THE DECLINE FROM CARY GRANT TO HUGH GRANT

Giles Whitten reports that the Four Weddings hero has failed

in his attempt to become a star in America. It's also to do with women (though not that prostitute)

Los Angeles IN HUGH Grant's latest film, which has just opened in London, he plays a young New York surgeon who uncovers an evil but ethically interesting scheme to test a possible cure for cancer on live human guinea-pigs. They are the homeless, virtual- ly anonymous shadows who scrape together crack fixes in the catacombs around Grand Central, and Mr Grant ends up riding to their rescue. This is the actor who acquired fame and daunting expectations in a light romantic comedy that was written (and rewritten 52 times, it is said) with him in mind. Extreme Measures is not light, romantic or funny, and so far it has bombed. The problem may not be the film, which has been warmly reviewed. It has been called 'well-made and thought-provoking'. But something has gone sadly awry in the masterplan hatched jointly three years ago by Mr Grant and Hollywood to unpen him from the quaint corral of his Britishness onto the lucrative uplands of American stardom.

With a tight script and Gene Hackman as villain, Extreme Measures was supposed to hit pay-dirt. It might even have made its star a Cary Grant for our times; a likable Brit capable of transcending accent and endless self-deprecation in order to be the anchor of a mainstream thriller. Instead it made an underwhelming $17 million in America — roughly two thirds of its bud- get. Michael Medved, the cultural com- mentator and chief film critic for the New York Post, dismissed it as 'a complete flop'. In London, friends of Hugh fear once again the sharpening of profile-writers' scalpels. In Los Angeles a more ominous quiet has fallen over the once bustling Hugh Grant industry. Telephone his agent and you are shunted briskly to his publicist. Telephone his publicist and they tell you, `Hugh's kind of on hiatus with us at the moment.' Telephone his production com- pany, and an assistant wanly admits that they have nothing in production and only one script, a romantic comedy called Other- wise Engaged, 'in development'. Mr Grant and Elizabeth Hurley, his pro- ducer and girlfriend, were not at the office. Nor have they been seen much recently in the neighbourhood of their new Hollywood apartment, which has a glorious heritage as a former residence of Bette Davis and a less glorious proximity to the kerb from which the prostitute Divine Brown stepped into the reckless actor's rented BMW one sticky summer night in 1995.

The call of duty is apparently behind their long absences from California. Just as he forced himself through the exquisitely watchable torture of American chat-show confessionals about that night to save the box-office fortunes of his first Hollywood venture, Nine Months, so Mr Grant has been traipsing the globe from Italy to Argentina to publicise Extreme Measures in the hope that eventually it will recoup its costs. But he may also feel less adored here than he was. One well-known Hollywood figure said, 'Hugh and Liz were at Liz Tay- lor's big party last year, but recently the invitations haven't been coming their way quite so thick and fast.'

smelt strongly of defeat,' David Niven wrote of one of his slumps, 'and Hollywood is like a bird dog. When things are going badly, it tenses and sniffs at you. It scrapes away at the camouflage. It knows.'

Things are not going quite that badly for Mr Grant. Despite a bad script badly direct- ed, Nine Months made money (over $60 mil- lion in America alone). This sort of paradox impresses studio types more than a genuine hit. 'What people are looking for is someone who can make even a terrible film do well,' Mr Medved says. 'That's why Bodyguard and Robin Hood did more for Kevin Costner's star status than Dances with Wolves. The same was true of Nine Months precisely because it wasn't any damn good.'

Mr Medved explains Mr Grant's dol- drums in broad terms: 'People don't feel the same fascination with movie stars gen- erally that they used to, or with Britain as a centre of urbanity, aristocracy, sophistica- tion and charm. That is why Hugh Grant will never be the contemporary equivalent of that other British import called Grant.

`To some extent you have the Windsor family to thank for that,' he continues. `Given the extraordinarily well-publicised antics of Charles and Diana, it's more diffi- cult than ever to associate a British accent with class.'

Closer to the furnace of deal-making that drives Hollywood, people mutter more bluntly about the Grant predicament. It is, they say, a nasty Catch 22 based on the likelihood that America's appetite for charming screwballs like the one he played in Four Weddings and a Funeral will prove finite. 'Does he branch out and play other characters, as in Extreme Measures, and not find an audience, or does he play the same old thing and lose his audience because they've seen it before?' one of his agent's rivals asks. As for his current prospects as an A-list leading man, this agent puts them rather brutally at 'zilch', while another, in the withering jargon of the business, says, `He's just casting now.'

`Casting', here, means auditioning for parts in other people's films rather than having them written for you. It is not a label to have associated with your name so soon after being the 'hottest thing in town'. (Glossary note no. 2: 'heat', the only corn- modity in Hollywood that excites agents and producers more than money, is gener- ated as much by their talk as by an actor's talent. Edward Norton deservedly basks in it now after superb performances in Primal Fear and Milos Forman's The People vs Larry Flint.) Mr Grant may protest that all actors suffer flops and none wants to be typecast by his first successful role. This is true. But he appears to have done himself no favours in a fickle trade by encouraging his girlfriend apprenticed only as a model and occasional actress — to act as producer for his first big- budget departure from romantic comedy.

After the success of Four Weddings the couple set up their own production compa- ny in the welcoming Beverly Hills embrace of Castle Rock Entertainment. They called it Simian Films because 'Elizabeth thinks I look like a monkey', Mr Grant said recent- ly. Such a company is often a mere trophy for a star on the rise, but to their credit the British pair have tried, so far in vain, to make theirs a conduit for British writers seeking deals in Hollywood.

The only real action at Simian Films has revolved around Extreme Measures, with Ms Hurley in charge. 'It was a bold step,' the film's director, Michael Apted, said in a recent interview. 'One of the things that really impressed me was that she never tried to bullshit or pretend she knew about things she didn't.'

Others take a different view — roughly the view that Republicans took of Hillary Clinton appointing herself in charge of healthcare reform. 'It was very bizarre that they made such a big deal about doing it together,' a producer with solid experience in importing foreign talent to Hollywood told me, after checking several times that he would not be named. 'One wonders whether it was necessarily a good idea given that she's had zero experience in film-making. Some see it as almost disre- spectful to the industry, and it does take presumption.' Such an arrangement, he continued, 'could work, depending on the person. But it's always considered suspect in terms of knowing who's really in control and how smart they are about material. The jury's still out, but they certainly have one strike against them.'

In Hollywood, where candour is often anonymous and truth a matter of opinion, the extreme caginess of those in the industry when talking about Hugh Grant is a reason for optimism on his part. It means they think he could have another attempt at the big time and want to stay friends with him just in case. The bird dog is sniffing, but not yapping yet. George Christy, the veteran Hollywood columnist whose pronounce- ments have determined the course of many acting careers, is not writing off Mr Grant quite yet. 'I've seen them come and go. But look at John Travolta,' he says. 'If the right role came along for Hugh, who knows? I doubt he will ever be in the superstar league, but he is definitely still marketable.' Mr Grant's other consolation is that the Divine Brown affair has not done irrepara- ble harm (this is despite Ms Brown having just embarked on a tour of America with a somewhat embarrassing speciality act she mimes on stage, and in some detail, her nocturnal encounter with the actor). 'We just re-elected a president who is probably going to face sex scandals in his second term,' the influential critic Roger Ebert points out. 'The American people knew that and ignored it. Hugh Grant's scandal is peanuts by comparison.' A former head of the Casting Society of America, Mike Fenton, put it more succinctly: 'He didn't murder anyone, so who cares?'

Mr Grant's shadows hang not over his sex life but his acting. It may be that he (and his critics) underestimated the scale of the leap he is attempting from British twit to Hollywood hero. Certainly no one except a succession of 007s, who of course had to be British, has pulled off anything similar since Michael Caine put on a good southern drawl for Otto Preminger in Hurry Sundown 30 years ago. But instead of Mr Grant's fluttery eyes and verbal dither- ing, Mr Caine's signature was virile cheek. He was credible in the heartland as a step- ping-stone between the unforgettable Cary Grant of North by Northwest — lithe, Bryl- creemed and sarcastic, the definitive mid- Atlantic leading man of the Fifties — and the monosyllabic, steroid-drenched squad of modern American he-men. , Mr Grant's main trouble is that he has failed to make the transition from an endearing eccentric to a sex symbol. In truth, many American women no longer find him very attractive. One director explained, 'The problem is that Grant's nov- elty has worn off and women are left with something that is not obviously masculine. He just can't compete with the beefcakes.'

Mr Ebert, America's Barry Norman, con- firms this, saying that Mr Grant's drawback is that 'he is not naturally stoic. One of the things you notice when you look at the big action heroes — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis — is an impassivity. They are the immovable object and the movie whirls around them, whereas Hugh Grant gets whirled along with the film.'

Somewhere between romantic fop and `I'm being stalked.' male icon there is the career path chosen by most actors: character acting, and, if you're good and lucky, the chance to relax occasionally and play yourself. But along this path being British no longer gives you an automatic head start. Mr Ebert insisted that Americans 'have had an inferiority complex about the British since day one'.

This may be an exaggeration, but Holly- wood's treatment of British actors has been cyclical. The celluloid English gentleman, in whom Grant specialises, had his heyday in the 1930s, represented by such diffident fig- ures as Robert Donat, Ronald Colman, Brian Aherne and of course David Niven. After the second world war, however, the drawing-room comedies and costume dra- mas in which they had featured were replaced by more 'realistic' films portraying the everyday life of the American masses. The new school of tough-guy actors, includ- ing Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, elbowed out the British, who were no longer considered 'suitable casting'.

If Cary Grant was one of the few English actors to remain big box office, it was because he was so geographically indefin- able. Hugh Grant's predicament is closer to that of Niven, who, shortly before he died, remarked to a friend over lunch in the South of France, 'That period after the war was the lowest of my career. No one want- ed a recognisable upper-class Brit. When the English finally came back into fashion in the 1960s, it was not in the guise of the gentleman, but in the role of the "swing- ing" working-class rogue.'

If the Americans do have an inferiority complex, they certainly no longer encour- age the English to rub their noses in it at the movies. It is no accident that Tim Roth, much in demand for unsavoury cameos since his rottweilerish opening scene in Pulp Fiction, has buried his native accent somewhere in New Jersey, nor that Daniel Day-Lewis, the most successful British actor currently working in Hollywood, hardly ever plays British characters. Whether Hugh Grant wants to adapt to this regime, or can, is unclear. Mr Medved has his doubts. 'There's been no demon- stration of versatility at all,' he says. 'There wasn't with Cary Grant either, but the dif- ference is that playing the sheepish klutz in Four Weddings has limited Hugh Grant to one particular kind of film that isn't terribly in fashion now.'

This is a little unfair. Back in his extraor- dinary summer of 1994, when Four Wed- dings was racing past $50 million at the American box office, two smaller films called Sirens and Bitter Moon were showing the art-house crowd that the new Grant could be a prig as well as a paramour. Even then, he liked to tell interviewers that he was making a point of enjoying the adula- tion of Hollywood because he knew it would not last. We hoped he might be wrong, but he was not.

The author writes for the Times.