Though he has walked through the shadow of some ticklish “scandals”, Hugh Grant has always kept his cool.

A conviction for “lewd conduct in a public place” with a very talkative prostitute and endless tabloid scrutiny of his relationships with Liz Hurley and Jemima Khan failed to blow the frosting off the top.

Whatever the turmoil of his private life it seemed his cool was invincible.

Yesterday he was accused of losing it. A photographer, Ian Whittaker, described how an apparently innocuous request for a photograph had brought forth in the actor a bitter rage. Whittaker claimed that Grant had launched a frenzied verbal and physical attack that involved a tub of baked beans – allegations denied by Grant.

Yesterday, it also emerged that Grant had been arrested on suspicion of an assault and questioned for an hour at Notting Hill Police station. He was bailed to return next month.

His lawyers issued an urgent legal notice. They allowed that “an incident did happen” but denied the allegations, printed in The Star, the Daily Record and The London Paper, about “our client’s alleged wish that a paparazzi’s photographer’s children die of cancer”.

The photographer, for his part, promised “to see the thing through to the end”.

Whittaker, 43, had been in Chelsea on Tuesday, waiting outside the home of Liz Hurley, hoping to get pictures of the actress after her well-publicised marriage to Arun Nayar, the Indian businessman.

Grant lives in the same street and pulled up in his car. “It looked to me as if he had been out for a morning jog,” Whittaker said in one report of the incident.

Whittaker said that Grant had his head down, and that he merely asked the actor to “give us a smile, please?”

“But he must have been having a bad day, because he started chasing me down the street.” Whittaker then appears to have walked backwards away from the actor, taking pictures as he went. He said: “We ended up about 100 yards down the street in the middle of the road.”

He then claims the actor kicked him “three or four times and then kneed me in the groin”.

“He asked me if I had a girlfriend or any kids and I said I had two. He said, ‘I hope they die of f***ing cancer’.”

He claimed that Grant then said: “Do you know who I am? I’m a millionaire”, and then screamed: “Leave me alone,” offering to pay the photographer £200 a day to keep away.

In perhaps the most bizarre claim of all, Whittaker said Grant had then picked up what appears to have been a Tupperware container full of baked beans from outside his door – perhaps a discarded takeaway carton – and threw it. Whittaker was said to have been left bruised “and covered in baked beans”. It was, the photographer said, “the kind of thing you expect Pete Doherty to do, not Hugh Grant”. Grant rejects the allegations.

It seems an unlikely reaction from one so used to media attention. After his arrest in 1995 by the Los Angeles Police Department with the prostitute Divine Brown, he handled the blanket publicity with cautious and apologetic charm. Appearing in the US on the Jay Leno Show, he was asked: “What the hell were you thinking?” Grant replied: “I’m not one to go around blowing my own trumpet.” If anything, Grant’s image was bolstered as sales of his videos increased by 30 per cent.

So it remained through his split with Ms Hurley and his recent break-up with Ms Khan. Intrusive reports were handled by his lawyers. Yesterday they settled a libel action with Associated Newspapers over a report into his private life.

In an interview in February he described himself as “grumpy, anxious and difficult”. Asked what made him grumpy, he replied: “Everything. It would be shorter to tell you what doesn’t.”

An actor’s life

— First hit the big screen with the 1982 film Privileged and during the decade worked as an advertising copywriter and actor in repertory theatre

— Earlier roles included playing Frederic Chopin and Lord Byron, and he also starred in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon

— His big breakthrough came in 1994 with Four Weddings and a Funeral when his performance as the charming but stammering Charles drew comparisons with David Niven and Cary Grant

— Achieved notoriety in June 1995 when he was arrested on Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, in the company of Divine Brown, a prostitute. The actor was apparently engaged in a “lewd act”. He later made a public apology to Elizabeth Hurley, then his girlfriend. His next film, Nine Months, benefited at the box office from the publicity

— During the 1990s he also took roles in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility alongside Emma Thompson, starred with Gene Hackman in Extreme Measures and in the opulent period piece Restoration

— His “comeback” film was Notting Hill released in 1999 where he played a failed bookshop owner who enters a relationship with a Hollywood film star, Anna Scott, played by Julia Roberts

Source: Times database

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