Celebrities are known to engage in excessive drinking followed by making an expensive purchase which they happen to forget or regret after they sober up. Some buy obnoxious things whereas many splurge their wealth on art like Hugh Grant.
A blackout drunk Hugh Grant bought an expensive painting, forgot about the purchase, and later sold it for seven times the amount only to regret the sale later. At that time Grant was climbing the mountain of success and fame with movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Hugh Grant’s story of purchasing a $3.5 Million painting
It is indeed a privilege to buy an Andy Warhol painting on a whim, Grant is no art connoisseur and he confessed that his purchase of the painting had nothing to do with his affinity for art. The Notting Hill actor confessed that it was his impaired thinking after all which pushed him to order his assistant to book the painting at an auction. Grant narrates the story,
“It all began with a drink. I’d been having a drunken dinner with my father the night before, and I said, ‘We ought to go see my brother Jamie. You know, the Concorde’s amazing.’ And he said, ‘I hear it is.’ So I bought him a Concorde ticket and we went. We had lunch and drank a lot of beer. And I was thinking about some stuff in the Sotheby’s auction and I saw the Liz Taylor.”
Hugh Grant asked his assistant to buy Liz Taylor from the auction, little did he know that his sober self will wake up to a surprise. During this incident, Grant was already starring in blockbuster films like Notting Hill and was a household name famously known for the rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Hugh Grant sold Andy Warhol’s painting for a whopping $21 Million
Not everyone’s midnight mistakes turn into huge investments but apparently, Hugh Grant is not like us mortals. The actor’s drunk purchase turned out to be a big investment as he sold the painting for seven times the price at which he initially bought it.
In 2005, Warhol painted 13 pictures of a famous actress in the sixties in the series including Liz Taylor. The painting sold for nearly $12 Million each, but Grant managed to sell his piece for $21 Million. Grant regrets it now he said, “I slightly regret selling it now, even though it made me rich.” We will never be as lucky as Hugh Grant probably because we are not as cool as him and our net worth unlike Hugh Grant is not 150 Million Dollars.
Source: DailyMail
