If you see Hugh Grant or Liz Hurley, you’re bound to want to take a picture of them.
That’s just basic logic at work – your choices are essentially limited to taking a picture of Hugh Grant or Liz Hurley or approaching them and saying “Hi, I really loved you in Music And Lyrics/ Passenger 57.” And only the very worst kind of pathological liar would think to do that last one.
But wait – don’t go taking pictures of Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley without their permission, because they’ll sue you and win £58,000, which is what happened yesterday after a photo agency took their picture on holiday. The moral of this story is that Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley value their privacy, although clearly not enough to stop making films and doing modelling jobs. Even though everyone sort of wishes they would.
We feel sorry for celebrities sometimes. Holidays should be a time for them to relax and unwind, but the current celebrity-obsessed culture means that there’ll always be an interest in them wherever they are on the planet. What kind of a world do we live in when a celebrity can’t even angrily shout at a child until it cries without it ending up in a newspaper? It’s disgusting.
Not even Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley are safe from this level of media intrusion. Although one of them is determined to keep churning out ever more creepy romantic comedies to growing public indifference and the other doesn’t really do anything, it didn’t stop a photographer from secretly snapping them on holiday together in a private resort in the Maldives recently.
Photographs? On holiday? Without permission? Surely people are only allowed to do that if they then track you down an hour later with the photo digitally printed onto a flimsy plastic plate and try to make you buy it for £35 while shouting “souvenir” at you in a funny accent.
Apparently so, because Hugh Grant, Liz Hurley and her husband Arun Nayar have just managed to sue Big Pictures for £58,000 in damages after it sold the secret holiday photos of them to newspapers.
Of course the newspapers were interested in the photographs because a) Hugh Grant, his ex-girlfriend Liz Hurley and her husband Arun Nayar went on holiday together? That’s a bit fruity, and b) The papers got to rock out some truly hopeless headlines because of it. The Times reports:
[Lawyer] Laura Tyler told Mr Justice Eady that the photos were taken covertly without their knowledge while they were on holiday in a resort which they had chosen for the privacy and seclusion it offered. “It has been most upsetting for the claimants to have their privacy invaded by these defendants,” she said… News Group published three of the photos in News of the World in an article headed “Liz does the blokey-cokey”. Associated published four photos in The Mail on Sunday in an article headed “Hugh’s that gooseberry?”.
So congratulations to Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley for winning their lawsuit. After all, everyone knows that when someone takes your photograph they steal a little bit of your soul, which is why Hugh and Liz have fought so hard over these holiday snaps. True, having sat through American Dreamz and Double Whammy we’re not entirely convinced that Hugh Grant or Liz Hurley actually had souls to begin with, but let’s not rain on their special moment right now.
Read more:
Liz Hurley, Hugh Grant and Arun Nayar win damages for invasion of privacy – Times
John says
Grant didn’t sell his soul to Hello! magazine like Hurley and her huband did last year though. £2 million for wedding photos, and now this? Hypocrites!