Hugh Grant Deals With <i> IT</i> : We were introduced to him as the charming, unaffected Brit in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral.’ Now he’s one of Hollywood’s most-wanted leading men. The honeymoon is over, bloke.

Hugh Grant, peering from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, assumes his brilliant signature grin. “On balance,” he says, in that terribly English drawl of his, “I have to say I’m loving all this. Hugely.”

“All this?” Celebrity, of course--sudden celebrity of a sort no British actor has experienced in decades.

At the beginning of this year, lest we forget, Grant was “Hugh who?”--one of several, almost interchangeable young Britains, winsome, well-spoken chaps who tended to pop up in various films by Merchant Ivory or Merchant Ivory wanna-bes.

But this all changed when Grant starred in one film, “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” a respectable hit in the United States and, proportionately, an even bigger hit in Britain. As a result of that film, Grant is sought after by le tout Hollywood, has become about as well-known in his own country as Prince Charles, and is certainly more popular. Her association with Grant has made his girlfriend, actress Elizabeth Hurley, a household name, though few people could name a movie she has actually appeared in. One London newspaper columnist, tongue only slightly embedded in cheek, has described Grant as the Most Famous Living Englishman.

“After years and years of obscurity,” says Grant, “it would be nonsense to pretend a little bit of glamour and attention wasn’t quite nice.” And yet, as he concedes, there are downsides to fame--hard work being one.

“Quite apart from the acting, I seem to have to spend most of my life on the telephone talking to agents and lawyers. The stakes seem so much higher now. I can’t afford to make mistakes--I have to do the right interviews, make the right films, do all the things that never bothered me before. Well, not so much.

“In some ways I miss my unemployment. I miss those long periods when I could sit at home and watch cricket on TV all day.”

He tells you all this with the same insouciant charm that marked his role as the chronic bachelor in “Four Weddings.” Grant punctuates the serious parts of his conversations with jokes, politically incorrect or impolite observations about life and people, and shockingly funny pronouncements delivered in a mock-solemn manner.

He often resorts to English schoolboy slang; someone he likes is referred to as “a good egg.” All this has the dual effect of making him both entertaining company and someone who keeps his true feelings, in best British fashion, well in reserve.

One imagines Grant will have even less time to watch cricket in forthcoming years. A glittering Hollywood future clearly beckons--but in the meantime he is still fulfilling his obligation to contracts struck before “Four Weddings” catapulted his career into the stratosphere.

He has come to this tiny picturesque border village to make a film with the unwieldy, charming title “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain.” Grant plays one of two English map makers who in 1916 arrive in a small, remote Welsh village with a single claim to fame--it is overshadowed by the first mountain inside the Welsh border. The English cartographers make some calculations, then announce to the dismayed village that their mountain is 15 feet too short to qualify as a mountain; it must be reclassified as a hill, and will not appear on the new, redrawn maps they are completing.

Their pride stung, the villagers unite (burying some old differences in the process) and decide to attack the problem in the most practical way--by physically hauling loads of earth in carts and barrows up the hill, and piling it up at the summit to increase its height.

The film, which has a budget of less than $8 million, also stars Colm Meaney (“The Snapper,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation”); Tara Fitzgerald, who co-starred with Grant in “Sirens,” and Ian Hart (“Backbeat”). It is written and directed by Christopher Monger (“Just Like a Woman”), who was born in Taff’s Well, a Welsh village where these events actually occurred at the turn of the century. Monger says that he was told the story by his father, David, who in turn was told it by his father, Ivor; Monger credits them both at the end of his screenplay.

“The Englishman” has been kicking around for more than three years. Its producer, Sarah Curtis, first commissioned it for the BBC, where she was then working. “But it really needs a bigger shooting budget than the BBC could afford, and it needs a big screen to do justice to the Welsh landscape,” Curtis noted.

“Hugh was the first actor to be attached. He read the script in April last year, and responded very positively, instantly. But I can’t say there was overwhelming interest initially. It took a while to get the ball rolling.” Eventually Miramax financed the film.

All this was before “Four Weddings” gave Grant his big break. “The Englishman” was to have been shot last summer, but various cast commitments prevented it.

“Colm Meaney keeps going off into space,” grumbles Grant in deadpan mode about Meaney’s “Star Trek” role. “Every time it happens we get put off again. We’ve just had a two-week break while he goes off to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. But he’s landing again shortly. I’m a bit jealous, actually. I’ve always wanted to do one of those space movies.”

Still, Grant wanted to be in “The Englishman” as soon as he read it. “They’re so few and far between, good scripts,” he said, sprawled across two seats on the crew bus during a break in shooting. “When you find one, it’s like a gem. You want to cradle it like a child. This was one of those.

“Good material is really hard to come by. I’ve just signed up for one in the autumn in America, but that’s after reading 50, 60, 70 scripts. That’s all I do now--I’m more or less a professional script reader.”

Is that boring? “Quite tedious, yes. Everyone in America seems to have to read scripts from dawn till dusk. It’s wearying. I’m dying to read a book again. Just for pleasure. I’m not one of those people who when they read a book they enjoy immediately want to make it into a film. Quite the reverse. I want to protect it from filmmakers.”

G rant has settled next on a major studio movie, called “Nine Months,” which Christopher Columbus (“Mrs. Doubtfire”) will direct for Fox.

“I liked that script too,” Grant says. “It’s a remake of a French film about a guy who’s been in a longstanding relationship for about five years and he’s perfectly happy. Then one day, to his horror, his girlfriend announces she’s pregnant. And he can’t hack it, can’t cope, can’t get it together. One thing leads to another, she leaves him, and you track them through the pregnancy, month by month.”

Considering the heat currently surrounding Grant, his participation in any film would give it a boost. Since emerging in “Four Weddings” earlier this year, he has completed work in two other films--a lead role in “An Awfully Big Adventure,” which continued his collaboration with director Mike Newell from “Four Weddings,” and a small part in “Restoration,” a period epic shot in England and Wales, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Meg Ryan.

Competition for his services is understandably hot at present, and Grant has not endeared himself to director Allison Anders (“Mi Vida Loca”), who believed she had an understanding that Grant would star as Paul McCartney in her film “Paul Is Dead.” Once “Four Weddings” made Grant a hit earlier this year, however, she says Grant changed his mind; for his part, Grant has refused to comment on the situation.

Grant is also highly selective about scripts, which, as he tells it, must clear three hurdles before he can consider them: “Firstly, they have to be good, and secondly there has to be a (role) for me. And then we have to see if the part for me can be made English, because I don’t want to play American.

“For me, American is a deadening accent. I did it once, in a CBS TV movie about AIDS called ‘Our Sons,’ with Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret.”

And how was that movie?

“It was beautiful,” says Grant, perfectly stony-faced before dissolving into giggles. “No, it was quite good, actually. Seriously.”

Still, he has a dilemma here, since most of the scripts that come his way are American in origin. Grant is meeting the problem head-on; he has a first-look deal with Castle Rock and is setting up an office in London to look for British scripts.

“I’m a big fan of Rob Reiner, and the people at Castle Rock, it seems to me, are the company which puts the greatest emphasis on script rather than star, director or producer. They’re all good eggs over there.

“My idea is to weed out our best (British) TV writers and novelists, and get them to write feature films. Writing for film isn’t the first thing that occurs to the best people in this country. I’d better not say who I have in mind, because they’ll probably spurn me as soon as I call them up. But that’s my plan.”

N ot that Grant is anti-American in his approach to films, though he can be howlingly funny about “taking meetings” and “doing breakfast” with studio executives in Hollywood. “It’s easy to get snobbish about European films, but if I had to say which side of the Atlantic produced more good movies, it would always be America. They’re really good at it.

“There’s a thoroughness about Hollywood. Often if a script isn’t good enough they’ll say, rewrite it and rewrite it again. In Britain, there’s a whole culture of ‘The text is sacred, darling.’ You don’t rewrite Shakespeare, certainly, but some screenplays you see in Britain now, people are just too quick to start shooting them. Often they should get more writers in.”

This was what he liked about “The Englishman.” “It was perfect. I go through these (scripts) with a fine-tooth comb. If there’s anything I don’t like, I’ll worry the writer about it for hours and suggest rewrites. But there was very little I could find to complain about on this one. It just works, it clicks.”

Colleagues on the set insist that Grant has responded well to his newfound stardom. English character actor Ian McNeice (“No Escape”), who plays the second map maker, concedes: “I was rather nervous, because Hugh had got to be such a big star just before this, and one’s always interested to see how that’s going to work out.”

Christopher Monger concurs that fame hasn’t gone to Grant’s head. “Oh, I have to thrash him each morning to get him started,” he says in a droll manner reminiscent of Grant himself. “No, really, he works very hard. He can’t get too above himself because the crew tease him all the time.

“One day in a newspaper there was a story that he’d been voted the No. 7 hunk in the world, or something. He got total hell from the crew, with every one of them claiming they were in the Top 6. He’s been great about it all.”

Monger first saw Grant alongside Judy Davis and Emma Thompson in James Lapine’s 1991 film “Impromptu.” “I thought he was fabulous, so I offered him this part. He was gracious enough to accept and he came in with a lot of good ideas.

“I first met him when he was in the middle of shooting ‘Four Weddings’; I had lunch with him on the set. And of course at that point no one had any idea the film would be so big.” Monger casts an approving glance around the hilly terrain: “It’s been a fantastic bonus for us.”

Back on the crew bus, Grant is growing increasingly uneasy with my questions. “I don’t want this to be a major profile,” he frets. “I’m happy to talk about this film, but, ummm. . . .” One particular inquiry about the dangers of media overexposure has clearly sounded a warning system in his brain.

“Look, sorry to be such a queen about this,” he says, rather winningly, “but I think I’d better talk to my press agent. I didn’t know this interview was going to be so . . . far-reaching.”

And he descends from the crew bus and strides off to the one pay phone in Pen-y-bont-fawr, from where he will place a call to New York.

He returns 10 minutes later. “Yes, look, let’s just talk about this film, OK?” His whole body seems contorted with apologetic embarrassment.

He goes on to say that he doesn’t like to talk about the characters he plays (“It’s bad karma, somehow”), that he dreads it when directors want to talk about character motivation, that he’s a believer in the adage “shut up and act.”

And that’s about all there is left to say under the ground rules he has imposed, and we stare at each other helplessly for a full minute before agreeing to end the discussion. Grant shuffles off, brows knitted in worry: “Sorry about this. Umm, sorry.”

Yet another downside to overnight fame.*