Hugh's Sorry Now

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He's even happy to riff on his 12-year relationship with Hurley, the often scantily clad Valkyrie to whom he seems content to play the hapless chorus boy. "Elizabeth made me buy a house," he confesses, "and we spent two years having idiot, pretentious, criminal bozos decorate it. It's now completely hideous, and I'm quarreling with her because I don't want to live there. The shower smells of dead people; I hate it." Instead, he hangs out in their old flat around the corner. "I go there and watch the football and drink beer. But I think that's healthy, isn't it? Maybe not."

For a man publicly adored for his boyishness, it must be hard to take on the trappings of adulthood. Perhaps that is why, despite signs of a comeback, Grant still pretends he is not fully committed to acting. "There's the ever increasing prospect of just...stopping," he says. "It would be such bliss." He dreams of taking up writing again. In his lean years he wrote book reviews and comedy sketches; he even worked on a novel. "It was called Slack," he says, "and it was about someone with no job, strangely enough."

People who know Grant have heard this talk of quitting before. "He said that the first day I met him--that acting was no profession for an adult," says Curtis. "Maybe it is bull____," Grant admits, "but it is a sort of fantasy." It is also the one thing that audiences would probably never forgive.