Cary Grant, the one and only By Laurie Bennett March 21, 2013 at 6:05am (MUCKETY)

The New York Times has proclaimed Justin Timberlake the new Cary Grant, which must make George Clooney the old Cary Grant.

The premise for the Times verdict is Timberlake’s suave new look, a tailored contrast to his earlier boy-band bagginess.

Grant, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite actor, set a standard, sartorial and otherwise, for later generations of actors.

The comparison is made with so many handsome, witty leading men that it has become a cliche.

Hugh Grant (no relation) runs a close second to Clooney as the chosen successor. The Daily Mail pointed out: “Both were born in England, have similar Byronic sex appeal, look good in suits, and excel at playing well-heeled characters.”

Others who have been promoted as the next Archibald Alexander Leach include Bruce Willis (when he had hair), Pierce Brosnan (before he serenaded Meryl), Mark Wahlberg, Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ashton Kutcher and Ewan McGregor. (The McGregor analogy makes no sense whatsoever. He obviously is the next Christopher Plummer.)

Vanity Fair noted this trend almost a decade ago, identifying Frankie Muniz, TV’s Malcolm in the middle, as the most inexplicable nominee. When told that a critic had described him as “the Cary Grant of kid stars,” Muniz replied, “That’s cool… but I don’t know who Cary Grant is.”

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The disastrous duet of Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley (EVENING STANDARD)

Things have not always run smoothly in the glittering career of Hugh Grant. He tells an Oxford literary magazine about five embarrassing failures in his life.

When he was 12 he tried to throw a cricket ball back to the bowler at Lord’s but it flew backwards into the crowd. Later he wore his mother’s red anorak when he was a teenage motorbike messenger and no one would talk to him. He once failed in a TV adaptation of a Barbara Cartland novel because he had a squeaky voice, and in a Spanish- made film about Lord Byron his hair perm was too curly.

But the worst disaster occurred when Liz Hurley made him sing a duet with her, as Frank and Nancy Sinatra, while they were on holiday in the South of France.

“A band was playing to a large crowd,” he tells the autumn edition of Arete, a learned quarterly for Oxford graduates such as himself. “It’s hard now to imagine how I allowed myself to be persuaded by my then girlfriend to go up with her and sing Something Stupid. In harmony. I might have been fractionally drunk but I remember a moment of sudden and terrifying sobriety, followed by blind panic, and then us starting so far off key that the band had to stop and start again.

“This happened three times. In the end we were told to leave the stage. When we got back to our friends we found they’d fled.”

Arete’s editor Craig Raine writes  encouragingly: “Hugh recently starred in the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking with great success.”

READ MORE: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/the-disastrous-duet-of-hugh-grant-and-liz-hurley-8117470.html