Hugh Grant is one of the most intelligent comic performers British cinema has produced, an actor who spent a decade being underestimated as a romantic lead before revealing, with considerable satisfaction, that the self-awareness had been there all along. He broke through with Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and went on to a career that includes Notting Hill (1999), About a Boy (2002), and The Gentlemen (2019). His late-career reinvention as a villain and character actor has been one of the more enjoyable second acts in recent memory.

On screen, Grant has always used his good looks as material rather than a resting point, and the slight curl of self-mockery around his performances is what separates him from actors who simply photographed well in the nineties. The rumpled charm, the stammer deployed with surgical comic timing, and a face that has settled into something more angular and watchable with age make him a consistently surprising screen presence.