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Hugh Grant - Biography

The Notting Hill and Love Actually star was born in 1960


Hugh Grant smiling at a red carpet event© Getty Images
Hannah Watkin
Content Writer
Updated: July 11, 2023
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Early life

Hugh John Mungo Grant was born on 9 September 1960, and grew up in an unpretentious middle class suburban home. His father was an Army officer who later retired to retail carpets, his mother wokred as a schoolteacher in West London Hugh attended Latymer Upper School before attending New College, Oxford on a scholarship in the early 80s. 

While at university, Hugh joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society and got involved in productions including Twelfth Night. He also starred in a student fil, Privileged, which also saw the screen debut of actors Imogen Stubbs and Mark Williams. After graduating, he took small parts in regional theatre productions and later earned minor roles in TV programmes.

Stardom

His big break came which he gained his first leading role in the 1987 Merchant-Ivory film Maurice, adapted from the E.M. Forster novel. Then followed further roles of varying success, until 1994 and Hugh's starring role in Four Weddings and a Funeral. At the time, the Hollywood heartthrob-to-be was considering giving up acting, but after securing this role he became a much in demand international star. 

Roles in Sense and Sensibility, Notting Hill and Love Actually followed, to name only a few, and Hugh also enjoyed several ventures into the world of film production. In the 2000s, Hugh starred in hits such as About a Boy and the Bridget Jones's Diary franchise. 

More recently, his career has seen another renaissance with Hugh taking many celebrated and varied roles in films such as Florence Foster Jenkins, Paddington 2, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, as well as TV roles including playing Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal and starring alongside Nicole Kidman and Donald Sutherland in the HBO miniseries The Undoing.

Personal life

While filming on the Spanish film Remando Al Viento in 1987, Hugh met Elizabeth Hurley, and the pair began a relationship which became a regular media fascination. They split in 2000. 

Hugh has two children with his previous partner Tinglan Hong, Tabitha Xiao Xi Grant, who was born in September 2011, and Felix Chang Hong Grant, who was born in December 2012.

Inbetween his on-off-again relationship with Tinglan, Hugh met his future wife, television producer Anna Eberstein. The couple welcomed their first child, John Mungo Grant, just three months prior to the birth of Felix, in September 2012. Anna and Hugh have since gone on to have two more children, a daughter, born in December 2015, and another child (gender unknown) born in January 2018. The couple married in 2018.

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