The Way They Were
I am away on my holidays for August so this will probably be my last newsletter for a few weeks. Before I go, I wanted to tell you about my podcast The Way They Were and why I find celebrity splits so fascinating.
Every week a very funny person brings along a celebrity break up that broke their heart and we do a deep dive on the romance: reading quotes from interviews, memoirs, tweets, and perform a full post mortem on what went wrong. Every episode swoops from giddy nostalgia to queasy identification and back again, because from Liz and Dick to Emma and Andrew, the celebrity couple we cherish is usually the one that moulded our ideas about what love is supposed to be like.
So please gather round the fire, while I tell you a tale of Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.
I was in my very early teens when they became famous. I remember going to see Four Weddings and a Funeral with a gang of friends. At the time there was a popular Guinness ad with a dance and when it came on as a trailer, I stood up in front of the whole cinema and danced along. I genuinely thought this would impress the boy I liked, because what teenage boy isn’t attracted to a needy attention seeker getting her first hit of validation from strangers?
I thought Hugh Grant was cute, in that posh Hugh Laurie way that seemed incredibly exotic to me. I assumed he was probably very shy and nervous around girls and would love a girlfriend who could put him at ease and make him laugh. He’d surely be so grateful to meet someone like me because he seemed so geeky and very obviously unlucky in love. He was definitely a safe back up choice for my romantic future.
And then I saw pictures of him on the red carpet with Liz Hurley and my mind was blown. What was ummy awhy Hugh doing with this attention seeking floozy, in a dress barely hanging together, all pleased with herself with mean eyes? I THOUGHT HE WAS SHY!!! And more confusingly, why were all the boys my age obsessed with her? She wasn’t funny. She didn’t seem like the type of sound girl who’d get up and dance to a Guinness ad unprompted. She wouldn’t drink a can of cider and climb a tree on a dare. She didn’t even seem to care if other girls liked her. She started to pop up on lots of magazine covers and I’d stare at her face like it was a puzzle. Why do men like her so much? She was every frosty girl I went to school with who the boys nudged each other about. She never smiled, she only seemed to smirk and it was an in-joke only the boys seemed to get.
The iconic Versace outfit that launched Liz’s career.
One day, I read an interview where a reporter came to meet Liz in her house. She appeared at the top of the stairs, the piece began, yawned languorously, stretched out her arms and said “I’ve just woken up from the most delicious nap.”
This interview haunted me. It was like a Rosetta Stone for how to make boys like you and I could not crack the code.
I thought about it obsessively, walking myself through her actions, like I was listening to a murderer explain how they did it, and with each beat, tried to imagine myself doing the same. I’d climb to the top of the stairs, in my pyjamas, in front of a man I’d just met and say, with a completely straight face “I have just woken up from a delicious nap.” It was like saying that all you have to do to get a boyfriend, was run into busy traffic with no clothes on. But in a sexy way. Liz Hurley was, in a word, terrifying.
I poured over all the interviews that Liz and Hugh gave. 90s Liz and Hugh were famous in a self consciously un-Hollywood way. They teased that they liked to check into hotels and pretend they were sister and brother. They didn’t seem to have any other celebrity friends. They always acted like the red carpet was slightly beneath them, as though caring about fame was a hilarious in-joke, a prank they were playing.
I don’t get it Hugh - she doesn’t even know any Fast Show sketches off by heart.
They always seemed to be laughing about how broke and poor they had once been, but it wasn’t in a way I recognised it; working in a supermarket with no money to go to the cinema. This was GLAMOUROUS poverty. When people said to me “you can't be an actor, Gráinne you wont make any money”, I pictured the life they described. Just as the oversized moon in ET made me think it simply orbited nearer the earth in America and so was just bigger in the night sky, Liz and Hugh made me think being a poor actor in London was just different. Before I became famous, teenage me admitted, I might struggle financially, but it would just mean ruefully laughing about the dreadful ITV3 Catherine Cookson adaptation I had just done, in the kitchen of my friend's house which was a castle. I could handle it.
The couple as penniless students.
Then there was Divine Brown. While doing publicity for 9 Months, his big Hollywood debut, Hugh was caught paying for the services of a sex worker and I WAS BESIDE MYSELF. Mainly about how Liz would react. Was smug perfect “I have no female friends” Elizabeth Hurley finally going to be embarrassed? I couldn’t hold the idea of her face and something so grubby and humiliating at the same time. It was more shocking that Hugh’s arrest - 90s Liz Hurley, taking a break from upstaging world beauties on the red carpet, to be human? Foolish me. When you're as beautiful and posh as Liz, it wasn’t going to happen. There was some drama. A new mattress was very publicly ordered for their London flat. Liz wore a white dress on the red carpet and looked demure. Hugh gave a charmingly embarrassed Late Night chat show interview. That was it. Nothing would smudge Liz’s perfect white-jeans life.
And then they broke up. After over a decade together, and to my surprise I was sad. The spell was broken. I knew even then, that they were so much more than the sum of their parts. They had gone from modern day Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier, posh and lusty, making in-jokes in matching vintage cricket jumpers to just two boring celebrities.
And what of the human Liz and Hugh that broke up, what can we learn? Beneath the glazed smirk had Liz actually felt betrayed by Hugh? Was the sudden global fame too much for the couple, had they never really recalibrated? Had they outgrown each other but hung on out of a need for someone they could trust in the madness of fame? Did Liz outgrow Hugh and yearn to spread her wings in the pleasure garden of holidays with Elton John, international billionaires and living her life like a real life Jackie Collins character? Had Hugh, an indulged actor in his thirties, become too much hard work?
Now, I can imagine Hugh - a bore at parties, talking himself too seriously and Liz - a shiny face amongst a choir of identical beauties. There is nothing aspirational. Their romance bloomed and died in a world before social media. We never really knew them and now never would, so their relationship remains perfectly preserved in amber. They are refugees from a court that fell decades ago, a glittering kingdom that we can never return to.
And what of me? I’ve finally realised that though it's great if people like you, it’s also OK to arrive in a killer dress, know you’re fabulous and not care if anyone thinks you're sweet. But maybe I’m just saying that because I feel so relaxed… you see… I’ve just woken up from the most delicious nap.
Treat yourself to some of episodes here, featuring fascinating couples like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-way-they-were/id1598595577
Maybe you’ll also like my online sketch videos! Find them all here: