The Rake
Charming, dashing, witty—and not at all poncy—Brit star Hugh Dancy comes of age True, the hair is kind of floppy. And yes, the accent is posh and the wit British. So maybe all the Hugh Grant comparisons that rain down on Hugh Dancy—particularly after he played a foppish prince in Ella Enchanted and the lone testosterone in The Jane Austen Book Club—weren’t so blunt-minded after all.
What’s less supportable is the perception that he’s one of those classically trained British actors reared in tights and Elizabethan collars. Dancy, 33, didn’t go to any royal academy. Actually, he was a first-class ****up at prep school, nearly expelled for acts he’d rather keep quiet. “It’s not like I was freebasing,” Dancy says. “Just as much as you can get up to as a 13-year-old at boarding school.” He was sent to the theater as punishment, which turned out to be a multipart blessing. “I was at an all-boys school, and there were girls in the theater,” he says. “I wasn’t like a ravening sex hound, but…Okay, maybe I was a little ravening.”
After a trip to Oxford for a degree in literature and some solid TV and film experience, he’s back to his ravening ways—offscreen with Claire Danes and on-screen with Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic, a comedy about a retail addict who learns a slap-across-the-face lesson about spending. (For proof that Dancy can be more than just high-class eye candy, see Adam, an indie love story about a man with Asperger’s syndrome, coming soon.) Confessions, Dancy acknowledges, is “painfully topical” given the economic climate. But calling the chick flick prescient is a stretch. “Look,” he says, “some very smart people made this movie, but we’re not smarter than the entire American economic system.” After a cheeky (we’ll say it: Hugh Grant–like) comic pause, he adds, “I’m not saying we’re stupider.”
I don't like her. 
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