How artist daughter of Richard Curtis – who even had a cameo in his Love Actually hit – got him to APOLOGISE for ‘size jokes’ and how he had written women in his films during literary festival interview

Richard’s Curtis’s daughter who had a cameo in his Love Actually hit got her father to apologise for ‘size jokes’ and the way he wrote women in his films during a literary festival interview. 

Scarlett Curtis, 28, is a writer, artist and feminist who curated The Sunday Times bestseller Feminists Don’t Wear Pink – even designing the artwork for Ed Sheeran’s seventh album Autumn Variations.

The great-niece of Lucian Freud, Scarlett has been surrounded by inspiring figures her whole life as the daughter of both the famous film-maker and broadcaster Emma Freud. 

Curtis, 66, revealed his activist daughter made him see sense – saying he was ‘stupid and wrong’ for the way he wrote about women and joked about people’s size in his films.

Curtis added he regrets much of his work and he was ‘unobservant’ and ‘not as clever’ as he should have been – adding he will never use the words ‘fat’ and ‘chubby’ again. 

Renée Zellweger’s character Bridget Jones was described as having ‘tree-trunk thighs’, while the Prime Minister’s PA Natalie in Love Actually, played by Martine McCutcheon, was famously depicted as the ‘chubby one’ and having a ‘sizeable a**e’.

But Curtis said those jokes weren’t funny anymore when he was quizzed by his daughter Scarlett at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Scarlett previously described Sigmund Freud as ‘sexist’ and ‘horrible’. Her maternal grandfather Clement was exposed as a paedophile in 2016.

As a child, she even acted briefly in her father’s film Love Actually – playing a lobster in the Christmas Nativity play attended by the British Prime Minister, played by Hugh Grant.  

Scarlett, 28, this year made her TV writing debut on the second series of Amazon Prime Video’s teen romance The Summer I Turned Pretty, with the feminist activist and writer telling the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden: ‘It was truly my dream job.’ 

Curtis said his activist daughter had made him see sense, reported The Times. 

‘I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word ‘fat’ again’,’ he said. ‘Wow, you were right. In my generation calling someone chubby [was funny] — in there were jokes about that. Those jokes aren’t any longer funny.’

He also spoke of his regret of not having a black character in Notting Hill and ‘not being ahead of the curve’, but that his work was never intentionally meant to cause any harm. 

But he did defend himself for writing a gay couple into 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.  

Curtis said he felt ‘stupid and wrong’ for thinking he couldn’t write about those parts because of his ‘very undiverse school’ and ‘bunch of university friends’.

He said: ‘I felt as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t look outwards.’ 

Curtis was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and had lived in Sweden and the Philippines before moving to Britain aged 11 where he was educated at Harrow School. He went on to achieve a first-class Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

Curtis has criticised his own work before when in January 2022 he described his films as starting to look like ‘historical documents’. 

Speaking to Craig Oliver on his Desperately Seeking Wisdom podcast, The Blackadder and Mr Bean creator said: ‘All my conversations with my children now, they don’t like 20 percent of my jokes, because they think they’re old fashioned and wrong in some way.

‘So I’m really interested in how a generation that’s grown up to be passionate, angry and pedantic about these issues may well change things for the better.’  

While in November that year he admitted that Love Actually’s lack of diversity now makes him feel ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘a bit stupid’ as he looked back for the film’s 20th anniversary.

Speaking to host Diane Sawyer for the ABC special The Laughter and Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later, he admitted he thinks the 2003 Christmas classic is ‘out of date’ in some moments. 

‘There are things you’d change, but thank god, society is, you know, changing. So, my film is bound, in some moments, to feel, you know, out of date,’ he said. 

‘I mean, there are things about the film, you know, the lack of diversity makes me feel uncomfortable and a bit stupid.’

Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk

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