I suspect that Hugh Grant regularly suffers something of a dilema.  I would not be surprised if after many months of hard work on a cinematic blockbuster, that he sits back with a pile of forthcoming movie script prospects and lets his imagination run wild.  He thinks to himself: 'Who can I play next?  I could portray a Marvel Comics superhero, or be the next James Bond Villian, or a futuristic cyber-cop from the year 2037 who has to save the post-apocalyptic world from an evil robotic overlord for some currently unexplained but plausible reason.'

Then the phone rings. 'Hugh, it's your agent.  I've got you the lead role in another British romantic light-comedy.'  The other script prospects flutter slowly to the floor, disgarded, causing a possible health and safety hazzard.

You see change is not always a good thing.  Polo Mints discovered that when they launched their new spearmint flavour, Vanilla Coke was a fairly unwelcome break from the norm, and all the new different pronunciations of Kim Basinger's name are just confusing.  The fact of the matter is, that Hugh Grant plays the romantic comedy lead very well, probably the best in the business, as a string of British film successes shows.  A list that includes blockbusters such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary.  So it would appear that Grant is again correct in starring in the new British romantic comedy: 'Love Actually'.

Love Actually sees Hugh Grant playing the new British Prime Minister.  A young single Prime Minister, who, 30 seconds after entering Downing Street falls in love with one of the Number 10 staff (played by Martine McCutcheon.)  And the romance continues from there.  The film tells the tale of a spectacular number of love affairs, all clevery interweaved into one story, like some kind of cunning-giant-weaving-thing.  But before you point out the blatent Blackadder-esque nature of the previous statement, let me point out that it was a deliberate link, allowing us to seamlessly slip in the fact that Love Actually was directed by Blackadder co-writer Richard Curtis.  Curtis (who wrote television comedies: 'Blackadder' and 'Bean') is of course no newcomer to working with Hugh Grant on romantic comedy films, being the screenwriter of films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Notting Hill.  Richard Curtis however, now moves from being screenwriter to making his debut as a film director.

The big names involved in this movie don't end with Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis.  The full list of stars making up the casts is as follows:  Alan Rickman, Andrew Lincoln, Bill Nighy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Colin Firth, [Breath], Emma Thompson, Gregor Fisher, Heike Makatsch, Hugh Grant, Joanna Page, [Breath again], Keira Knightley, Kris Marshall, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Martin Freeman, Martine McCutcheon, Rowan Atkinson and Thomas Sangster. [resume normal exhallation].

Assuming you didn't exhale yourself to death attempting to read aloud the impressive cast list above, we can tell you that Love Actually is set in contemporary London in the run-up to Christmas, it tells one story which weaves together a spectacular number of love affairs - sometimes romantic, sometimes sad,sometimes stupid - all funny in their own way.  Any more than that and we may spoil some of the spaghetti plot, meaning you won't go to see it in the cinema, causing potential damage to the popcorn and slush-puppy industries repsectivly.

Speaking about the making of the film, Richard Curtis told Funny.co.uk:

"Love Actually is meant to be a real spoiling experience. I tried to work out the extra bits of plot and get straight from 'A' to 'F.' It's like watching the edited highlights of several stories, yet put together, they all combine to an overall story—even though there are a lot of different ingredients, they form one cogent taste." 

"I can't remember how Love Actually started. I think it may be that I decided that films take me such a long time—about three years, in the end—and I thought that if I wanted to go on writing romantic films, I would spend the rest of my life doing it. So I decided that I would try to write nine or 10 of them all at the same time. I went away on a long holiday with my family and every day, during my walk, it was my job to come up with a story. I would think around the world that I knew, of little incidents from my past and the lives of people I knew, and slowly the storyline for Love Actually came to me."

Curtis set Love Actually in the city he has called home (off and on) for the last two decades, London, but also includes jaunts to Marseille and a villa in Vidauban, France.

"Throughout my career, I've been proud of the fact that I've never had a day of filming outside of London—I'd never taken any of my characters outside of the city and I thought I'd been very wise about that. But then after one of week of filming in Marseille, with gorgeous surroundings and lovely dinners, I realized that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Now, I'm never going to set anything closer to London than Morocco!"

Love Actually will be released in British cinemas on 21st November 2003.