William Thacker (Hugh Grant) is a travel-book shopowner in London's trendy Notting Hill whose life is transformed through a chance encounter with film star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts). Against all-odds, they start to get something going until William is heartbroken when her on-off boyfriend (Alec Baldwin) shows up at her hotel and he is shown the door. Things get even worse when he is dumped a second-time after his lodger Spike (Rhys Ifans) leaks their story to the press. Life with a film-star is not all its cracked up to be then. Will he allow her a third chance to get it right?

William is invited to the set of Anna's latest movie (she has taken his advice and is shooting a period piece), but he overhears her telling another actor that he doesn't mean anything to her.
  Back at the shop, she turns up and asks for another chance. He dismisses her out of hand as his heart couldn't survive another breakup. She leaves him an original painting of a print he has up on the wall of his apartment.
  He asks his friends his advice, and Spike is the only one to tell him he made the wrong decision.

They jump in a car and race around London to find her - finally ending up in a hotel conference room where she is giving a final press interview before leaving the country. Thacker asks her a question, that if he was to ask for forgiveness would she change her mind?
  An earlier journalist asks his question again - about is she planning on staying in the UK -- she looks to William for a prompt, then says "indefinitely".

They get married, and buy one of the houses with the enclosed communal garden space they trespassed into earlier. It ends with William sitting on the bench they found romantic, reading a book, hand-in-hand with a pregnant Anna, both blissfully happy and content.