Notting Hill star Julia Roberts has reunited with the film’s writer, Richard Curtis, 26 years on from the hit romantic comedy’s premiere in 1999 to celebrate his daughter Scarlett’s 30th birthday.
Curtis’s daughter shared a video from her 30th celebrations to social media, which showed Curtis and Roberts sitting together and hugging, behind her birthday cake.
“Gonna go back to crying and feeling so loved I wanna burst,” the 30-year-old wrote alongside the heartwarming footage.
In the clip, Roberts and Curtis could be seen smiling as they chatted while the group sang a rendition of the Carole King hit “You’ve Got A Friend”.
Roberts starred in Curtis’s fourth feature film as the Hollywood actor, Anna Scott, who finds romance with a British bookshop owner, William Thacker, played by Hugh Grant.
While Notting Hill cemented Roberts as a romcom actor, the star revealed in 2022 that the reason she hadn’t returned to the genre was because she hadn’t found anything “good enough”.
The exception to the trend, she said, had been 2022’s Ticket to Paradise, which she starred in opposite George Clooney. “They didn’t exist until this movie that I just did that Ol Parker wrote and directed,” she said.
Curtis, who shares four children, Scarlett, Jake, Spike and Charlie, with his partner Emma Freud, went on to pen the scripts for subsequent hits, including Bridget Jones’ s Diary and Love Actually.
The celebrated screenwriter even attempted a sequel of the Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant hit, but the project failed to launch after Roberts rejected his script, which saw her character divorce Grant’s.
Although Roberts didn’t believe in the idea, Grant was on board. “I’m sure that my character in Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character have been through the ugliest imaginable divorce with really expensive, nasty lawyers,” he said, adding it would feature “children involved in tug of love, floods of tears, psychologically scarred forever”.
“I’d love to do that film,” he added.
