I N the late 1970s, a teenage actor called 'Hughie' Grant moved to Nottingham to work at the Playhouse theatre for a year and thereby earn his Equity card. His arrival coincided with the renting out a room in his family's Park Terrace home by Dr Richard Godwin-Austen, a consultant neurologist in Nottingham. Hughie, then just 18, was the family's first lodger.

The physician landlord's memories of the time include amusing new anecdotes about the actor, who went on to be known as Hugh and find worldwide fame in 1994's Four Wedding and a Funeral.

"Hughie had a motor scooter but found that it was not [powerful] enough to get him up the motorway to visit his girlfriend in Leeds – a distance of 60 miles. So Hughie developed his strategy of riding his scooter to the motorway, hiding it in some bushes near to the exit, and then thumbing a lift to Leeds," remembers Dr Godwin-Austen, 72, in his unmissable new autobiography Seizing Opportunities: The reminiscences of a physician.

"The plan worked well for several weeks but then the inevitable happened. One Sunday evening Hughie was very late and we began to get worried.

"When he finally returned he had walked the five miles from the exit because his scooter had gone and was never seen again. However, he persuaded his girlfriend to move to Nottingham."

Dr Godwin-Austen, who now lives in Westgate, Southwell, told the Post: "I don't remember Hughie's girlfriend's name, but I think it was before Liz Hurley's time."

His overriding memories are of a "really naive" young man, whose accommodation was arranged by his mother, Fynvola Grant, and who "needed a bit of looking after".

"He was a very, very nice person," said Dr Godwin-Austen, who then lived with his first wife Jane – later to die in 1996 as the result of a car accident – and their two children, Jonathan and Alice.

Described by his late wife as "a shy and reticent son, who was extremely good-looking, who never spoke a word", Grant, a descendant of Heneage Finch, 1st Earl of Nottingham (1621-1682), appeared in Lady Windermere's Fan, Hamlet and Coriolanus at the Playhouse under famous stage director Richard Digby Day.

Dr Godwin-Austen's brush with celebrity is just one fascinating element of an extraordinary life. The eminent physician was born in 1935 and brought up in Cyprus and South Africa.

He qualified in medicine at St Thomas's – the famous London hospital where Florence Nightingale set up a nursing school – and received his specialist training as a neurologist at the National Hospitals for Neurology in London. He was appointed consultant neurologist in 1970 to the Nottingham, Derby and South Lincolnshire hospitals.

In 1976, Dr Godwin-Austen worked in Baghdad for three months, teaching young doctors.

"I was in Iraq at a time when Saddam Hussein had established dominance by executing the opposition, often by his own hand".

A chance encounter with an American couple at an archeological site led to Dr Godwin-Austen and his visiting wife being arrested as "Zionist spies" and it was only through an Iraqi friend they were released.

The author's great-uncle was the Victorian explorer and cartographer Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, who discovered the world's second highest mountain K2 while surveying the Karakoram range in 1867.

And the author's father was Robert Annesley Godwin-Austen, a distinguished surveyor in the Colonial Service.

But the book is more than a family history and tale of a successful medical career.

Dr Godwin-Austen was High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1995.

He restored Papplewick Hall, which had stood empty for three years, and in 1987 he and his wife hosted a fancy dress ball in 18th century costume to celebrate its bicentenary.

Tragedy struck in 1996, when Jane died from injuries sustained in a car crash on the Oxton by-pass near Papplewick.

Dr Godwin-Austen, who was driving the car when it was struck by an oncoming vehicle overtaking other traffic, describes his "waves of infinite grief".

After his own injuries healed, Dr Godwin-Austen returned to work and soon afterwards was elected President of the Association of British Neurologists.

He retired as an NHS consultant in 1997 and in the same year married Sally, whom he had first met more than 40 years before.

"For Sally to come back into my life was nothing short of a miracle," he says.

He has written his memoirs for his grandchildren, of whom he says: "[They] are all very small and their perception of me is as an old, old man who doesn't have much relevance to them. I thought it would be nice to have something put down about me and my ancestors"

Seizing Opportunities – the reminiscences of a physician by Richard Godwin-Austin is published by The Memoir Club. It is available at £19.50 from The Courtyard, Aryanna ebusiness Centre, Arya House, Langley Park, Durham DH7 9XE or e-mail memoirclub@email.msn.com

K2, the world's second highest mountain, was unclimbed until 1954, nearly a century after Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen first discovered it.

A man of enormous energy and a wide range of skills, he showed a talent for map making while at Sandhurst Military College.

A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was appointed to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and a completed a survey of the Karakoram range in 1867.

This was a prodigious task, mostly carried out at about 18,000ft.

K2 earned its name because it was the second peak in his surveying log.

The mountain had been seen before but never surveyed.

What made Haversham's feat all the more remarkable is that it was achieved before Alpine mountaineering techniques and equipment were available.

Accompanied by a small team of Sherpas and using a mahogany and brass theodolite he produced measurements so accurate that they were within a few feet of the precise altitude figure confirmed a century or so later by satellite.