Hugh Grant wins Best Actor at the Evening Standard British Film Awards 2016

In Stephen Frears’s hilarious comedy about the worst singer ever to make it on to the public stage, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hugh Grant delivers what may just be the role of his life — never mind all those previous greatest hits: Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones, Love Actually and the like. As the failed English Shakespearean actor St Clair Bayfield, Florence’s financially dependent husband and deviously supportive manager, Grant is wonderful: hammy, dubiously aristocratic, not the gent he appears yet not entirely cynical either, with tenderness despite his infidelities.

No other actor could have pulled off this funny-sad acceptance half so well. As he says in his credo: “You think I didn’t have ambition? I was a good actor but I was never going to be a great actor. It was very hard to admit that to myself, but once I had I felt free from the tyranny of ambition, I started to live! Is ours not a happy world? Do we not have fun?” In Florence Foster Jenkins we certainly do.