Hugh Grant, the British star of films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love, Actually was in Delhi on Saturday, when he told a crowd an interesting bit of family trivia.
According to the Hindustan Times, he said his father, the 97-year-old Captain James Grant, was born somewhere in India, making him “Indian or Pakistani by birth”. Hugh said, “So I guess that makes me half Indian, or half Pakistani.”
Talking about how he discovered this Indian connection, Hugh told the audience, “I had to find his birth certificate the other day, cause I was applying for some visa or something, and it was really hard. It was some very obscure town in the north of India. In fact, I think it might be Pakistan, I’m afraid, now.”
Hugh’s grandfather was also in the British army, likely having served in India before he fought World War Two in France. The actor has recounted earlier how he was always fascinated by the “stories of soldiering” told by his father and grandfather.
Hugh also talked about how he started acting and the family pressure not to pursue the profession. “My mother came from the school that put actors and prostitutes on the same kind of level. So I think she always wanted me to go into the church,” he told an audience in Delhi.
He said he was 23 when he took up acting “because [he] was poor [and] had no money”. The actor said he initially planned to act “for a year or two” and then “do a grown-up job”. Now 65, he quipped, “In some ways, I’m ashamed of myself.”
Much like Hugh, many British celebrities have India somewhere in their family history. Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Jungle Book, was born in Mumbai — then Bombay — in 1865. George Orwell, known best for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, was born in Bihar in 1903. Singer Engelbert Humperdinck was born in Chennai — then Madras — in 1936.