“He’s So Different From His ‘Notting Hill’ Persona”: The 1999 Vogue Interview That Lifted The Lid On The “Real” Hugh Grant

So is it true that your company is called Simian Films because she thinks you look like a monkey?

“She does think I look like a monkey, yes…”

“But she loves you nonetheless?”

“She loves me because of that.”

Ah, Hugh and Liz, Liz and Hugh… All we need are some beautiful babies for them to make a new royal family. I had, in fact, already asked Elizabeth if they wanted children. “I think we probably will, at some stage,” she said, “but sooner rather than later, because I’m 33. I can’t imagine not having children, and in the end, although he drives me demented, I can’t imagine having children without Hugh.”

Hugh, asked the same question, immediately wants to know what Elizabeth has said. When I tell him, he replies, “Well, I think I do, too, so we’d better get to it… I don’t know why we haven’t before. I suppose I’ve always had an inexplicable horror of settling.”

Like Peter Pan?

“No, not at all like Peter Pan. I think I’m just a bit of a glamour queen. I like the idea of flitting around the world, and not living in a semi-detached – not that that isn’t a lovely life, and not that I didn’t have a lovely childhood, because that’s how I was brought up.”

I point out that he and Elizabeth do not have to relocate from their splendid Chelsea townhouse to a suburban semi-detached in order to have children.

“Well, I suppose I’m beginning to realise that,” he says with a hint of a pout. “So I don’t have any excuses… I suddenly realised last Christmas that I can’t have another Christmas without having children. It’s just too humiliating, like not having a present for anyone – just too embarrassing… But I think I’ve blown it for this year, haven’t I?”

Still, he hasn’t quite given up the idea of Elizabeth giving birth on Christmas Day: “The Second Coming! The new millennium!”

Hugh Grant, as you may have guessed by now, is a handful: troubled, yet also flippant; a consummate flirt, yet also brotherly; a handsome heterosexual film star who occasionally lapses into the mannerisms of a homosexual heart throb. His relationship with Elizabeth reflects some of these inconsistencies: they lead quite independent lives (he describes himself as a “hermit”) yet there is a symbiosis in both their private and their business partnerships (and who else but each other could understand the perils and the pleasures of their ever-reflecting fame?) Hugh clearly adores Elizabeth, and finds comfort and security in their shared history – not just in the 12 years they have spent together, but in their separate yet mirrored childhood. “We are almost the same person,” he says, echoing a phrase she has already used about him. “Her mother is a teacher, like mine; her father is ex-army. We have the same sense of humour and had read the same books before we met, which is really creepy… People say we’re like brother and sister, as if we don’t fancy each other, which is just not the case. But we do have that fondness, that love you have for a sibling. If anyone says anything nasty about her, I want to smash them in the face, because that’s the way you feel about someone in your family.”