There are no cherry blossoms hinting at the first flush of spring, the nights are creeping in rather than drawing out, and there are scant few leaves left on the trees on my street. And yet, were it not obvious from the freezing temperatures that we in the UK are now in the dog days of November, one might think it were April Fools’ Day. For what’s this? Reports in the Hollywood press suggest that Daniel Craig and Luca Guadagnino are teaming up for – really? – the DC Comics adaptation Sgt Rock?

For those of you unacquainted with the gruff second world war infantryman … well, let’s just say if there were two characters more fundamentally different than Sgt Rock and the gay desperado and William S Burroughs cipher played recently by Craig in Guadagnino’s acclaimed Queer, they’d need to rewrite the laws of physics just to exchange a polite wave across the multiverse. So far apart in tone are these two worlds that it’s almost impossible to imagine the same team working on both projects.

Rock, who might politely be described as a bit like Captain America’s grumpier uncle, is hardly your typical DC character. He doesn’t wear a cape, or have a tragic origin story involving alien planets or dead parents. In fact, he isn’t really even a superhero (unless you count being able to shout “Hold the line!” while shrugging off bullets like they’re mosquito bites.) Created in 1959 (though prefaced by earlier iterations), Sgt Rock and his “Easy Company” embodied the kind of no-nonsense heroism that made postwar readers nod solemnly and light another Lucky Strike. He’s the kind of guy who can turn a stick of chewing gum into a victory strategy, and would barely complain of a flesh wound if somebody stuck him with a bayonet.

If the reports are true – Deadline does suggest this one is at the earliest stage of development – they also say something about DC’s current path. We already knew that the James Gunn-led studio has no interest in shoehorning all its movies into a single, Marvel-style universe where Superman, Batman and Condiment King could battle it out for supremacy. But this latest rumour suggests the studio is opting for the superhero equivalent of jazz improvisation, in which its characters will only occasionally meet, like mismatched Tinder dates at the multiverse’s weirdest coffee shop.

Sgt Rock has sometimes bumped into the Man of Steel in the comics. But it was weird when he did. One example is a 1979 issue of DC Comics Presents that saw the last son of Krypton travelling to accept an award in Paris and getting sent back in time by an explosion caused by the booby-trapped trophy. Suffice to say, that particular issue featured a whole lot of the down-to-earth and curmudgeonly Rock being almost completely unaware of Superman’s godlike invincibility – but secretly quite liking his cosmic counterpart’s willingness to knuckle down and do the dirty work. It’s like watching Kelly’s Heroes interrupted by a celestial laser show.

One imagines a Sgt Rock movie will eventually emerge under the DC Elseworlds banner that Gunn has cooked up (or borrowed from the comics) to give him an excuse when fans complain that Robert Pattinson’s Batman will never meet Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. And here it’s just possible to imagine Guadagnino being given licence to bring his own particular brand of existential poetry to the comic-book world. The Italian’s genius lies in his ability to find depth and humanity in unexpected places, and it’s possible he sees Sgt Rock as a canvas for exploring themes of masculinity, sacrifice, and the bonds forged in the crucible of conflict, rather than as a straightforward war movie.

If so, he hasn’t found a bad place to start, as the Rock comics always offered a more nuanced take on the popular 1940s and 50s war comic genre than many of their forerunners. A good parallel is perhaps the “acid western” films of the 1960s and 1970s, which spun that well-worn genre into new areas of offbeat introspection, after the more homespun and hokey fare of the previous decades. It’s possible to imagine Craig bringing emotional scar tissue to the role, in much the way he transformed James Bond from a pun-wielding joker into a flawed and vulnerable antihero.

If we’re completely honest, this project feels like it could easily implode, like a submarine crafted from Swiss cheese and held together with wishful thinking and duct tape. But if DC really could pull it off, it might just represent a new type of comic-book movie – or at least the kind of raw, humanistic cinema we haven’t really seen in the genre since James Mangold’s Logan. And, who knows, maybe Guadagnino’s Sgt Rock could finally answer the age-old question: when push comes to shove, can heartfelt vulnerability (and incredible lighting) lead a bayonet charge?

Sebastian Stan, who stars in The Apprentice, a biopic of Donald Trump focusing on his association in the 1970s with lawyer Roy Cohn, has said that other actors in Hollywood are too “afraid” of the president-elect to participate in press with him.

Stan claimed that he had failed to find a single peer who would appear opposite him in the Actors on Actors series run by industry magazine Variety, in which key awards contenders quiz each other.

During a recent Q&A about the film in Los Angeles alongside director Ali Abbasi, Stan – best known for his work in Marvel films – said: “I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me, because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie. So I couldn’t do it.”

He added: “You know, I’ve got to do a lot of great things, and that’s not pointing at anyone specific. It was … we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them, because [they were] too afraid to talk about this movie.”

His claim was confirmed to People magazine by Variety co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh. “What Sebastian said is accurate,” he said. “We invited him to participate in Actors on Actors, the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”

Stan said that he felt the response was ominous in terms of the film industry’s interactions with Trump after he comes into power in January.

“That’s when I think we lose the situation,” he continued. “Because if it really becomes like that – fear or that discomfort to talk about this – then we’re really going to have a problem.

“For many, the idea that Trump is the same as any one of us is a really difficult thing to deal with at the moment and I understand the emotions are very high, but I think that’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film,” said Stan.

“If all it’s saying is you cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote, should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that?”

Trump called the biopic, which features a scene in which he rapes his ex-wife, Ivana, a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” ahead of its release in the US, adding that it was “fake and classless” and took particular issue with its director and screenwriter.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump said: “So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!”

‘When he said he was in Toulouse for paediatric training, he was in Krakow seeing his other wife.” This is the moment when a Parisian woman called Marianne discovered that her partner had a second life. And a third, and a fourth … The Man With a Thousand Faces slots neatly into the mini-genre of dating scammer documentaries – but this is the French-intellectual version. There are some jaw-droppers in the story of how Ricardo (sometimes Alexandre or Daniel), a Portuguese (sometimes Argentinian or Brazilian) man conned numerous women. But it’s an emotionally literate, lo-thrills film from film-maker Sonia Kronlund, who casts actors to play some of the women to protect their privacy.

And really, it’s the women that Kronlund finds compelling. Marianne (played by Aurelie Gasche) had a baby with Ricardo, supposedly a surgeon who’d spent years in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières. She was five months pregnant when suddenly she couldn’t reach him; the phone numbers he’d given her were fake. Another woman discovered the truth after finding a photo that he’d sent to the mother of his baby daughter – only they didn’t have a baby. Ricardo’s typical exit strategy at the end of a relationship was to vanish after getting a phone call to say that one of his parents was dead or in a coma.

Director Sonia Kronlund hires a detective to find Ricardo, who is married and living in Krakow. Her revenge will feel like an anticlimax for anyone gearing up for a showdown. But Kronlund understands men like Ricardo; she gets that he is untroubled by shame. It would be impossible to make him feel guilty about how his lies have devastated his former partners. So instead she makes him look silly, showing him up as a needy narcissist desperate for attention. It’s a masterstroke, although her film leaves a fair few questions unanswered.

It’s called the “caravan of death” – cars speeding, Mad Max-style, across the desert on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, loaded up with jerry cans of petrol. Colombian film-maker Andrés Baiz, who previously worked on episodes of Netflix’s Narcos, has directed this crime saga inspired by the real-life “pimpineros”, smugglers who exploited dirt-cheap petrol during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. But strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.

The year is 2012, when sixpence bought a gallon of petrol in oil-rich Venezuela, leading to a boom in cross-border smuggling to Colombia. A trio of brothers, the Estradas, have been muscled out of the smuggling business by ruthless Don Carmelo (David Noreña); he’s a nothing-special villain with his wolfish grin and novelty shirts. Moises, the eldest of the Estrada clan (played by Colombian rock star Juanes), retires to open an Italian restaurant. Ulises (Alberto Guerra) joins Don Carmelo’s mob; like Fredo in The Godfather, he’s the undisciplined one. Little brother Juan (Alejandro Speitzer) decides to go it alone, smuggling with his girlfriend Diana (Laura Osma).

The movie starts off on a fun high, with beat-up old cars racing across the sun-bleached desert. But the action gets toned down in favour of sentimental melodrama as the story switches to Juan and Diana’s startup smuggling business. In this macho world the film sets up Diana as the hero, a woman among men. But still, the script can’t resist treating her like a little lady, with a plotline as conventional as it gets, in which she is trafficked into sex work. It’s a film in need of sharper writing.

Quincy Jones died too soon to accept an honorary Oscar at the Governors awards on Sunday night – so the ceremony in Los Angeles became a moving celebration of the life of a music legend.

Jones, who died on 3 November aged 91, was one of five Hollywood luminaries due to be honoured at the 15th Governors awards. In his absence, his daughter Rashida Jones read the speech he had drafted, alongside a spirited performance by Jennifer Hudson.

Flanked by three siblings, the actor and director recounted her father’s words: “I was always keenly aware of the enormous power that we possessed as film-makers, that the art we created, the stories we told, if we were lucky, had a chance to move people in ways that they could never imagine, to make society and the world a more understanding and embracing place for us all to exist.”

Describing her father, she said: “He had this preternatural gift with people. He knew how to stay present, stay curious and stay loving.” It had been “a difficult decision for our family to be here tonight, but we felt like we wanted to celebrate his beautiful life and career”.

The event, presented by the Academy’s board of governors, honours lifetime achievement in the film industry, often lauding those who haven’t won the traditional statuette. This year’s recipients were the screenwriter and director Richard Curtis, for his humanitarian work; the casting director Juliet Taylor, who, like Jones, received an honorary Oscar; and the James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, who received the Irving G Thalberg Memorial award.

The ceremony is a magnet for A-listers and Oscar hopefuls. Those gathered at tables in the Ray Dolby Ballroom included Saoirse Ronan, Jennifer Lopez, Paul Mescal, Lupita Nyong’o and Angelina Jolie, among many others. The actor, writer and director Colman Domingo gave an opening speech reflecting on the national moment: “What a time to create meaningful art, what a time to be in this room with you all. Tonight, we will inspire each other to just keep going,” he said. “Let’s keep telling the most complex stories that can show us that we’re more alike than unalike.”

Daniel Craig presented the award to Broccoli and Wilson, siblings who have produced the Bond films since 1995, when they took over from Cubby Broccoli, Barbara’s father and Wilson’s stepfather. Nicole Kidman presented the award to Taylor, whose credits range from Annie Hall to The Birdcage.

“The work of the casting director is always seen but it is often overlooked,” Kidman said, noting that Taylor was the first person in the job to be recognised by the Academy. “This woman was at the centre of American film-making from the 70s through the end of her career. She was more than professional. She defined the profession.”

After Taylor, Hugh Grant begrudgingly presented Curtis’s “better-than-nothing Oscar”, needling his friend for an initial resistance to casting Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Then, “not content with saving the British film industry, he decided he also had to try and save the whole bloody world,” Grant said, referring to Comic Relief, Make Poverty History, and Curtis’s other humanitarian endeavours. “There I would be in one of the lulls in my career – because of some flop or some arrest or whatever – and I’d be frankly desperate for Richard’s next film, and I’d be told, ‘I’m sorry, he’s away for a year in Africa, saving starving children.’

“I found that annoying and frankly selfish.”

In his own speech, after remarking on Grant’s “infamously unsatisfactory character”, Curtis praised his colleagues for making films with potent messages but urged them not to stop there. “Powerful films and TV shows are made, and everyone just sort of hopes they’ll help change things, and they don’t take the final step to create a mechanism in the actual production that helps to change things,” he said. They should appoint “impact producers” who would use the films “for campaigning, for targeted education, for changing laws. When films get shown to the right people in power at the right time, when films are linked to the right charities, amazing things can happen.”

The night ended with Jones’s award, presented by Jamie Foxx in a speech that included startlingly accurate impressions of Jones and of Donald Trump – whose re-election was obliquely and mournfully referenced several times throughout the evening. Foxx recalled working with Jones on the film Ray and hailed the composer’s “fearless and tireless” work for disabled people, including people with Down’s syndrome like Foxx’s late sister. “Thank you for giving the world music, thank you for giving the world light, thank you for giving the world an example of what a great human being is supposed to be,” Foxx said.

Closing her speech at the end of the evening, an emotional Rashida Jones urged the crowd to listen to her father’s music on the way home. “There’s an entire universe waiting in his seven decades of music. And while you listen, hear him, hear how he imbued love into every single second of music he made. That was his real legacy, love,” she said.

“In honour of our dad, we hope you will do the same. Live with love, lead with love. Bring love to everything that you do.”

The cast of Marvel’s Avengers movies have come out in support of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris less than a week before the US election.

In a video posted first on Vanity Fair on Thursday evening, actors Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany playfully riffed on their respective characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while encouraging viewers to vote for Harris.

The video, which runs for just over 90 seconds, opens with the actors taking an incoming video call from Johansson. On screen, they brainstorm ideas for a catchphrase for Harris, landing on the dubious “Down with Democracy”, which they spin into a brief Marvel-style Harris/Walz campaign video with dramatic music and comic-style graphics. The final frame of the video encourages viewers to vote on November 5.

Sharing the video on X, Ruffalo, a vocal Democrat supporter who is best known for his role as the Hulk, wrote: “Don’t sit this one out. It’s the one where we will lose big: Project 2025, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, public education, student debt relief, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and as of today, life saving vaccines. This shit is real and it’s going to come for you.”

Speaking to Vanity Fair about the making of the video, Johansson, who played Black Widow in the Marvel films, said, “It just immediately turned into people trying to one-up each other with one-liners,” and joked that Downey Jr and Ruffalo were “bickering like two old ladies. And, of course, I’m the person that’s just trying to organise everybody. It’s very similar to what our dynamic is in the films. It was wonderful to feel everybody assemble around it, and hopefully it will engage our fans in the process of voting.”

Johansson initiated the project, reaching out to her fellow MCU alumni via their group chat and reminding them: “We’ve got a lot of powerful people on this thread, and it would be great to unite … in hopefully creating a bit of a viral moment for Kamala.”

The Avengers cast join a list of celebrities who have endorsed the Harris/Walz campaign, including Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah. In the last week alone, Beyoncé, Madonna, Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, LeBron James and the former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger have all come out in support of Harris.

The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in next week’s election.

In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements” … “hate[s] politics” and doesn’t “trust most politicians”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice president Tim Walz.

“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognise our country. And you are right to be furious.”

Schwarzenegger, who quit acting between 2003 and 2011 while he served in California, continued by writing that he was disappointed in all those who have been in power in the US over the past decades who have discussed addressing the national debt and “our broken immigration system” yet not managing to do so. This continued during election campaigning, he said, as politicians prefer “having talking points” for elections rather than performing “the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.”

“It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea – that won’t solve our problems.”

Schwarzenegger, who replaced Donald Trump as host of The New Celebrity Apprentice in 2016, has long been an outspoken critic of the former president and current Republican candidate. Schwarzenegger likened the 6 January attack on the Capitol to the Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany and described Trump as “a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever.”

He returned to the aftermath of the 2020 election on X, saying that “rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America [a] trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.”

Were Trump to be re-elected, he said, “it will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful. We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that.”

“I want to move forward as a country,” he concluded, “and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.”

Teri Garr, the actor known for roles in Tootsie, Young Frankenstein and Friends, has died at the age of 79.

Garr died of multiple sclerosis, “surrounded by family and friends”, as confirmed to Associated Press by her publicist. She had been diagnosed in 2002 and also had an operation in 2007 after a ruptured brain aneurysm.

She began her career as a background artist, appearing as a go-go dancer in films and variety shows in the 1960s. “I was always resenting the fact that I was an “extra”, because in those days, working on those musicals, you personally had to study for 10 years to be a dancer,” she said in a 2008 interview. “And when you finally got a part as a dancer in a movie, you were put in the extras union.”

She landed her first speaking role in the Monkees movie Head in 1968. She was in the same acting class as the film’s co-writer Jack Nicholson.

After becoming a regular on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in the early 70s, she broke through on the big screen with roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Carl Reiner’s Oh, God! and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein before playing Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

In the 1980s, she gained an Oscar nomination for her role opposite Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and also appeared in One From the Heart, The Sting II, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and alongside Michael Keaton in Mr Mom.

In the 1990s, she starred in Prêt-à-Porter for Robert Altman and appeared in Dumb and Dumber, Michael and Dick, playing the mother of Michelle Williams’ character. She also had a recurring role on Friends as the estranged birth mother of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe.

“Women are not taken seriously,” Garr said in a 2008 interview, speaking about the lack of roles available to her. She added: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that.”

Tina Fey once told Entertainment Weekly: “There was a time when Teri Garr was in everything. She was adorable, but also very real. Her body was real, her teeth were real, and you thought that she could be your friend.”

In 2002, Garr confirmed that she had MS. “I’m telling my story for the first time so I can help people,” she said. “I can help people know they aren’t alone and tell them there are reasons to be optimistic because, today, treatment options are available.”

She went onto serve as a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Garr also published her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, in 2006, which detailed her career and also her health problems.

Bridesmaids and The Heat director Paul Feig, who directed Garr in the 2006 comedy Unaccompanied Minors, paid tribute on social media: “Oh man, this is devastating. Teri was a legend. So funny, so beautiful, so kind. I had the honor of working with her in 2006 and she was everything I dreamed she would be. Truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more. This is such a loss.”

The trial of Gérard Depardieu on sexual assault charges was postponed until next year after the actor failed to appear in court on Monday, saying he was unwell.

His lawyer Jérémie Assous had said the 75-year-old was “extremely affected” by ill health and that he had asked for the proceedings to be delayed until he could attend in person.

The health of the actor, who has had a quadruple heart bypass and suffers with diabetes, had declined because of the stress caused by the hearing, the court heard before it adjourned to consider the request to delay.

Depardieu was also said to be incapable of remaining seated for six hours. Medical certificates from a cardiologist and an endocrinologist were produced, declaring that the actor was not in a fit state to appear.

Informed that one of the alleged victims had travelled 400km to be at the hearing, Assous said he had requested the trial be postponed in a letter to the court last Thursday.

Lawyers for the two female plaintiffs deplored that they were presented with a “fait accompli”, and asked for the actor be examined by a court-appointed doctor and psychiatrist. Their request was refused.

Depardieu is being tried on charges of sexually assaulting two women while shooting the 2021 film Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters).

Depardieu, an icon of French cinema who has appeared in more than 200 films, has denied accusations that he aggressively groped and made explicit sexual remarks to the women – a set designer and an assistant director. In an open letter published last year, he said: “Never, but never, have I abused a woman.”

The actor is the highest-profile figure to face accusations in French cinema’s version of the #MeToo movement, triggered in 2017 by allegations against the US producer Harvey Weinstein.

The names of the two women at the centre of Monday’s trial have not been made public. The set designer reported in February that she was subjected to sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexist insults while filming Les Volets Verts, directed by Jean Becker, in a private house in Paris.

The plaintiff told the French investigative website Mediapart that during the shoot Depardieu started loudly calling for a cooling fan because he “couldn’t even get it up” in the heat.

She claimed the actor went on to boast that he could “give women an orgasm without touching them”. The plaintiff alleged that an hour later she was “brutally grabbed” by Depardieu as she was walking off the set. The actor pinned her by “closing his legs” around her before groping her waist and her stomach and continuing up to her breasts, she said.

Depardieu made “obscene remarks” during the incident, she said, including: “Come and touch my big parasol. I’ll stick it in your pussy.” She described the actor’s bodyguards dragging him away as he shouted: “We’ll see each other again, my dear.”

On Monday the plaintiff’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, told Agence France-Presse: “I expect the justice system to be the same for everybody and for Monsieur Depardieu not to receive special treatment just because he’s an artist.”

Durrieu-Diebolt added: “My client expects that the justice system will find Gérard Depardieu to be a serial sexual assaulter.”

The second plaintiff in the case, an assistant director on the same film, also alleges sexual violence.

Assous previously said Depardieu’s defence would offer “witnesses and evidence that will show he has simply been targeted by false accusations”. He accused the plaintiff of attempting to “make money” by claiming €30,000 (£25,000) in compensation.

The defence also asked for a further eight witnesses to be heard, which would result in the trial taking longer than originally planned. It is now scheduled to be heard on 24-25 March next year.

Anouk Grinberg, an actor who appeared in Les Volets Verts, told AFP that Depardieu used “salacious words … from morning till night” while on set.

About 20 women have accused Depardieu of various sexual offences, which he denies. The actor Charlotte Arnould was the first to file a criminal complaint. A judge has yet to rule on a request from prosecutors in August for Depardieu to stand trial for allegedly raping and sexually assaulting her.

Arnould and Grinberg were outside the courtroom on Monday, alongside a crowd of people supporting the plaintiffs.

In December last year the French president, Emmanuel Macron, shocked feminists by complaining of a “manhunt” targeting Depardieu, whom he called a “towering actor” who “makes France proud”.

Macron’s remarks followed the broadcast by an investigative TV show of a recording of Depardieu making repeated misogynistic and insulting remarks about women.

Jacques Audiard was born in Paris in 1952, the son of the prolific screenwriter and director Michel Audiard. He began writing films in the mid-1970s and made his directorial debut in 1994 with See How They Fall. He won Baftas for The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2010) and the Cannes Palme d’Or with Dheepan in 2015. Audiard’s latest film, Emilia Pérez, a trans-empowerment musical set among Mexican drug cartels, won the Jury prize at Cannes and was described by Variety as “dazzling and instantly divisive”. It’s in cinemas now and will stream globally on Netflix from 13 November. Audiard lives in Paris.

This week sees the release of Heretic, Hugh Grant’s 45th feature film. Few critics would have predicted that length of career after his pouting 1982 debut in Privileged, a pretentiously shonky whodunnit featuring several of his fellow Oxford students. For the next decade he wasn’t so much a fringe actor as an actor with a floppy fringe, invariably cast as a posh, slightly foppish Englishman, doomed to be forever brushing his lustrous hair back from his finely chiselled features.

Then 12 years on everything changed with the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. More accurately, the floppy fringe remained, but now it was employed as comedy cover for a strikingly diffident kind of romantic hero. Overnight Grant was catapulted into the realm of international fame, going on to co-star with his haircut in a series of not wildly dissimilar romcoms.

A horror film, Heretic is a world away from all that. Grant is now 64, the curtain mop is long gone and the boyish charm has matured into something far more dangerously charismatic.

He plays Mr Reed, who is driven by a provocative yet pitiless logic, and betrays more than a touch of evil. It’s not his first bad guy. He’s been flirting with villainy for a while in films like Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons, not to mention his suavely ruthless Jeremy Thorpe in the much-lauded TV drama A Very English Scandal.

Mr Reed, though, occupies much darker territory. Grant said recently that the role is part of “the freak-show era” of his career. The change in direction has suited him, not least because a roguish character, as he’s made a point of saying, is closer to his own.

The stammering toff who seemed to have fallen out of an early Evelyn Waugh novel was his party piece, and it was used to brilliantly subversive effect in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, which predated Four Weddings. But it was perfected for Richard Curtis and it became his go-to public persona.

As he told the New York Times: “I thought if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too.”

That job grew much more challenging after his arrest in June 1995 following a brief encounter in a BMW on Sunset Boulevard with sex worker Divine Brown. His timid romantic act appeared to have been dealt a fatal blow, but Grant doubled down, dealing with the fallout in character, as it were.

The nervous young man who squirmed in the Tonight Show armchair while Jay Leno asked: “What the hell were you thinking?” managed to perform a delicate piece of image repair. In this endeavour he was ably supported by his then girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley.

With her photogenic looks and preference for well-ventilated clothing, Hurley had become a fixture in the UK press, making the couple a red-carpet dream team. The attention they drew would later have far-reaching repercussions when Grant discovered what press intrusion really entailed.

The sordid sex crisis deftly negotiated, Grant’s star continued to rise in a trio of Curtis-scripted films: Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.

It was in the middle one, in which he played the caddish Daniel Cleaver, that Grant began to grow as a comedic actor, famously ad-libbing some of the film’s best lines. Next year he reprises Cleaver in the fourth Bridget Jones film, Mad About the Boy.

“I think he did feel apprehension about stepping out of that floppy, tongue-tied English character,” recalls Bridget Jones’s Diary director Sharon Maguire. “I remember him being really pleasantly surprised and relieved the first time he saw the movie at the New York premiere … and only a teensy bit jealous that Colin Firth got just as many laughs.”

The making of that film coincided, roughly, with his breakup with Hurley. There followed a prolonged period of intermittent dating and an ever-more fractious relationship with the tabloids. The key text of this period is About A Boy, in which he plays a man in flight from romantic commitment. Grant acknowledged that he put a lot of himself into the role.

Yet suddenly, in his 50s, the confirmed bachelor contrived to father two children who are now 13 and 11 with the actor Tinglan Hong, and in between a son with Swedish TV producer Anna Eberstein, with whom he had two more children and to whom he has been married for six years.

Grant, whose father was an ex-army officer who worked in the carpet business and mother a French teacher, had originally wanted to be a writer. Although he more or less fell into acting, he’d always been a performer. Old schoolmates at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, West London, still talk of his mesmerising recital of Eliot’s The Waste Land.

But without formal drama training or a background in the theatre, Grant, even by the neurotic standards of most actors, nurtured a deep streak of professional insecurity – he has complained of being paralysed by panic attacks when filming.

“I got the strong impression,” says Maguire, “that Hugh was filled with loathing at his own acting and yet he was hugely conscientious about the process of acting, a perfectionist who often contributed gold in terms of the comedy and authenticity of a scene.” His exacting approach to work has not always won him friends on set. Robert Downey Jr called him a “jerk” after they made Restoration together in 1995. And Jerry Seinfeld, who directed him in Unfrosted, was only half-joking when, earlier this year, he described Grant as “a pain in the ass to work with”.

For all his self-criticism – he’s said that people were rightly “repelled” by his stumbling Englishman character – Grant also knows his own worth, not just financially but also in terms of industry longevity and position. The man who appears nowadays on talk shows with his well-honed anecdotes and waspish self-deprecation is a supremely confident veteran of the business of selling himself.

There’s also an added steeliness, a disinclination to suffer fools, that has been sharpened in the legal battles waged since he learned that his phone had been hacked by the now defunct News of the World. A leading figure in Hacked Off, the campaign group that seeks reform of press self-regulation, Grant settled a lawsuit with the Sun this year, having accused the paper of hiring a private investigator to break into his flat and bug him.

He said on X that he would have liked to go to court, but if he’d been awarded damages that were less than the settlement offer “I would have to pay the legal costs of both sides”, which he said could be as much as £10m, adding: “I’m afraid I am shying at the fence.”

Taking on Rupert Murdoch is one thing, but Grant is also not averse to showing his tetchier side to those lower down the media ladder. Last year his stilted interview with model Ashley Graham on the Oscars red carpet inspired almost as much condemnatory newsprint as his other Hollywood interaction three decades earlier with the unfortunate Brown.

When asked what he thought of the event, he compared it to Vanity Fair. He meant the Thackery novel, but Graham assumed it was the magazine after-party. The conversation only went downhill from there. Grant was derided as a snob and self-important, though it’s fair to say that some of his fanfare-deflating drollery was lost in cultural translation.

Then again, maybe he wasn’t just bored with banality but instead, with one eye on his career, he was establishing his new edge in the public imagination. With Grant it’s impossible to know. His real motivations and character are buried beneath geological layers of artifice, irony and a highly developed celebrity defence system.

He could probably write a wonderfully scabrous exposé of the film world and himself in the tradition of David Niven and Rupert Everett, but it’s far more likely he’ll concentrate on the job in hand: gradually occupying the position of a national treasure.