Take a day trip to Cuttyhunk
By Luaine Lee, Scripps Howard News Service
People will forgive you anything if you do it with enough charm -- and a British accent.
So it's easy to excuse actress Elizabeth Hurley for not talking about her boyfriend Hugh Grant's encounter with a Hollywood prostitute last year.
Ms. Hurley herself was able to forgive. In fact, she and Mr. Grant have just finished a new film together, "Extreme Measures," in which Mr. Grant stars and Ms. Hurley produces. (The film opens today locally.)
Technically, that makes her his boss.
"There are advantages and disadvantages of knowing so well the person you're working with," she says, curling her feet under her on a rust-colored couch here and lighting a Marlboro.
"The advantage was I could be a great deal ruder to him than I could to the other actors. There was less pussy-footing. You always have to say, 'That was a good idea but perhaps we could just think about trying it like that.' With him, I could say, 'That's terrible. Do it again or I won't pay you,' " she grins.
Actually, their filmmaking techniques seem an extension of how they've always related to each other. Both have been hardworking actors since they met in Spain more than 10 years ago co-starring in the undistinguished "Rowing with the Wind."
"Always in an unofficial capacity we asked each other for help for years and years," she says, the bangs of her light-brown hair shading her brow.
"He'd say, 'I don't know what the hell I'm doing with this part! I can't play it.' I'd say, 'Yes, you can, the reason you can play it is ...' You have to raise people's confidence a lot sometimes. And I do quite a bit of that."
He helps her as well, she nods. "I say, 'I don't know how to play this line, give me a line reading.' And he helps me with speeches I have to make."
Not only is she an actress and a bona fide producer, Ms. Hurley's also one of the world's most recognizable models as the official "face" of the Estee Lauder cosmetic line. Often she's obliged to speak in public when a new product is launched, an experience she finds unnerving, and one with which Mr. Grant is particularly helpful.
While she trudged headlong into acting and producing, modeling was strictly an accident.
"It came out of nowhere," she says, shrugging. "I'd spent nine years trying really hard, acting. And suddenly I get one of the best modeling contracts in the world without putting any effort into it whatsoever. And it's very bizarre trying to handle that in some ways because it's not something you've longed for and dreamt about and killed yourself trying to get."
Though Ms. Hurley claims that she and Mr. Grant indulged in "slothful" periods, both have toiled steadily whenever they could find the work.
Her first break came in 1988 when she starred in TV's "Cristobel," one of the last miniseries written by Dennis Potter before his death.
"I was only 22, and I thought, 'Yippee! That means everything's going to be great from now on!' It wasn't. I got some little foreign films and bits of TV, but I wasn't whisked to Hollywood, and I didn't do a million great movies."
Rubbing her cheek, she muses, "In retrospect, I had to work a lot harder after that."
Ms. Hurley, 31, grew up in a close knit family with an older sister and younger brother. Until she was 12, the family moved frequently with her father, who was in the Army. Her mother was a schoolteacher.
Being uprooted so often took its toll, she thinks. "When I look back on it now, I think if you get up and leave every two years, if you go to a new school every two years, if you have no continuity of friends for two years ... I think it does make a difference. It probably makes you sink or swim."
Once you meet her, you realize that Ms. Hurley is definitely a champion swimmer. After years of study, she renounced ballet when she realized "I was never going to be very good." In college she kept working when her pals were partying.
"My friends were going out and having a laugh. And I formed a dance troupe to get my union card. I didn't have enough money, so we used to go and dance every night in nightclubs. I used to try to make people do it with me. But it was, 'Oh, no, I'm only 18, I want to go out and have some fun.' I said, 'OK, that's cool. You do that. But I can't. I've got to do some work.' "
She and Mr. Grant both feel -- because of the rabid media attention in England -- that they can't go home. She's exhausted from living out of a suitcase, she confesses, and envies her older sister's bucolic life.
"She's married, has a 2-year-old baby which I watched being born," she sighs.
"She's pregnant again. She's a literary agent. She's married. (Her life) is ordinary compared to our lives. But she's so happy. She's so very, very happy. She's not envious of the fact that we have silly things in our lives that some people think are great: Concorde flights, free hotels and trunkloads of clothes. Yeah, of course it's cool. But it doesn't mean anything at the end of the day."
While she admits that she threw herself into her work after Mr. Grant's dalliance, Ms. Hurley swears she'll eventually take a break.
"But I don't like to let opportunity pass me by, because there's plenty of other people who want that opportunity," she says.
"It's a combination of not wanting to waste time and opportunities because I don't think they come by so very often. And I don't think you can hope that fate's going to intervene too many times in your life."
Now that she HAS actually been whisked away to Hollywood, she acknowledges, "I like my life as it is now. But I'm sort of frightened to stop working in case ... things can just disappear if you don't keep hold of them and keep working at them."
"Extreme Measures" opens Friday.
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