Hugh Grant Fears Ending Up Alone

We loved his bumbling, well-meaning hubby in Nine Months. We (reluctantly) crushed on his caddish Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones's Diary. He touched hearts again in About a Boy, made us laugh in love epic Love Actually, and is now appearing in new rom-com Did You Hear About the Morgans? With so much going for him, it couldn't possibly be true that this dashing, charming-as-all-get-out Brit is stressing out about getting old, and ending up alone. Could it?

You heard it from him first. During the course of an expansive interview for The Mirror, Grant mentioned his impending 50th birthday, saying, "Fifty's not a good number and we all have age terror sometimes in the middle of the night. I think I might have made a sort of pact with the devil in which I think I can have fun now and sort everything later. But then he comes back and says, 'Time's up and I'm taking you to hell as you're going to be a lonely, sad old man.'"

He goes on to talk about his tendency toward "love avoidance," a bad habit that some of us here happen to know something about (sigh). Still, he doesn't want to give up on the possibility of marriage, and happens to think that he'd be a "marvellous father."

So what, exactly, has him suddenly pondering his own mortality? Over at the Daily Mail, they're wondering whether Grant has noticed how distantly he actually resembles his poster image for Did You Hear About the Morgans? Grant was photographed in front of a massively blown up poster for the movie at its recent premiere in Berlin, and the difference—stretched out, smooth skin vs. craggy, deep crow's feet—is extreme.

"To be honest, I don't feel that old," Grant says. "I think I'm rather young and sprightly but then you see pictures of yourself and think, 'Who is that old man?'"