A few weeks ago, a colleague asked me to explain Elizabeth Hurley. This was a question from someone younger, which made it a trickier task than most. Well, I said, she’s Hugh Grant’s ex – before I realised that’s probably a bit demeaning as a descriptor. She’s an actor, too, I added. Or was an actor. I suppose she still is – perhaps they remembered all those headlines last year about her son directing her in a saucy thriller?
I could have brought up Austin Powers and Bedazzled. Or that safety pin dress. Or the fact that she’s so outrageously posh that when her mouth opens, the crown jewels seem to fly out. Instead, I admitted that I couldn’t adequately explain Elizabeth Hurley. Over the course of her 30 years of fame, Hurley’s most important role has simply been being Elizabeth Hurley, plummy super-goddess seamlessly transplanted into every facet of the celebrity ecosystem. This, my by-now-weary colleague told me, didn’t exactly help.
The question kept nagging at me. Who is Elizabeth Hurley? Is she just bikini selfies and forgettable cinema? Brexit voting and underwear entrepreneurialism? Is she always Elizabeth Hurley, even when she’s playing someone else? Her new Channel 4 reality show makes a good case for that theory. The Inheritance is more or less The Traitors with Elizabeth Hurley, the star appearing in campy, occasionally coffin-bound cameos as a woman known only as The Deceased, whose “vast fortune” is fought over by 13 contestants. She’s dead, but she’s also still Elizabeth Hurley – complete with a tasteful smoky eye, bizarre accent, and glowy decolletage at the ready.
To properly unravel the mystery of Elizabeth Hurley, I decided to go right back to the beginning of her long career, assuming that to truly understand her is to witness her from the ground up. This meant watching all 28 of her feature films in rapid succession – films being the one true constant across a career that has spun into wildly erratic corners. By the end of this mad journey, I’d watched Hurley hijack a plane, murder Patsy Kensit, fire bullets from her nipples, and smoke crack cocaine in two entirely different movies. I grew to adore her. My mind may have turned to soup along the way.
Day one: Euro-puddings and gratuitous nudity
Hurley and Hugh Grant met on the set of a 1988 costume drama called Rowing with the Wind, one of a number of obscure films the pair made at the start of their careers in inexplicable places on the continent. Grant has called this his “Euro-pudding” phase. I find Rowing with the Wind on YouTube, Grant playing Lord Byron and Hurley the flouncing ninny who’s in love with him. They’re both quite bad in it, as if they’re making this for the free holiday and know that not a living soul will ever watch it. (I should also mention Aria, a bizarre 1987 movie that served as Hurley’s proper debut – she pops up for five minutes lip-syncing to an operetta and showing her breasts. Madness!)
My journey continues with two more Hurley Euro-puddings. One, The Long Winter, I can only find on an obscure Russian website with Spanish dubbing all over it. The other is an absolute howler titled Kill Cruise, in which Hurley and Pasty Kensit play a pair of loud northerners flapping about an unnamed European city, with Hurley at one point performing an unbearably long striptease for a crowd of baying locals. “Bugger me, you were somethin’ else takin’ all your clothes off,” Kensit’s character exclaims soon after. The pair get on a boat with a man they become convinced is a serial killer, only for Hurley to reveal herself to be the one who’s actually insane. I wish I could say Kill Cruise is as fun as it sounds, but alas.
Day two: terrifying nightmares and Toby Young
Now we’re talking. I begin my second day of Hurleyfest with a rewatch of Passenger 57, the 1992 film that marked Hurley’s American debut. She plays a flight attendant and terrorist on a plane hijacked by Bruce Payne – who is unaware that undercover fed Wesley Snipes is also on board and ready to punch people. This is fun stuff, and Hurley matches its slightly mad tempo – seeing her wield a big gun and get knocked about near the sandwich cart is a hoot.
Next, I suffer through Beyond Bedlam, a risible 1994 horror in which Keith Allen haunts Hurley’s nightmares. While it’s on, I google what Hurley was up to around this time: flitting between London and Los Angeles, neither she nor Grant has yet made it, and are hanging out with Old Etonians and Toby Young at ritzy Hollywood parties. I briefly ponder whether I’d rather attend one of those events or set myself on fire. I choose the flames.
I also do a bit of a deep dive into Hurley’s poshness, which is all a bit confected: much like Grant, she was raised middle class, her cut-glass, jolly-hockey-sticks accent a put-on that sort of stuck. Fascinating!
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Day three: an inexplicable amount of cocaine
Things changed for both Hurley and Grant around this time. The Versace safety pin dress Hurley wore to the Four Weddings and a Funeral premiere sent her career stratospheric, and she was quickly snapped up to be the face of Estée Lauder. This also coincided with the release of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a very big British flop in which she plays a posh yuppie addicted to crack cocaine. It’s more ludicrous than explicitly awful, and Hurley tries her best to bring a touch of authenticity to the role (however hopeless). I then watch Dangerous Ground, a right odd duck of a film, in which Hurley plays a South African pole dancer who romances Ice Cube and who is also addicted to crack cocaine. I actually like her in this film – she’s nicely vulnerable and human in a movie that can’t decide whether it wants to be a serious drama about post-apartheid Johannesburg or a bullet-ridden actioner.
I dig out an old issue of Empire magazine from 1996 – published shortly after Grant had been arrested for his infamous dalliance with a sex worker, which only furthered his and, by proxy, Hurley’s notoriety. In it, she spoke about her unusual actor-turned-model-turned-professional-girlfriend-of status, and how disappointed she was by her film career. “So often things I’ve done have really added up to nothing,” she said. “I just have to turn that around.”
Luckily, there was Austin Powers in the pipeline, with Hurley lovely and deadpan as the catsuit-clad love interest for Mike Myers’s toothy secret agent. This is, at least in my household, a comedy classic. Underrated is another Hurley film from this period, the addiction drama Permanent Midnight. She plays a British TV executive in Los Angeles who marries Ben Stiller’s druggie writer for a green card. She’s quite lovely in it – one of the few real innocents in a city plagued by users. She’s great in this mode, slightly de-glammed and wholesome. It’s unfortunate she wasn’t allowed to do it more.
Day four: monkey business
I skim through her cameos in the Ron Howard flop EDtv (think The Truman Show but stupid) and the inexplicably randy Disney kids’ comedy My Favourite Martian, while continuing to read her press through the years. It turns out that Hurley loves primates. “Whenever I’ve sued a newspaper, I’ve never taken the money myself,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 1996. “I torment the editors by making them pay thousands of pounds to the Great Ape Escape in Dorset.” I make a note to consult The Independent’s lawyers before this piece is published, just for safety. Sorry to those apes.
I then watch Hurley’s cameo in Austin Powers 2, in which her character turns out to have been a cyborg all along, has her face ripped off, attempts to kill Austin and then explodes. It’s incredibly funny. She really does have great comic timing. Then it’s The Weight of Water, an inexplicably star-studded psychological thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow that absolutely no one remembers. It follows two plot strands, one in which Sarah Polley and the wonderful Katrin Cartlidge suffer under the patriarchy in 1873, the other in which Hurley, Sean Penn, Catherine McCormack and Josh Lucas research murders and play sexual mind games with one another on a boat in the present day. Hurley does naughty things with an ice cube while Penn salivates. This is an absolute corker of a terrible movie, but Hurley herself isn’t half-bad. She doesn’t ever disappear into roles, exactly, but that never did Sean Connery or Nicolas Cage any harm, did it?
Day five: peaks and troughs
Released shortly after Grant and Hurley announced their amicable split, Bedazzled remains the ultimate Elizabeth Hurley movie, for it asks little from her besides being suitably withering and looking sensational in a parade of fantastic outfits. She plays the Devil, who grants Brendan Fraser’s loveless sadsack seven wishes. This was a big hit in 2000, and has aged like a fine wine – I remember disliking Bedazzled as a child, but upon rewatch find it to be plenty camp and fun, and specifically because Hurley throws herself so thoroughly into it. There’s a touch of Joan Collins to her performance here (complimentary), and – let’s call a spade a spade – surely no one has looked so good in a film this century?
I skim through two bad Denis Leary romcoms Hurley was in next and focus my attention on Serving Sara, an interesting pit stop in her career as it is, to date, the last big American film she’s made. Serving Sara was also the last big American film to be led by Matthew Perry. It’s quite an unusual project as a result, as if you’re watching two celebrities spinning through their last days as proper movie stars. (The brief presence of a young Amy Adams only adds to the lopsided feel here.) Hurley isn’t very good in Serving Sara, in which she plays a trophy wife tangled up with the man who serves her divorce papers, but it’s hardly her fault: this is a film in which the biggest comic set piece involves Perry sticking his arm into a cow’s rectum. Even Meryl would struggle with that one.
Hurley’s better in Method, a 2004 thriller that ended up being her last film before a 10-year hiatus from acting. It’s probably the most conceptually interesting Hurley film to date, too, as she’s cast as a pampered, beautiful movie star of questionable talent, who causes trouble on the set of a movie in which she plays a legendary serial killer. There’s a lot of salacious lore to this film, with its director making lots of wild allegations about Hurley’s diva behaviour on set to the News of the World. “When she told me rather grandly the first day of shooting not to direct her because she was ‘a celebrity, not an actress’, I really had nowhere to go,” he claimed. I don’t know whether this is accurate – Hurley only denied the more outlandish claims via her publicist at the time – but it’s quite a sad quote if true, isn’t it?
Day six: oh dear
At this point, 18 films in, I’m admittedly a bit tired of watching Elizabeth Hurley movies. But, nevertheless, I persist. I skim to her single scene in Made in Romania, a strange 2010 mockumentary actually inspired by the chaos behind the scenes of Method, then skip through 2014’s Viktor, which is basically Taken if it starred a sweaty Gerard Depardieu. I put Father Christmas Is Back and An Elephant’s Journey on in the background while I make soup, and am appreciative of her two-scene cameo in the throwaway romcom Then Came You.
I follow this up with the Father Christmas Is Back sequel, Christmas in Paradise, which features numerous musical performances from Billy Ray Cyrus, who is currently Hurley’s real-life beau. They have minimal chemistry, which might be because Cyrus has the screen presence of a bag of flour.
Day seven: for the love of God, make it stop
It is my seventh day of Elizabeth Hurley films, and I smell freedom on the horizon. I speed through an inexplicably expensive-looking horror film called Piper that’s streaming on Prime (godawful), a third terrible Christmas film, and then the infamous beachfront erotic thriller Strictly Confidential. Damien Hurley, my new favourite actor’s model-slash-filmmaker son, directed this one, which calls for his mum to indulge in lesbian love scenes and be beaten around the head. It’s like an episode of Poirot crossed with a Jet2 advert. It is also, blissfully, the last entry in Hurley’s filmography.
The funny thing about this last two-day run of Hurley films, though, is that she’s very “Elizabeth Hurley” in them. She tends to have the exact same, immaculately coiffed haircut, the same uber-glam wraparound dresses. At one point in Strictly Confidential she’s all over-glossed lips and tousled hair while laid up in a hospital bed. Hurley had become more of a brand than an actor during this time – launching an underwear line and hosting the reality show Project Catwalk (she was reportedly dropped after the first series for being “too wooden”, which is hilarious) – and you can see that reflected on screen. I don’t know if I’d call any of what she’s doing in these films “good acting”, but – for better and worse – you can tell she’s having fun, often playing into her haughty image rather than running away from it.
Most of all, though, my journey across Hurley’s film career has produced a series of undeniable truths: the camera loves her; her voice is so clipped and unusual that it loops back around from baffling to beguiling; she has, believe it or not, a bit more range than you might think. I don’t think she has a Paddington 2-esque renaissance in her, meaning the same mid-life pivot into great, interesting performances that Grant has experienced, but I do think she probably warrants a second look as an actor. If only because it explains why she’s lasted so long in the public eye, Elizabeth Hurley is, unequivocally, a star. And no one else has quite had the kind of career she’s had. I’m a man who’s now spent nearly 2,500 minutes of his life watching the entirety of her filmography – just trust me on that.
