What Women Want

Don't you wish Hugh Grant really

Combine it with a script of satisfying love stories, fleshed out with the usual thespian suspects (Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon, Liam Neeson, Rowan Atkinson et al), and you have the new Four Weddings....

It is almost a rule of romantic comedy that, if you want a hit, you need Grant. Of all today's leading men, it's his name that seems to inject films directly into the fantasies of female moviegoers (not to mention the men who also fancy him rotten). Do we care if he doesn't disappear into a role like Alec Guinness? Or that his characters seem to be only slight variations on his public persona? No. Two tickets for tonight's show, please.

While Hollywood has some splendidly ageless men with dubious morals (Rob Lowe, Robert Downey Jr), Grant is Britain's own beautiful loser. You can keep your Jude Laws (too actory) and your Ewan McGregors (a bit too comfortable with his own nudity). Grant plays the handsome chap whose charm cannot conceal vast and unexplored insecurities. As he struggles and suffers, stammers and stutters, we feel so sorry for him that he can do no wrong. He could pistol-whip us and we'd still smile in pathetic understanding. Grant's monopoly on hapless masculinity, masquerading as upper-class eye candy, woos the punters every time.

A lot of actors can play funny. But Grant comes across as actually being funny. He is never more quick-witted than when cut loose from a script. Being articulate and unpretentious sets him apart from 99 per cent of actors, anyway, but his speciality is blurring the line between the characters he plays and his real-life self. By using this ploy, Grant can say virtually anything he wants without the audience knowing whether he means it or not.

In an interview with Jonathan Ross in 2000, during the promotion of Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks, Grant launched into a surreal tirade about his dreams, which featured the Queen and Woody Allen. We learned virtually nothing about the film or Grant, but it filled a few minutes in an amusing way. During the release of Two Weeks Notice, Grant stated he couldn't get a woman, while implying that 'something' had gone on between him and co-star Sandra Bullock. Bullock played along as Grant effortlessly manipulated the emotions of his fans.

Grant's only real competition is George Clooney, who snags old-timers with his Clark Gable allure and beguiles younger fans with his comic roles. But he's not a patch on Grant, the classic young Old Boy. In his Fulham uniform of cords and hacking jacket, topped off by his perfect hair, age looks good on him. In the guise of society's bred-in-the-bone winner, Grant exposes the public schoolboy interior as amusingly stunted. In Four Weddings..., he keeps saying the wrong things to the wrong people, and in Nine Months, when his pregnant girlfriend says her water has broken, he replies, 'Well, we'll get you another one!'. Love Actually has even more classic Grant moments than usual, most memorably when he disco-dances down the stairs of Number 10.

But Grant's characters aren't necessarily always charmers. At his lowest, he plays men who could be the evil clone of Harry Enfield's character, Tim Nice But Dim. In Bridget Jones' Diary he is Daniel, Bridget's gorgeous but shitty boss, who uses her attraction to him as pure ego-boost. Because Grant plays Daniel as being fully aware of his thrall over his employee without being truly malicious, we forgive him all sins. We envy Bridget's torrid sessions with him, even if it's quite obvious that he isn't 'the one'.

Whether being caught with the prostitute Divine Brown weeks before Nine Months opened was a publicity stunt or not, Grant's dalliance with Hollywood's underbelly didn't dent his appeal for long. My American friends still love him. They actively seek his films out because Grant 'seems like he would always remember your birthday'.

American women adore Hugh Grant because he is, quite possibly, the only palatable modern example of upper-class masculinity. The old versions - Jeremy Irons, Edward Fox, etc - were strictly stiff-upper-lip-type toffs, a type who may have rung our mums' bells but don't cut the mustard nowadays. In this day and age, it's Hugh's vulnerable, modern, insecure take on poshness that we crave. He's a man who, if his horse broke its leg while hunting, would cry over the poor thing rather than shoot it himself. Grant's roles are imbued with such grace, charm and endearing clumsiness that American women, normally so performance-oriented, couldn't care less whether he's good in bed or not. Of course, in real life, the grown-up public schoolboy is often only this charming at social functions and in front of his family.

American women will continue to be wooed by Grant, partly because they don't have firsthand experience of what men like him are really like. They want to look after him and ruffle his hair, but remain blissfully unaware that his reallife counterpart may not have changed his shorts for a week. Why should he? Nanny isn't there to press them for him anymore.