Hugh Grant Aims To Please

Perhaps because success and fame bloomed so recently for him, perhaps because he can still imagine them withering if not tended well, Hugh Grant aims and works diligently to please.

As he moves from one throng of reporters to another in a Manhattan hotel on a recent morning, he treats almost every question as an opening for a joke and sculpts almost every answer into a bit of witty repartee.

Is it true women try to sneak into his hotel rooms?

“Not nearly enough to my liking.”

Did the huge success of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” change him?

“I’m thoroughly unpleasant now, very bigheaded, won’t talk to any of my old friends.”

Has he been able to translate any of the lengthy treatises on his craft published in Japan, where he’s a superstar?

“They’re very revealing. They said I prefer to act lying down or reclining. Now that I think about it, they’re dead right. I’ve always found it a tremendous effort to stand.”

Grant is promoting his new movie, “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain,” which opened Friday. He’s also gearing up for three additional releases in the second half of 1995.

After “Englishman,” a small and unassuming British comedy, comes “Nine Months,” a big and brash Hollywood one. Directed by “Mrs. Doubtfire’s” Chris Columbus, it casts him as a man unnerved by his wife’s pregnancy.

Also ahead: the period comedy “Restoration,” in which he has a cameo, and “an awfully big adventure,” a dark story with Grant as an evil theater director. It reunites him with “Four Weddings” director Mike Newell and gives audiences a different side of both their talents.

By the end of the year, either Grant will have shored up his newfound star status and fulfilled the promise of his performance in “Four Weddings And a Funeral,” or he will be ebbing.

That might explain his fidgeting, his pausing, his air of exertion, exhaustion and willed charm.

He acknowledges that the perpetuation of stardom is hardly the most burdensome worry to possess. Still, he says, “It would be humiliating to come crashing straight down again.

“If I could just keep it going for a year or two, then I could gradually fade away.”

Grant’s arrival at stardom last year seemed instantaneous, even though the 34-year-old actor had appeared in more than 20 movies and TV projects over the prior decade. Before “Four Weddings,” almost nobody noticed. After, almost everybody did.

Movie commentators frayed the pages of their thesauruses rummaging for better adjectives to describe his appeal. Many decided to pass him the mantle of another debonair actor with the same last name - Cary Grant.

He feels awkward about that.

“Four Weddings” went on to win an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Grant did not get the Best Actor nomination many thought he would, but he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

Grant did get to be a presenter at the Oscar ceremony. He arrived glamorously with his girlfriend, model-actress Elizabeth Hurley, who recently became the official face for Estee Lauder cosmetics, and proceeded to embarrass himself totally, he says.

The prelude to Grant’s big breakthrough came in late 1993, with the release of “The Remains of the Day,” another Merchant-Ivory production. Grant was the character to whom Anthony Hopkins tried to explain the birds and the bees.

Then, in early 1994, came “Four Weddings.” Grant says he was totally unprepared for its huge success, as were his colleagues on the set of “The Englishman,” which he was shooting in Wales at the time.

Says Colm Meaney, one of his co-stars, “Suddenly, we were watching every milkman to see if he was really a tabloid reporter.”

Grant had two other movies released around the same time as “Four Weddings,” though neither drew significant attention. Both “Sirens” and “Bitter Moon” cast him as repressed Englishmen, and both were kinky sex comedies of sorts, though “Bitter Moon” was much stranger.

Grant says that making the film with director Roman Polanski and model-actress Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife, was doubly bizarre.

“Roman won’t work in the mornings,” Grant explains. “So you’d turn up at lunchtime and have a few glasses of wine.

“Then you’d go on the set and Roman’s wife - she was a great one for flashing her bosoms. She’d say, ‘You like these?’ And you’d say, ‘Yes, they’re lovely, Emmanuelle, you showed them to me yesterday and the day before.’ If she’s bored in a restaurant, she does that - just takes her top off. She’s one of my favorite people.”

There’s a pattern here. Part of what Grant loves about Hurley is that “she’s a very naughty-looking girl.”

The two share a residence in London, though each is often away - which is what makes the partnership work, he says.

When they’re cooped up together, he annoys her by idly drinking beer and watching soccer on TV.

She annoys him by being “a piggy beyond belief,” he says.

“Chewing gum wrappers are everywhere,” he says. “They’ll even be in the fridge.

“When she comes home in the evening, she likes to sit on the floor with her handbag and she just empties everything out. She just puts it all on the floor and then gets up and gets on with her life.”

He shakes his head. “I never, ever give her a letter to post. It’s like throwing it in a lake or down the loo.”