Elizabeth Hurley is not like other film actresses or producers. At least not from the outside. While other women who work in films sometimes project some personality or get snapped from unflattering angles, Hurley looks more like a brunette Barbie doll every day.
From the outside, the glitz is always on,
the lips are always glossy, the dress always hot off the Versace catwalk. And on the inside, well, who knows? Hurley epitomises the life of the modern celebrity - her outside is buffed to perfection, and her inside is a complete mystery.
Is that a criticism? Maybe it shouldn't be. After all, why shouldn't Hurley keep herself to herself? She is, clearly, getting what she wants out of life, and if what you want is to dine with Donatella and holiday with Elton, then why not go for that ambition?
Sweetly, like all celebrities, she insists that it's not like that at all. "I'd rather have Marmite on toast with a good friend than eat out with a glamorous co-star," she tells interviewers before dashing off to Mustique with Mick Jagger.
Not for Hurley the rather strained look peculiar to most actresses as they approach the red carpet at premieres and Oscars. While you can see them wondering why they have to behave like walking dolls, for Hurley the trip down the red carpet seems to be the icing that's worth the whole cake. In yet another Versace number, slashed to the thigh, decollete to the waist, cut to the coccyx behind, brilliant scarlet or jade-green, she turns to the paparazzi as to her long-lost lover.
Hurley has been part of modern royalty, the Celebrity Club, for years, not simply for her ability to wear a frock but because the perfect Barbie also had a perfect Ken, Hugh Grant.
As with other duos such as Posh and Becks or Liam and Patsy, the doubling up of minor celebrity makes for major excitement. These particular contemporary couplings may not reach anything like the glamour of the couples of yesteryear, of, say, Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier, or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But in our celebrity-obsessed age they will do very well. So who would be surprised that the recent split of Hurley and Grant made front pages in all the tabloids and several of the broadsheets?
Hurley left home on the day the split was announced in her usual way, immaculate, coiffed, in a white fake fur jacket and white jeans, smiling for the cameras. Grant, similarly, seemed to be shrugging the whole thing off. "I'm feeling fine," he told reporters.
Of course the two of them may have been sobbing and sparring all night after the break-up of their 13-year-old relationship, but, as usual, they presented a good front. They will continue, for the time being, to live together. And they will continue to work together, since their company, Simian Films, has five films in development or production.
In fact, it seemed as if the only people excited by the news of the break-up were journalists. For years, Grant and Hurley have been telling interviewers that they see one another as brother and sister rather than lovers, or that she likes to throw things at him when she is annoyed. When asked if she would ever do a sex scene on screen with him, she was shocked. "I'd never want to inflict that upon the public."
They were hardly, in other words, claiming to be participants in a fairytale romance, even before Grant's arrest for lewd behaviour with prostitute Divine Brown in 1995. Normally, such an episode would shift sympathy firmly on to the woman involved in the case. But Hurley didn't need public sympathy. While Grant paraded his embarrassment and desire for forgiveness, she has never let anyone in the outside world know that she is made of anything but lip-gloss and steel.
Like Grant, Hurley affects the mannerisms of the upper class even though her background isn't staggeringly posh. Her father was in the Army, and as a teenager she lived in Basingstoke, where she sold double glazing on Saturdays to earn some cash.
"It was fish fingers and peas for suppers and holidays in Devon as opposed to Mustique," she once said, and she was determined to end up somewhere rather different. A friend of hers from those days remembers that she always "exuded an air of determined achievement. She had a plan: she studied ballet, she read books, she spoke about having a career and she showed only a fleeting interest in excessive cider consumption. That, in Basingstoke, was classy."
For a long time Hurley was simply a bit-player on the very outskirts of show business. She moved to London at the age of 18 and danced five nights a week with a group called Bodyline. When she was 22 she landed the part of Christabel in Dennis Potter's series of that name, but after a series of unnoticed appearances in films such as Passenger 57, Beyond Bedlam and Mad Dogs and Englishmen, it looked as if she'd never work her entry into the Celebrity Club.
But then, at the age of 29, she began to exploit her talent for stealing the show even when she wasn't in the show. As the press first realised in 1994, at the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral, she knew how to wear the dress and walk the walk.
Given the proclivities of the press photographers, that talent wins out all the time. You and I might want to see our favourite actresses - Cate Blanchett, say, or Judi Dench - looking cool and cheery as they march into the awards ceremonies, but what we always get, after every Bafta, every Oscar, every Vanity Fair party, is Liz, her glossy pout and her cleavage.
Why is this? There are dozens of actresses and models as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than Hurley. But her image has struck gold. Perhaps that's because although she walks around half naked at parties, she has such an old-fashioned aura. Whatever is going on in her head, she projects herself as the perfectly blank slate on to which men can visualise a thousand fantasies.
Understandably, serious actresses don't see Hurley as one of them. After she was reported saying, "If I were as fat as Marilyn Monroe I'd kill myself," a rather better actress than she was reported saying, "If any of us were as talentless as Elizabeth Hurley, we'd kill ourselves."
The jibe isn't wholly unfair. On screen, Hurley tends to look embarrassed and stilted. The high point of her acting career to date was probably Vanessa Kensington in Austin Powers: Man of Mystery, and even that film, where hamminess was the order of the day, made her less watchable than her magazine advertisements for Estee Lauder.
Still, with the public profile that she has attained, the parts keep coming in. In the past couple of years you could have caught her as an arrogant television reporter in My Favourite Martian, as a junkie's wife in Permanent Midnight and flashing her smile in EdTV.
Even if it's her celebrity profile that makes her a wanted face, rather than her acting ability, that doesn't mean she's learnt to love the press. Just like all the other celebrities who have made a pact with the devil of media exposure, she still acts surprised when the devil shows his teeth and her privacy is invaded.
Those who want to see something more in Hurley than the frocks and premieres quote the fact that she loves Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. It was once said that Demi Moore, who sat next to her at dinner one night, was overwhelmed by her beauty and her intelligence. Oh, wouldn't it be great to imagine that behind the glossy smile there was a witty, clever woman, observing the mores of Hollywood and London celebrity life with the cool edge of a cynical intelligence?
Up to now, however, Hurley hasn't chosen to give out quite that impression. Sure, she can read, but what really seems to get her going are dresses. She has never spoken so passionately - not about Grant or films or acting - as she did about frocks in a recent issue of Elle magazine, when she described her love affair with couture fashion.
"By June 1994 Versace was my favourite word," she said. "I am in heaven every time I get to wear couture." This is a woman obsessed, like the late Princess of Wales, with the image reflected back at her from a thousand lenses. "I threw away two-thirds of my wardrobe and lost 15 pounds after I first saw paparazzi pictures of myself," she recorded dismayingly.
She would never do a Kate Winslet and get too plump for Versace, or a Julia Roberts and forget to shave her armpits. But she isn't going for marks for personality, she's going for the Barbie Doll of the Century award, and it looks like the prize is already hers.
In fact, the career that most people out there know her by is modelling. In 1995 she became the face of Estee Lauder, and when you read her talking about modelling, you marvel that a woman who isn't entirely stupid could take being photographed to plug Advanced Night Repair or Time Release Moisture Creme quite so seriously.
But the career she is now putting her back into is that of film producer. "I am manically driven in my work," she has said enthusiastically, and, "I do love the business side of movies. It's easier to do than the creative side and sometimes much more fun, too."
With that lack of irony and sense of drive, it's not surprising that Screen International recently rated her as the fourth most powerful producer in Britain. Although the first film out of Simian Films was the egregious flop Extreme Measures, starring Grant, the second, released last year, was the mild success Mickey Blue Eyes, starring - surprise surprise - Grant.
Who knows, perhaps there is another Elizabeth Hurley out there - somebody who has a whole life independent of the frocks and the Time Release Moisture Creme and the cuddly snaps with Elton John. It's always nice to give celebrities the benefit of the doubt, even if they don't give you any clues to the real person hiding away behind the glossy smile.
Indeed, she apparently believes that there might be life after she hangs up her sequinned dresses. "I'll do that when I'm tired of being Elizabeth Hurley," she said to a friend recently, talking about a potential life outside the celebrity precinct.
That life might turn out to be an interesting one, even if it will leave a yawning gap in the tabloids.
- INDEPENDENT
Elizabeth Hurley is not like other film actresses or producers. At least not from the outside. While other women who work in films sometimes project some personality or get snapped from unflattering angles, Hurley looks more like a brunette Barbie doll every day.
From the outside, the glitz is always on,
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