Stardom and work ethic

Hugh Grant has called being a successful actor a mistake and has repeatedly talked of his hope that film stardom would just be " a phase" in his life, lasting no more than ten years. He pins his lack of interest in acting on two different thoughts: first, that he drifted into the job as a temporary joke at age 23 and finds it an immature way for a grown man to spend his time; and secondly, because he believes to have already given the one remarkable comic performance he had hoped to create on screen. Grant has constantly described himself as a reluctant actor, who chooses to be neutral about his career and works mostly with friends from previous collaborations.

He has stuck to the genre of comedy, especially the romantic comedy, for the entirety of his mainstream movie career and never ventures to play characters who are not British. While some film critics, such as the respected Roger Ebert, have defended the limited variety of his performances, others have dismissed him as a one-trick pony. Eric Fellner, co-owner of Working Title Films and a long-time collaborator of Grant said, " His range hasn't been fully tested, but each performance is unique." A majority of Grant's popular movies in the 1990s followed a similar plot that captured an optimistic bachelor experiencing a series of embarrassing incidences to find true love, often with an American woman. In earlier films, Grant was adept at plugging into the stereotype of a repressed Englishman for humorous effects.

Grant's screen persona of later films, in the new millennium, gradually developed into a cynical, self-loathing cad. According to Carina Chocano, amongst film critics, the two tropes most commonly associated with Grant are that he reinvented his screen persona in Bridget Jones's Diary and About a Boy and dreads the possibility of becoming a parody of himself. His preference for levity over dramatic range has been a controversial topic in establishment circles, prompting him to say:

“I've never been tempted to do the part where I cry or get AIDS or save some people from a concentration camp just to get good reviews. I genuinely believe that comedy acting, light comedy acting, is as hard as, if not harder than serious acting, and it genuinely doesn’t bother me that all the prizes and the good reviews automatically by knee-jerk reaction go to the deepest, darkest, most serious performances and parts. It makes me laugh”.

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Княжева Елена Александровнана,

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Воронежского государственного университета.