Love Actually, 2003
Director
Cast
- Hugh Grant
- Martine McCutcheon
- Alan Rickman
- Liam Neeson
- Chiwetel Ejiofor
- Colin Firth
- Keira Knightley
- Bill Nighy
- Emma Thompson
- Billy Bob Thornton
- Andrew Lincoln
- Thomas Brodie-Sangster
- January Jones
- Elisha Cuthbert
visit the film locations
London: Flights: Heathrow Airport; Gatwick Airport
Selfridges & Co, 400 Oxford Street, W1
Whiteley’s, Bayswater, W2
City Hall, the London Assembly Building on the South Bank alongside Tower Bridge.
Surrey: Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher (rail: Esher, from London Waterloo)
Trivia
The British romcom is being honed to a solid box-office formula: quality cast, slickly crafted script (there's a novelty in itself), audience-grabbing musical moment, a tearjerkingly satisfying wrap-up and that inevitable fixture of the genre, Hugh Grant. Maybe in years to come they'll be remembered as fondly as the Ealing comedies or the Carry Ons. Maybe.
The undisputed king of the genre has to be Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and A Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary
Love Actually filming location: Andrew Lincoln's ‘South Bank’ gallery: Great Sutton Street, Clerkenwell, London
The ‘South Bank’ gallery run by Mark (Andrew Lincoln) isn't on the South bank at all, of course. It was an empty office – now a solicitors – at 26-27 Great Sutton Street, in Clerkenwell – which was Hugh Grant's neighbourhood in About A Boy.
Love Actually filming location: Liam Neeson’s heart-to-heart: Gabriel’s Wharf, South Bank, London
Queen’s Walk is the path running alongside the south ban of the River Thames. On Gabriel’s Wharf, in front of the Riviera Restaurant, 56 Upper Ground, you’ll find the bench on which Daniel (Liam Neeson), during a heart-to-heart chat, discovers that his distracted son (Thomas Sangster) is – actually – in love.
Slightly further east along the walk is the Oxo Tower Wharf complex, home to Mark, where he embarrassedly leaves Juliet (Keira Knightley) with the wedding video. He exits the flat by the rear entrance of the wharf building on Barge House Street, through the courtyard to Oxo Tower Wharf itself. It’s on the pier here that disgracefully ageing actor Maurice (Peter O’Toole) recites a speech from Macbeth for an unappreciative Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) in Venus.
The Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) and Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) attend a school concert at Elliott School, Pullman Gardens, Putney, southwest London.
The church in which Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) marries Juliet to the unexpected strains of All You Need Is Love, is the Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley Street, in the exclusive Mayfair district. Daniel buries his wife at St Paul’s Church, Rectory Grove , in Clapham SW4, south of the Thames.
Love Actually filming location: ‘the dodgy end of Wandsworth’: Poplar Road, Herne Hill, London
The PM searches for Natalie in ‘the dodgy end of Wandsworth’, though it's really 102 Poplar Road, Herne Hill that he eventually finds her. And, in these days of strict security, ‘10 Downing Street’ was a set built in the studio at Shepperton Studio.
You won’t find planes at the ‘airport’ from which Colin (Kris Marshall) departs to find fulfillment in Wisconsin. It’s not an airport at all, but Sandown Park Racecourse in Esher, about 15 miles southwest of London, in Surrey. What is it with racecourses standing in for airports? Sandown previously stood in for ‘Johannesburg Airport’ in Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, and ‘St Petersburg Airport’ in GoldenEye is Epsom Racecourse. The ‘Wisconsin’ bar itself, by the way, was no further away than a set built on the Shepperton backlot.
The radio studio, where Billy Mack reveals that his record is crap and that Britney Spears was a lousy shag, is Heat Radio, Mappin House, 4 Winsley Street, London W1.
Love Actually filming location: Mark declares his love silently: St Luke’s Mews, Notting Hill, London
In the heart Notting Hill, the home of newlyweds Peter and Juliet – where sadly lovestruck Mark silently declares his love with cue cards, is 27 St Luke’s Mews. The original script called for him to carpet the mews with rose petals – a gesture which surely would have had every female in the audience shoving a finger down her throat and gagging.
It’s in this mews, too, that Bill Murray gets mugged, all the while assuming it’s part of the ‘Theatre of Life’ experience, in Jon Amiel’s comedy thriller The Man Who Knew Too Little. And a couple of minutes away stood the restaurant which became ‘The Mother Black Cap’ in cult favourite Withnail & I (finally demolished in 2010).
And, away from London, the ‘Portuguese’ restaurant, where writer Jamie finally declares his love for Aurelia (Lucia Moniz) is Le Bar de la Marine, 15 quai de Rive Neuve, the Old Port in Marseille (tel: 91 54 95 42), in the South of France, which was also the setting for Marcel Pagnol’s 1931 film Marius.
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