Elizabeth Hurley has spent the past three decades tirelessly making British culture a little bit more glamorous. She rose to fame in the early 1990s, having made her feature debut in 1988’s Rowing with the Wind, a windswept Mary Shelley biopic with Hugh Grant as Lord Byron.
Hurley’s breakthrough came in the Wesley Snipes plane thriller Passenger 57 (1992), as a henchwoman disguised as a flight attendant, before taking the lead in 1995’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, about an upper-class heroin addict who begins an affair with her motorbiking drugs courier.
She is perhaps still best known on the big screen for her work in the Austin Powers films as Vanessa Kensington, top spy and lucky squeeze of Mike Myers’s shagadelic hero. Off-screen, meanwhile, she remains stratospherically famous for wearing safety pins to the British premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Over the past quarter-century, Hurley’s films have included Bedazzled (as the Devil), indie drama Permanent Midnight (opposite Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson), Serving Sara (with Matthew Perry), Viktor (a noir with Gérard Depardieu) and three consecutive Christmas movies.
Earlier this year she starred in Strictly Confidential, the debut film from her son, Damien, a swimwear-tastic murder mystery which absolutely was not an erotic thriller.
On TV she has starred in all four seasons of The Royals, as well as Runways and Gossip Girl. She owns her own beachwear line, models for Estée Lauder, among others, and is the star of the new “Duh, Debenhams!” Christmas ad.
Please post your questions for Hurley by midday on Monday 4 November; we’ll publish her replies three days later.
