I’m not awfully keen on family members of famous people putting themselves in the picture; nepo babies are the worst, the equivalent of Japanese knotweed when it comes to the landscape of modern popular culture. But pushy parents are annoying too: Stanley Johnson and the wittering senior Whitehall jumping on the bandwagon when they should be putting their feet up, or the phenomenon of the creepy ‘momager’ touting out her daughter for the delectation of the paying public.
But when I saw a photo on Instagram of Liz Hurley, 60, with her mum Angela, 85 – both in leopard-print swimwear from Hurley Junior’s extremely successful beachwear range – I felt absolute glee. Once again, Hurley doesn’t do what the showbiz herd do; everything from her vote for Brexit to her romance with Billy Ray Cyrus marks her out as original. Having her mother to live with her – Hurley Senior went to her daughter’s estate near Wales during lockdown and appears not to have left – is the latest of the unusual choices this fascinating woman has made.
Like most people I became aware of her when she wore That Dress – the black Versace held together with safety pins and audacity – to the premiere of her then boyfriend Hugh Grant’s film Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, despite the fact that she had been a working actress since 1987 and even taken the lead in Dennis Potter’s BBC adaptation of Christabel in 1988. She’s never been the best actor, to put it mildly, and if anything she’s got worse over the years. But what she did have was old-fashioned, uncomplicated star-power: a desire to be looked at by the maximum number of people mated with extreme physical beauty. In an age when actors often seem to be in an unspoken competition to see who can claim to suffer the most (coming to a head with the likes of Kristen Stewart comparing being papped with being raped in 2010, or Gwyneth Paltrow a few years later comparing internet trolling with surviving a war) the sheer fun Hurley had with being famous was refreshing. Rumour has it that the role of Vanessa Kensington in 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was created for her after Mike Myers and his wife saw her being interviewed on television and were impressed by her vivacity and wit.
She is ‘spirited’, an old-fashioned word which is woefully missing in the moping misses who have colonised showbusiness. Naturally, this quality often goes hand in hand with temperament, and I was privy to such a display when, after enthusiastically reading excerpts from my dirty book Ambition to be given away as a cassette tape with my magazine the Modern Review (‘Chummy, plummy and yummy’ ran the strapline) Miss Hurley was irked by then editor Toby Young’s intention to put a nude photo of her on the back of it. He wrote about it amusingly in the Standard in 2012:
The telephone call from Elizabeth Hurley was brief and to the point. ‘Toby,’ she said, ‘you’re a complete scumbag, d’you hear me? A COMPLETE AND UTTER SCUMBAG.’ This was an interesting situation. Usually, it’s beautiful actresses who get threatening phone calls from dotty young men, but here was Elizabeth Hurley abusing me. What was next? Actually, what happened next was that her solicitor called and threatened to start injunction proceedings against me.
He writes of the fast set with which she moved when she was in B-films rather than on the A-list: ‘In this group, Elizabeth occupied a position somewhere between matriarch and wayward daughter. She had a slightly high-handed, imperious manner which could occasionally put people’s backs up, but was so essentially down to earth and good-humoured it was impossible to dislike her. She was an odd combination of a thoroughly English character with a Mediterranean temperament. She was warm-hearted, but not someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of, as I was shortly to discover. When I originally asked her if she’d be interested in reading Ambition, Julie Burchill’s fucking and shopping novel, I expected her to refuse because it’s such a saucy book. It contains passages every bit as explicit as readers’ letters in Penthouse. But she readily agreed. She was at that stage in her career when she’d do almost anything for a bit of publicity.’ He writes bitchily of That Dress: ‘She must be the first actress in history who didn’t get noticed until she put her clothes on.’
Hers is a very old-fashioned English showbiz career; you can imagine her in the 1940s, a tonic for the troops, drawing stocking seams up the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil
For all her genuine elegance, there is something comical about Hurley. Maybe it’s the gap between her actuality and her image; she is gloriously vulgar, but passes for posh. Her father was an Army major and her mother a junior school teacher but she was a teenage state-school pierced punk. Her voice is classy, but her surname sounds like a burlesque move: hurley to the left, now hurley to the right! There is something of the Edwardian showgirl about her – the sort of woman who sporting gents would think ‘a fine filly’. She’s funny when she tries to be a grande dame, describing non-actors as ‘civilians’. If these were the old days, she’d have married a duke; as it is, she has been every inch her own woman. She is not massively driven by artistic ambition, one feels, more than happy to variously make her living from anything that interests her and pays well, be it organic farming or designing swimwear. Her latest showbiz project is the forthcoming Channel 4 gameshow The Inheritance, in which she stars with man of the moment Robert Rinder. During Covid she cancelled her annual Caribbean beachwear shoot because ‘it didn’t seem right to be drinking banana daiquiris on the beach whilst everyone else was cooped up’.
Her romantic life marks her out as not one of the herd either. Actors generally fall in love with whoever they are playing against, issue a lot of waffle about having found their soulmate, then rinse and repeat with the next romantic lead. She married an Indian businessman for four years, divorcing him for ‘unreasonable behaviour’ (wanting to watch her films?) before moving on to the next unlikely candidate, the cricketeer Shane Warne, who she became engaged to in 2011, separating two years later. He called their years together ‘the happiest time of my life’ before dying in 2022. When she took up with the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus earlier this year – having been friends for years – some people thought it was a gag, but the unusual pair seem to be extremely happy.
Every inch the femme fatale, she has been made more human than her extraordinary beauty would generally have it by public humiliation through the actions of men: Hugh Grant’s indiscretion in a parked car and the paternity test which the father of her son took, after erroneously and ungallantly saying they had had a brief and ‘non-exclusive’ relationship. Hers is a very old-fashioned English showbiz career; you can imagine her in the make-up chair at Pinewood or Gainsborough before the war gossiping with the gofers, imagine her in the 1940s, a tonic for the troops, drawing stocking seams up the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil and mucking in. She lacks the weary roster of introspections, addictions and self-destructive spirals which plague ageing American showbiz beauties. She is her own product rather than her own work-in-progress; trained as a ballerina, an actress in theory rather than practise, she became a model for Estee Lauder at the age of 29 when generally models are thinking of retiring. She has gamely kept her hand in at acting over the years – from E!’s spoof show The Royals to her latest woeful crime caper, in which her son Damian directs her in a lesbian snog – but considering that she was even sacked as host of Project Catwalk after one season for being too wooden, it’s unlikely that her latest performance will be up for a Critic’s Choice nomination. But so what? In a world of self-pitying, anxious celebrities, Elizabeth Hurley’s unpretentious, leopard-print-clad delight in her own good fortune is refreshing.
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