‘Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role’: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice

Abstract

ABSTRACT Resumés of Hugh Grant’s career routinely note his performance as the repressed, upper-class Clive Durham in James Ivory’s groundbreaking gay Edwardian drama Maurice (1987) as his breakthrough role. However, Grant’s subsequent rise to global romcom stardom and celebrity since Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) has gradually occluded this earlier career phase from consideration as a significant moment in the formation of the ‘Hugh Grant’ persona. This research interrogates this interpretative gap by exploring the mediated self-/construction and sense-making interpretation of Grant’s persona in and around Maurice as manifested in the film’s 1987 media coverage. Also drawing on Ivory’s casting files, and comparatively on media which focused on all three of Maurice’s young ‘unknown’ male stars, the study explores how the ‘Hugh Grant’ of the late 1980s prefigures, denaturalises and unsettles later understandings of romcom ‘Hugh Grant’, including problematising his relation to New Man masculinities and foregrounding questions of class. The recent career narrative of Grant’s ‘new’ turn towards serious roles is likewise challenged by attention to his tragicomic performance in Maurice, which his Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal (2018) would reflexively echo 31 years later.