Writer and broadcaster Emma Freud has revealed that she and her partner, rom-com king Richard Curtis, have wed in secret after 33 years together.
Curtis, 66, is known to millions as the man behind British romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually, and About Time.
Yet the filmmaker had never made it down the aisle himself, despite Freud proposing twice before – mostly recently while appearing on Radio 4’s Loose Ends on 29 February this year.
That is, until a few weeks ago, when Curtis apparently decided it was about time he got hitched. Speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Freud – with whom Curtis shares their four children, Scarlett, Jake, Spike and Charlie – revealed that the couple were married in secret a month ago.
The Independent has contacted Freud’s representative for comment.
She made the revelation while interviewing Richard E Grant. According to the Evening Standard, Curtis was also at the event, reportedly wearing a gold wedding band.
An onlooker told The Sun that Freud, upon realising the cat was out of the bag, put her finger to her lips and made a “ funny noise” that had the audience laughing as she tried to change the subject.
Freud first met Curtis while interviewing him in the early Nineties about his charity organisation, Comic Relief, which he co-founded with Lenny Henry.
“I think I knew quite early on that he was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with,” she told Fearne Cotton in an interview with Stylist in 2018.
Ironically, it was working together on films such as 1994’s Four Weddings that put them off marriage entirely. Freud was Curtis’s script editor and “sternest critic”.
“We added up the number of weddings we had both been to and it was over 100,” Freud said.
“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.”
Perhaps Curtis was also scarred by the 17 rewrites Freud put him through while they collaborated on the script. “She’s a very ruthless, almost unpleasant script editor,” he fondly told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs.
“The thing I dreaded was the bloody letters CDB, which stand for Could Do Better. I used to think, ‘But I’ve worked on that for a week.’”
Despite this, Curtis had also hinted at marriage, and said that he wrote Four Weddings in part as “an attempt to explain to my mother why I wasn’t married”.
In a 2014 interview on Radio 4’s The Reunion, which was then reported by The Telegraph, he then mused that he was “thinking about” getting married, prompting an astonished reaction from Freud on X/Twitter.
“Whaaaat?” she responded on the social media platform. “First I’ve heard about it. Is this what you call a proposal? In the telegraph??? [sic] #notsoromanticafterall.”
Nevertheless, Freud persisted, asking again while on air on Radio 4’s Loose Ends, knowing Curtis would have tuned in. When he walked into the pub where she was sitting with friends, the table went “very, very silent” as they waited for his reaction.
“He didn’t say anything apart from, ‘Great show, loved every minute of it; it was fantastic’ – and then nothing else,” she recalled. “The table was kind of like ‘Oooh’.”
Curtis later admitted that he’d slept the whole way through the interview.
Last year, it was reported that the couple had sold their Notting Hill home in an off-market deal worth close to £30m, after Curtis purchased it in 1998 for £3.6m.
Freud and Curtis also share a home in Suffolk, which was bought by her grandfather Ernst Freud – the youngest son of Sigmund Freud – in the Thirties. Her sister, the novelist Esther, also lives in the area.
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