London in Film - Romantic London

Romantic London

The city has often been used as the backdrop for romances like Indiscreet (1958) with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and A Touch of Class (1973), and has become popular for romantic comedies in recent years. This is at least partly due to the television and film writer Richard Curtis, who has written some of the most successful British films of recent years — The Tall Guy (1989), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003), all set or partly set in the city. The films follow the awkward love lives of largely upper-middle class characters (aside from The Tall Guy, always including one played by Hugh Grant).

Curtis has been criticised for pandering to the American market by playing to the stereotype of the English as posh, socially awkward eccentrics. This hasn't stopped the films generally being a huge success in the American and British cinema box office charts. Other films which have followed in Curtis's footsteps include Sliding Doors (1998), Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (1998), About a Boy (2002), Wimbledon, and the American film What a Girl Wants (2002). Londinium (2001) used locations in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, Hyde Park, Primrose Hill Park and at Waterloo Station.

Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen conducted their affairs around various parts of London in Closer (2004), which uses locations such as Clerkenwell, the London Aquarium. Bloomsbury, the River Thames and the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

Woody Allen's Match Point (2005), uses a very up-market view of the city to reflect the upper class lives of the protagonists, including locations in Notting Hill, Belgravia, Chelsea, St. James's Park and Tate Modern.