Daily Mirror
If life was like a Richard Curtis movie, then Hugh Grant would be seeing the error of his ways round about now – abandoning whatever hot young beauty he is dating to run to the side of the mother of his baby to beg for forgiveness.
It would be raining as Hugh raced through the city streets and a song would be playing – an old standard remade by youngsters.
As the mother of his baby looked up from a jumbo-sized pack of Pampers, Hugh would brush the hair from his eyes and stutter a faltering but strangely eloquent apology.
It would be a speech revealing why a life without love is meaningless, why bringing a child into the world is a thing of beauty and why a sleepless night with a screaming baby is far more meaningful than a sleepless night with a screaming, insatiable young starlet.
But Hugh Grant’s life is not much like a Richard Curtis movie. It is probably much more Last Tango in Paris than Love Actually.
Although for about 24 hours, Grant looked like he was going to give the world its happy ending.
A father to a baby girl at 51, it hardly seemed to matter that Grant and Chinese actress Tinglang Hong, 32, were no longer together.
Relationships break up. Yes, couples usually wait until after the baby has been born before they go their separate ways but everyone wanted to believe that Hugh would be humanised by his baby girl, and be enriched by fatherhood. You know – just like the rest of us.
But one day after the baby was revealed, Hugh was pictured holding hands with a German babe 30 years his junior.
Elisa Schmidt
It could have been funny – every night she takes off her braces while he removes his dentures.
But the presence of that baby made Grant look like a pathetic old man.
Too old to play the leading man, too weak to play character actors, Hugh Grant – who had spent the summer months whining about invasions of his privacy – suddenly looked like the Swiss Tony of RADA.
But the baby will not go away.
She will be there long after the little German girl or whoever replaces her has faded from the front pages and memory.
How Hugh Grant deals with parenthood is his business but it will determine if he is the vapid movie star that so many suspect he is, or if he is something more.
If Hugh Grant has an IQ higher than his golf handicap then he will be counting how many years he has left to live. For nothing in this world brings home your own mortality like having a child late in life. Grant will be dealing with a teenager when he is 70 – and that will wipe the smug smirk off of his face, if he lives that long.
But if an older father does not contemplate how long he has left then he is either very selfish or very stupid.
When my daughter was born, I wasn’t as old as Grant but I was in my 40s, wondering if I would stay alive long enough to bring up this baby.
When my son had been born in my mid-20s, I was convinced I was immortal.
When my daughter was born in my 40s, I was no longer quite so cocky. After my parents had died, I had realised that I was not going to live forever.
Hugh Grant will lavishly provide for his daughter.
He has apparently already installed mother and child in a £1million pad near his home.
But when he runs off to golf tournaments and little floozies, he looks like every other feckless dad who could not grow up enough to put a child before himself.
The greatest gift any parent can give their child is simply being there.
And if Hugh Grant can’t quite manage that, then he might be a big rich movie star, but I am afraid he is not much of a man.
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