If Hugh Grant was a woman he'd be branded a 'feckless slut'

THE revelation that Hugh Grant went from being a childless bachelor to a father of three (while remaining a bachelor) in just 15 months, has sent the tabloids into a frenzy.

The latest addition to the 53-year-old actor's brood is a boy, whose mother is Swedish TV executive Anna Eberstein. He was born in September, 2012 - just three months before the mother of Grant's first child, Tinglan Hong, gave birth to Felix, their second baby.

Writing in the Daily Mirror, Alison Phillips says the 53-year-old actor has "taken to collecting love children the way young boys collect football cards". The only difference, writes Phillips, is that boys pursue their hobby with more "commitment" and "maturity".

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The fact that Grant "appears" not to be living with either Eberstein or Hong infuriates Phillips. If a woman was "knocking out children in such circumstances" she would be roundly attacked as being a "feckless slut – and worse", she writes.

Adds Phillips: "This isn't three weddings and a funeral, more like three kids and no wedding."

The Sun's Jane Moore is a little more sympathetic towards Grant, but only a little. The actor has described the birth of his children as "life changing", Moore says, yet "not so life-changing that he has given up his bachelor status in favour of domestic bliss (or drudgery, depending on your outlook) with either of his baby-mothers".

"No. Hugh's life, it seems, is still just as fast-paced as it was before the births of Tabitha, two, Felix, one, and his unnamed 16-month old son with Anna."

Dismissing Grant as a "man-boy", Moore says he has created for himself the best of both worlds - "the freedom of being a single man combined with a family life he can drop in to when it suits him".

Grant is certainly witty and charismatic, admits the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine. It should come as no surprise that no surprise "to find that London is littered with his offspring".

But the fact that the actor was sleeping with "at least one other woman" – ie Eberstein - when Felix was conceived, underlines his "reluctance to be a father in any traditional sense of the word," Vine writes.

She adds: "He [Grant] clearly has little or no respect for the women involved. Even by modern standards, getting two women knocked up simultaneously is appalling behaviour."