The one movie line Julia Roberts hated saying: “To me, it was nails on a chalkboard”
There’s a fine scene in the classic 1999 Richard Curtis comedy Notting Hill in which Hugh Grant is seen walking through a market in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, moving from season to season in just over a minute to show the passing of time and his attempting to get over his heartbreak at Julia Roberts‘ character Anna Scott leaving him.
In it, Grant plods sadly along to the strains of Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ while the weather goes from sunshine to rain, to the fall of autumn leaves, to driving snow and then finally back to the warmth of spring. By the end, Grant has removed his jacket and is smiling, and it’s a gentle reminder of the healing power of time. It’s also a similitude for the fact that movies capture an actor in a moment; no matter the number of seasons that go by, they are still there when we press play, the same age, living in the same period of time.
Notting Hill embodies that floppy-haired, late ‘90s Hugh Grant perfectly, all stumbling mannerisms and upper-middle-class apologies. At that time, he was one of the biggest film stars in the world; his turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral had catapulted him from obscurity and paired him with Elizabeth Hurley, just as fast as his notorious meeting with LA call girl Divine Brown had almost cost him all of it a year later.
His co-star in the comedy had seen her career follow a similar trajectory, albeit without the part about getting arrested. Julia Roberts was little known until she was cast alongside Richard Gere in the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, and then suddenly she was everywhere.
So big was that movie that on release it was the fifth-highest grossing of all time, an astonishing feat for a film of its type alongside the likes of Star Wars and E.T., and Roberts was duly nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for her performance, eventually scooping a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress’ that year. Even the red dress she wore in the film became iconic.
Despite a predictable backlash and hounding from the press, she went on to dominate the ‘90s as one of the globe’s most familiar faces, commanding millions of dollars per role for films like Hook, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Runaway Bride. It made her the perfect choice to play Anna Scott in Curtis’ Notting Hill, a publicity-shy world-famous actor who just wants to be normal again and falls in love with a clumsy book shop owner.
Watching the film now is a reminder that the world was indeed a simpler time at the end of the 20th century. There’s barely any internet, there certainly aren’t any smartphones, and as Scott discovers, people got their showbiz news from the print tabloids. It has some pretty questionable lines in it due to society having changed over the last 25 years, but in general, watching it is like a very British hug. Slightly stilted, fairly meaningful, quite funny, with some swearing.
It certainly struck a chord at the cinema; it quickly became the biggest British film of all time and cemented Roberts as box office gold. While her character in the film wasn’t based on Roberts, rather according to Curtis, a mix of Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, it was often a case of art imitating life as Roberts would suffer the attention of paparazzi while filming.
Although she had previously been very complimentary of Curtis as a writer, she wasn’t too enamoured of a key moment in the script where her character lies in bed and utters a line from a Rita Hayworth movie, 1946’s Gilda: “They go to bed with Gilda, they wake up with me.”
Roberts told Vanity Fair: “I hate to say anything negative about what Richard wrote, because he’s a genius, but I hated saying that line. To me, it was nails on a chalkboard. I don’t really believe any of that.”
Regardless of how uncomfortable she may have felt at times making Notting Hill, it certainly did her no harm and set her star back on the ascendancy. The following year, she had her most critically acclaimed role in Erin Brockovich, a performance for which she earned an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Bafta and a SAG award for ‘Best Actress’.
