Jamie is a novelist whose girlfriend betrays him with his own brother. He retreats to his house in the south of France, where he hires a Portuguese housekeeper, Aurélia (Lúcia Moniz). They don’t share a common language — she speaks no English, he no Portuguese — but fall for each other across the autumn weeks of his solitary writing retreat.
The film’s climax, in which Jamie bursts into a Portuguese restaurant and proposes in halting, badly learned Portuguese, has become one of the most replayed scenes in British romantic comedy.
Richard Curtis’s multi-strand Christmas film follows eight different love stories around London in the weeks before Christmas. The ensemble includes Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley and Andrew Lincoln, Liam Neeson and Thomas Brodie-Sangster. £246m worldwide.