Hugh grant

I have a confession, or perhaps a boast. I have never played the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, and now, at the grand old age of forty-one, I doubt I ever shall. But there’s no doubt it’s a cultural phenomenon that has long since transcended any suggestion of being the preserve of adolescents, literal and overgrown alike. Since it was created in 1974, sales of the game have grossed billions, and it has been played by tens if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide. To be an aficionado is to find yourself in broad company — but how does that translate at the movies?  The first answer to this question came in 2000, when a film that starred Jeremy Irons as the villainous Mage Profion was released in cinemas.

There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to appear in domestic-based thrillers. Last Sunday when HBO’s The Undoing began, Jonathan and Grace Fraser (Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) seemed to have the happiest of middle-aged marriages. They still laughed at each other’s jokes. They still kept each other fully informed about the kind of day they’d had at work: he as a kindly child oncologist, she as an unfailingly wise therapist. Not only did they still have sex, but when they did, it wasn’t always in bed.True, they weren’t wholly without their problems. Their loving son Henry, for example, sometimes didn’t clean up after making smoothies.