Rewind romantic movie history frame by frame and you’re bound to spark up debates about which characters are most influential. Is it John Cusack, holding that boom box aloft in “Say Anything” or curating mixtapes in “High Fidelity”? Do you picture Ryan Gosling squeezing the hearts and flowers out of Rachel McAdams’ face in “The Notebook,” or any of the problematic dudes who strung along Molly Ringwald in your pick of John Hughes movies?
Or . . . does Hugh Grant come to mind? For a while in the 1990s, he was the male face of romantic comedy. We loved him as the stammering bookseller who captures Julia Roberts’ heart in “Notting Hill” or the feckless non-marrying type in “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” We loved to hate him in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” while understanding why Renée Zellweger's titular heroine wasted so much time on him.
