Elizabeth Hurley launched The Inheritance, Channel 4’s game of wills in which she plays a benefactor summoning thirteen strangers to her stately home, at The Ned.
Channel 4 premiered The Inheritance, its competition series built around a fortune and a will, at The Ned in the City of London on Wednesday 6 August 2025. Elizabeth Hurley, its star, led the carpet.
Hurley was born in Basingstoke in 1965 and studied dance and theatre at the London Studio Centre before her first film, Aria, in 1987.
In 1994 she accompanied Hugh Grant to the London premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral in a black Versace dress held together with gold safety pins. The picture made her famous overnight, and the dress is now held by the Metropolitan Museum. Austin Powers and Bedazzled followed.
In The Inheritance she plays The Deceased, a benefactor who summons thirteen strangers to her country house to compete for her fortune. Robert Rinder, the television judge, is her executor. Players are cut from the will one by one until a Prime Beneficiary emerges.
The series returned her to British television in the year she marked thirty years with Estée Lauder’s breast cancer campaign.
Billy Ray Cyrus, the country singer whose relationship with Hurley became public at Easter that year, walked the carpet at her side.