- bad performance of Hamlet at the 1981 Edinburgh Festival remains etched in the memories of drama-lovers who sat mesmerised through it. The heavy female presence in the audience wore a collectively rapt expression, which seemed to say: "We're only here for the hair."

Tonsorially, not a hair on Grant's head seemed out of place after he came down from Oxford, as his film career moved from risible straight-to-video fare such as his turn as Lord Byron in 1987's Rowing With the Wind (on which he met Liz Hurley, playing Shelley's sister-in-law) to the breakthrough of Four Weddings in 1994. If his huge hair seems in retrospect absurd, it should be remembered that he was merely following the fashions of the time - his Eighties cut was just the male equivalent of the puffball skirt, and an awful lot of people wore those without complaining, even if they blanche at the memory now.

Grant's decision to stick with big hair was, in any case, thoroughly vindicated when the huge success of Four Weddings elevated his locks into a superstar bracket all of its own. And he's never looked back. With each new film, the exact length, cut and angle of his crop is minutely analysed. In Bridget Jones's Diary, he was only demifop, but again the women swooned.

In About a Boy, the brushed-forward look seemed, when first revealed, to signal a panicked attempt to cover up a receding hairline (he wouldn't be the first fortysomething male to try that trick). In 1995's Restoration, the need for Grant to join the rest of the cast in wearing a Charles II-style wig seemed questionable: surely, you felt, his own locks would have done the job, with hair to spare.

A brief razor cut in the mid-Nineties was quickly (and privately) grown out, with Grant likening his look to "a slightly cross lady golfer". He'd booked a session with Hurley's then hair-stylist, Serge Normand, but the result left him all face and no head. "I thought it would be butch," he remembered. "The problem is, I'm pug ugly with all my hair cut off. Elizabeth couldn't even look at me."