How romcom king Richard Curtis finally made it down the aisle – after three proposals

He is the Beethoven of British romcoms, the Mozart of middle-class manners. Despite building an empire around depictions of other people’s weddings, however, the filmmaker Richard Curtis had never managed one of his own. 

Never mind Four Weddings and a Funeral, for the first 33 years of Curtis’s relationship with the writer and broadcaster Emma Freud, it was no wedding and four children. The couple were happily together, the parents of Scarlett, Jake, Spike and Charlie, without ever tying the knot. 

That all changed this week. Freud, 61, was interviewing Richard E Grant at the Cheltenham Literature Festival when she revealed that she and Curtis, 66, had got married in secret four weeks beforehand. Curtis was also at the event, apparently sporting a gold wedding band. At long last, they have climbed knotting hill. 

What changed? A long courtship is one thing, but after three decades together most couples have either got married, or will not. This wasn’t Curtis and Freud’s first pass at the idea. They have been together since the early 1990s, having met when Freud interviewed Curtis about Comic Relief for a radio programme. She has said she wrote to him afterwards to thank him for his time, something she’s only done twice, and that she knew “quite early on that he was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with”.

She had previously proposed to him twice before. The first time, they had only been together a year when she got down on one knee on February 29, the leap year day on which women have traditionally proposed to men rather than the other way around. Recounting the story on a podcast in 2018, Freud said: “We went to Regent’s Park and I went down on one knee and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ and he said, ‘No’.” She said Curtis asked for six months to think about it, after which he gave her a ring and said, “Look I don’t want to get married, but can we be not married for the rest of our lives?” 

Working on Four Weddings and a Funeral together a few years later didn’t make marriage a more appealing prospect. The hit comedy, starring a young Hugh Grant, follows the marital tribulations of a group of upper-middle class Londoners. It was rooted firmly in Curtis and Freud’s own experience. In interviews, she has said: “We added up the number of weddings we had both been to and it was over 100… Those weddings were the basis of the movie, and also the reason that neither of us could imagine going down an aisle.

“And I always thought that if we didn’t get married, we could never get divorced.” 

Curtis has hinted at marriage before, too. He said that he wrote Four Weddings partly “as an attempt to explain to my mother why I wasn’t married”. Speaking on Radio 4’s The Reunion in 2014, as reported by The Telegraph, he added that he was “thinking about” getting married. “I think I might.” 

Replying to his comments on Twitter, Freud joked that it was news to her. “Whaaaat? First I’ve heard about it. Is this what you call a proposal? In the telegraph??? (sic) #notsoromanticafterall”

It didn’t put her off trying again. At the Latitude Festival earlier this year, she recalled appearing on Radio 4’s Loose Ends on another February 29. She posed the question again on air, knowing Curtis would be listening. Later she was in the pub with friends when he walked in. They fell silent, awaiting his reaction. 

“As he walked in, all our table went very, very silent because they’d heard, obviously,” she told the audience. “It was like ‘What’s he going to say?’

“And he did’t say anything apart from ‘Great show, loved every minute of it; it was fantastic’ – and then nothing else. The table was kind of like ‘Oooh’.”

She added that Curtis then confessed he’d been unconscious all the way through. “He sat down and said. ‘How was it? I didn’t hear a word, I slept through it’.”

Curtis is evidently in a reflective mood. At the Cheltenham festival, in conversation with his and Freud’s author and podcaster daughter Scarlett, 28, he confessed to being ashamed at the lack of diversity in his films, as well as some of the humour in them. 

“In my generation, calling someone chubby [was funny],” he said. “In Love Actually there were jokes about that. Those jokes aren’t any longer funny.” In Bridget Jones’s Diary, too, the lead character is criticised for her appearance and constantly self-flagellates about her weight. 

When Scarlett asked about the lack of diversity in Notting Hill, a film set in a famously diverse area of London, her father said he regretted it. 

“Yes, I wish I’d been ahead of the curve,” he said. “Because I came from a very un-diverse school [he went to Harrow] and bunch of university friends [from Oxford], I think that I’ve hung on, on the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that.” Last year, speaking about his 2003 film Love Actually, Curtis said he felt “uncomfortable” about its all-white cast. 

The recent news comes off the back of a difficult period for the couple. Last July, a fire tore through their 18th-century country house in Walberswick, Suffolk. Nobody was hurt, but the blaze caused extensive damage to the timber-framed property.

“Has been a grim few days,” Freud said in an Instagram post afterwards. “Electrical fault caused a fire at our home. A total of 60 incredible Suffolk firemen worked for eight hours and we are safe. No roof, or bedroom, or clothes – but my brother also came to the rescue and we are all ok.” The home has been in Freud’s family since the 1930s, when it was bought by her grandfather, Ernst Freud, the youngest son of Sigmund, the father of psychoanalysis. Ernst passed it onto his son, Sir Clement Freud, who in turn gave it to Emma. Her novelist sister Esther also has a home nearby, while other celebrities who have had homes in the village include DJ Simon Mayo and the film director Paul Greengrass. 

More recently, Walberswick has become a green energy battleground, over plans to put a 50ft substation, for connecting offshore power to the grid, on a 35-acre site nearby. Critics say it will industrialise swathes of the idyllic coast. Freud told reporters that she is “delighted” the cause is receiving national attention, but Esther is leading the family effort against it. Esther has said the power companies will turn the area into an “industrial wasteland, destroying the beach, wildlife and ancient ecosystem”. 

Even were it not for these other stresses, Curtis and Freud would hardly be the first couple in their 60s, their children grown up, to take stock. They have had enviable careers. In 37 years, Comic Relief has raised more than £1.5 billion for charity. Curtis’s TV legacy – Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley – would be the envy of any comic writer. The films have taken an estimated £1.2 billion at the box office. As co-producer or script editor, Freud has been there for everything, an integral part of it all.  

In fact, they have done it backwards. They started out with charity work, had a blockbuster Hollywood career, raised a family and have finally, at the end of it all, got around to a secret wedding.

Put like that, it sounds like something out of a Richard Curtis film. It could just be love, actually. It’s definitely about time.