Romantic comedy’s old master Richard Curtis is still trying to persuade us that all we need is love
RICHARD CURTIS, THE TYPHOID MARY OF INCURABLE romantics, is not surprised that even though it is 9 a.m. on a weekday, Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon in New York City’s Central Park, is crowded. And he’s not bothered that the obligatory rumpled guitar-playing guy is doggedly torturing the Beatles’ oeuvre for tips. It would be hypocritical of the writer of the romantic-comedy classics Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary to deny tourists—or guitarists—whatever emotional fantasy sustains them.
Curtis has never been to Strawberry Fields before, even though he’s a Beatles superfan. In 1963, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came out, he was a 7-year-old New Zealand–born Brit living in Sweden. His parents had the same records every grownup in those days had—one copy of My Fair Lady and two
