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View to a thrill - actress Elizabeth Hurley - Interview

Interview, May, 1997 by Graham Fuller

Why Elizabeth Hurley is in "seize the day" mode

"Nice" is a word that Elizabeth Hurley uses a lot, and nice is what Elizabeth Hurley unquestionably is, no matter how much she plays the super-trollop in the photo shoots she does beyond the walls of Estee Lauder. No one is quite fooled by that vampy alternative image, and when I met her - be-jeaned and barefoot, smoking and sipping tea, she scrunched herself up on her hotel-room sofa for the interview - Hurley was friendly and trusting. Of course, it behooves stars to be good when the tape recorder's rolling, but The Hurl is no sultanness of spin. There's an ordinariness about her which is immensely appealing given the extremity of her celebrity.

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The thirty-one-year-old actress is a movie star without a fistful of hits, or even one, and there is something both Warholian and essentially "'90s" about that defining absence. Yet Hurley has toiled in the business for eleven years, and her late-flowering fame is not without foundation. After an exquisite performance as a thorny English rose transplanted to Nazi Germany in the miniseries Christabel (1988), adapted by Dennis Potter from Christabel Bielenberg's memoir, Hurley's career plummeted until her spectacular turn in a lowcut Versace dress at the UK premiere for her boyfriend Hugh Grant's film, Four Weddings and a Funeral(1994). The sequel to that stellar moment was the Divine Brown fiasco - but Hurley rode it with dignity and applied herself to business like a worker bee.

Her diligence is now paying off. This month, Hurley will be more visible than ever as the Intelligence op whose aloofness unravels In Mike Myers's spy Spoof, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And given some seasoning she may surprise us yet with more than her soignee beauty.

GRAHAM FULLER: Why do you think you weren't able to follow through on Christabel immediately?

ELIZABETH HURLEY: I was twenty-two when I did Christabel. I thought to myself, Now I'm always going to have nice jobs, but it just didn't happen that way. I think it had a lot to do with the character I was playing. Christabel [Bielenberg] is strongly English upper class. That was pretty old-fashioned in the late '80s. I was also associated with a kind of mock trendiness. That didn't help. I worked consistently but not in anything that took off. I did a few films in Spain and Germany and was paid much more than you'd get at the BBC or doing theater. But nobody saw those films, and it felt like a waste, though I learned a lot doing them, particularly The Long Winter [1990], which was about the Spanish Civil War. Then, I spent some time in America six or seven years ago, and I wasn't very successful. I did TV pilots and movies of the week, and I had immigration problems that cost me three nice jobs. It was a disappointing free. But I began to get rid of that very English feeling of not wanting to put yourself through something in case you might fail.

GF: You became an overnight celebrity because you made an impact at a public appearance, not because you were in a film. Did that seem ironic to you?

EH: Yeah, it was very silly. The upsetting thing about it was when people said I'd never done a day's work in my life. That was really unfair because I've always worked incredibly hard. I don't think people do well if they become an actor in order to become a celebrity. Now, when projects I work on as a small English girl who never pretends to be anything other than a small English girl are taken out of context or built up out of all proportion because of my involvement in them, they are often judged more harshly than they would be if I weren't involved in them. I often feel guilty about that.

GF: Why is life better for someone who's in the public eye - assuming it is - than for someone who isn't?

EH: You're very aware, as an actor or model, that being newsworthy has no effect on your talent whatsoever. But since I've become sort of famous, certain projects have been financed because of my name. If people scrutinize everything you do, it gives you a much higher profile for everything you're involved in. Sometimes I think that's a little unfair to other people who perhaps ought to be famous for the work they do but aren't. That's why I don't really associate fame with achievement.

GF: When things got rough for you in 1998, because of what was happening with Hugh, was your resolve tested?

EH: I think when bad things happen, it's the time when you get to work in the garden and sort out the pots from the weeds and the men from the boys. During that time, it wouldn't have occurred to me not to continue to work as hard as I could. It certainly didn't occur to me to collapse into a little heap and not capitalize on the run of good luck I was having. Because I had so much to do - too much to do really - I didn't have time to be angry or introspective. I had no choice but to carry on and go to work every day, and every evening, too. So that was a blessing. To this day I haven't had a day off.

GF: Was there a point when the press became so intrusive that you felt trapped?

View to a thrill - actress Elizabeth Hurley - Interview

Interview, May, 1997 by Graham Fuller

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