If the locations have been shelled, so, too, have the characters’ hearts Newcomer Cates is painfully raw. She has some crisply memorable moments – her profanities sound blunt and brash, and she gives a nice nervous wobble of the head when among those she considers her betters.But the most startling thing here is Hugh Grant as a De Sade in luvvy’s clothing. When Rickman first appears, we don’t hear his voice – that luxurious tiger’s purr. But his composure is still transfixing: he studies his fellow actors as though hunting them.

The only time he’s ruffled is during rehearsal, when Cates commits a faux pas: she prompts him, thinking he has forgotten his lines when he’s actually making a dramatic pause Rickman’s startled by her insolence – and he’s hooked. The second time they make love, he even takes his vest off.Visually, the film marks a return to the kitchen-sink, so steeped in grey that the red of a phone box burns exotically on a broken pavement. When local repertory director Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant) hires her as dogsbody on his production of Peter Pan, she falls in love with him, too green to notice that he’s having his way with a young male stagehand.
Cates’s youth also makes her easy game for P L O’Hara (Alan Rickman), the in-house Casanova who is lured back to rep to play Captain Hook. Director Mike Newell’s second collaboration with Hugh Grant is a sour, unforgiving film, but it understands something about the euphoria of a first brush with fame, when conquering the world means getting your photo in the Manchester Daily News.

Stella (Georgina Cates) is a teenage dreamer in post-war Liverpool, wallpapering over her accent with how-now-brown-cows in preparation for an acting career. TO SAY that An Awfully Big Adventure (15) is by the same team that brought you Four Weddings and a Funeral is rather like saying The Waste Land is a poem by the writer who inspired Cats. Our climate may not grow warmer, but our exposure to ultra-violet light will almost certainly increase significantly.n Plant trees.. This will help the planet; and there may well be less of it around anyway.n Buy sun-hats and sun-cream, and keep children out of the sun.

You too can make a difference.n Conserve energy, both in the home and in your travelling habits. You can no longer assume (as previous generations have tend to do) that nature is unchanging.n Become “green”. The best hope for the planet’s future is that millions of individuals will decide to behave with greater environmental responsibility. Every major commercial fish species is now classified by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation as “depleted” or “over-exploited”.n Between 1981 and 1993, Friends of the Earth’s membership grew from 7,500 members to 204,000, Greenpeace’s from 30,000 to 400,000.n 20 per cent of UK beaches do not meet mandatory EC standards for bathing water.SURVIVAL STRATEGIESn Be flexible. An ozone “hole” over the Arctic was detected for the first time this spring.n Since records began in 1855, global average temperatures have increased by between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees Celsius. The seven hottest years on record were all in the 1980s.n The world’s marine catch has increased fourfold since 1950. By 2021 it will probably be around 8 billion.n Over 50,000 sq km of rainforest are felled each year; 8 million sq.