Missing A Very English Scandal? Here are 10 great Hugh Grant performances you haven't seen

In A Very English Scandal,Hugh Grant’s terrific, multi-layered performance as the disgraced Jeremy Thorpe has proven to be the actor’s renaissance - consolidating his other high-quality acting work in Florence Foster Jenkins and Paddington 2.

And yet, while his career has been in the wilderness for several years, there is no denying that he has offered terrific value over a 35-year career. There are the obvious big hitters - Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary - but what about the other film and TV parts which have, on occasion, shown surprising versatility? Here are some of the highlights.

1. Privileged (1982)

Made while Grant was studying at Oxford, this film within a film concerns a group of undergraduates vying for roles in a student production of The Duchess of Malfi. Credited as Hughie Grant, he plays Lord Adrian, an aristocrat and he nails it with an air of entitled insouciance. Note - Grant was one a member of the university’s Piers Gaveston Society and photographic evidence shows him cavorting in surprisingly fetching leopard print.

2. A Very Peculiar Practice (1986)

Andrew Davies’s surreal satire set on a university campus is one of the best TV shows of the Eighties, and Grant unexpectedly pops up in one episode as an evangelical preacher called Colin who rather reluctantly agrees to take the chastity of dour Welsh student Megan. And this in an episode which sees the outbreak of a sexually transmitted disease on campus (or “a spot of tool trouble” as the crass Dr Bob Buzzard calls it).

3. Maurice (1987)

Grant’s breakthrough role came in this adaptation of EM Forster’s posthumously published novel (posthumous because Forster believed its frank depiction of homosexuality rendered it unpublishable). Grant plays Clive, an upper-class Cambridge undergraduate who represses his love for another man and, you feel, genins to wither away as he settlers into a life of dour provincial domesticity with the naive Anne.

4. The Changeling (1993)

Back in the Nineties, the BBC used to produce occasional seasons of televised stage plays and here, Grant was called on to do rather more than he was used to as Middleton and Rowley’s nobleman Alsemero, acting with far more honour and integrity (at least initially) than some of his later plays would afford him. Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern plays Beatrice Joanna, the tragic object of his affections.

5. The Remains of the Day (1993)

Everyone remembers this adaptation of Ishiguro’s novel for Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson’s performances as the touchingly repressed would-be lovers, but Grant gives a great account of the principled journalist (!) Reginald Cardinal who, with growing horror, realises that his uncle is a plaything of the Nazis. It’s a neat cerebral performance of the sort that Grant would soon abandon forever.

6. Sirens (1994)

Grant’s first film after the career-defining Four Weddings and a Funeral might not seem like much of a stretch (diffident, slightly prudish Englishman), and yet he gives considerable nuance to the part of an Anglican priest aghast at the bohemian ways of a group of antipodean artists between the wars. His slow sexual blossoming is played with both a delicious sense of control and an underlying humour.

7. An Awfully Big Adventure (1995)

Grant is often very good at capturing the attitudes of a particular moment in British history and that is certainly the case in this adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about a repertory company in Fifties Liverpool. As the eccentric sexually repressed director Meredith, Grant gives a brilliant account of a man whose creativity is hampered by a life spent living in the shadows.

8. Sense and Sensibility (1995)

On reflection, you would expect Greg Wise to play the decent stuffed shirt Edward Ferrars and Grant to play the caddish Willoughby but both excel in playing against type. Through Grant’s thoughtful performance, you can quite see how Emma Thompson’s Elinor, a young woman used to metabolising her pain, would feel safe in his hands. And I am sure many gave a quiet cheer at the sensible pairing off at film’s end.

9. Doctor Who - The Curse of Fatal Death (1999)

This Comic Relief special saw Grant as one of five doctors (the others being Rowan Atkinson, Jim Broadbent, Richard E Grant and Joanna Lumley) and you can see how he could have effortlessly slipped into the role proper - an effortless mix of intelligence and charisma. Indeed, when the show was revived in 2005, he was creator Russell T Davies’s first choice for the role. What a shame Grant’s agent blocked him from even realising the offer was on the table.

10. Music and Lyrics (2007)

An easy stand out in Grant’s later career, here he plays a washed-up former pop star who starts to write material for a promising young artiste. As a romcom, this was pretty standard fare, and yet Grant makes it a much better film with his combination of easy charm and a sort of relentless narcissism - something which would stand him in good stead when he played Jeremy Thorpe a decade later.