Hugh Grant has been embroiled in a row with the boss of a rubbish collection company in Rome, who filmed the incident.
Luisa Melara, president of Rome-based waste firm AMA, was secretly filming a restaurateur who was illegally fly-tipping when she crossed paths with the Love Actually actor and his wife Anne Aberstein.
“I was filming when I glimpsed a couple about to step in front of the camera,” she said, according to The Times. “I had no idea it was Hugh Grant.”
Melara added that she stuck out a foot to signal to Grant and his wife not to walk in front of her.
In the video footage, later released by AMA, Grant says: “Don’t put your foot out in front of my wife.”
“Grant, who was behind me, reached over and took my phone,” Melara said. “I took it back [and] he said, ‘You are not polite.’
“I said the same to him as a colleague explained that I was the president of Rome’s rubbish collecting company.”
Grant, who has campaigned against press intrusion, responded to the story on Twitter, denying the claim by some newspapers that he mistook Melara for a member of the paparazzi.
“Sigh,” he wrote. “Never remotely thought this person was a pap. Or trying to film me or wife. Paps don’t have cell phones. And phone was not pointing at us. But she did stick her foot out very rudely in front of my wife who was passing in front of camera. I objected.”
Rome is currently in the midst of a rubbish crisis, with Virginia Raggi, the city’s mayor, accusing Romans of failing to properly recycle.
