With Nails: Booklist Review
Booklist, 15th May, 1998
Film fans alert to the immense charm of the under-known British film Withnail & I will certainly enjoy the droll autobiography of the actor who played Withnail. The film - " bittersweet, sweet and sour, like King Curtis’ definitive sax version of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’" says its writer-director - tells the story of poverty-stricken drama school refugees in mid-1960s England.
Of the film’s script, Grant says "never before or since have I read something that conveys what goes on in my head so accurately."
The image of the brusque, hilariously overbearing Withnail fits Grant, who has also appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence, and the Robert Altman films The Player and Pret-a-Porter. He writes of his passage through the world of the aspiring film stardom wonderfully well, producing a book far superior to the usual movie life story. "Oh up and down and forklifts, this is a dull madness," he says of the process of landing a role, but his book wittily presenting the madness is never dull.
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.
