The Telegraph – Monday 24th October, 2005

Richard E Grant, back with a play and an autobiographical film, is as acerbic as ever. Sheila Johnston meets him

LEFT: Richard E Grant: ‘writing does wonders for your self-esteem’

Richard E Grant still talks darkly about a period in 1985 when he was unemployed for a full nine months.

“When you’ve been around as long as I have, it sounds disingenuous to say you’re anxious about work, and I’m not here to sing the blues about it,” he says. “But that left a great big mark on me.”

At the moment Grant is hardly under-employed; in fact, it’s rather difficult to avoid him. His are the honeyed tones of the villain in Tim Burton’s animated fairytale Corpse Bride.

He’s just finished Above and Beyond, a “gung-ho” TV mini-series about flying Hurricane bombers across the North Atlantic in the winter of 1940. Wah-Wah, his debut as a writer-director, opens early next year. And he’s presently starring in Simon Gray’s comedy Otherwise Engaged, which arrives in the West End next week.

Grant makes what will be his first stage appearance in 12 years, as a complacent publisher whose epic self-absorption is gradually deflated by a stream of intrusive visits. “He starts out apparently happy and successful and he feels he’s involved with other people,” the actor says. “But he’s spiritually wanting, and he discovers it too late and at great personal cost. Within the space of a day, his life collapses around him.”

Alan Bates played the role in the original 1975 production. Grant has created a far more dislikeable, self-serving character. Or perhaps it’s just that the intervening 30 years have eroded our sympathy for the Oxbridge elite around which the story revolves.

“I don’t think there’s much difference today,” Grant demurs. “The class system is as out there in all its hieroglyphic detail as it ever was and it’s the source of all the comedy and tragedy in English life.”

Grant was born in Swaziland in 1957, where he lived until 1982, and sometimes refers to himself as Swazi Boy, or, in his more swaggering moments, The Swaz. He’s tall – 6ft 2in – with an elegant, ectomorphic frame, appraising, pale-blue eyes and a deliberate way with words.

These he employed to great effect in his fabulously gossipy film diaries, which were published to acclaim in 1996. His conversation, like them, is speckled with mentions of celebrities without it somehow ever seeming like name-dropping.

One could easily imagine adapting the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” parlour game for Grant, who, over his 30-year career, seems to have met or worked with everyone who’s anyone in showbusiness: his three films with Robert Altman – a director famed for his ensemble casts – are enough in themselves to set up a huge web of connections. Yet he remains indelibly linked in the popular imagination with his first big-screen role, as the brilliantly corrosive, alcoholic wannabe actor in Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy Withnail and I.

Grant displays no signs of resentment. “To begrudge that seems to me bonkers, even if some people can never quite forgive you for not playing that part for the rest of your life – or for not being that person. But I so enjoyed doing the film and I still remember the dialogue.”

He’s not alone: at previews of Otherwise Engaged in Bath and Oxford, towns with large student populations, youths as yet unborn when Withnail came out in 1987 would buttonhole him in the street to announce that their tongue was wearing a yellow sock or to call for “the finest wines available to humanity”.

LEFT: Iconic role : Richard E Grant in Withnail & I

Grant’s diaries offered many acerbic observations on his adventures in the screen trade. While he has no plans to write about the theatre, he is equally trenchant about that world.

“There’s a fair amount of sentimental hogwash: that whole sepia-soaked notion of the great days of rep and touring and landladies. And it’s easy to become self-important – actors talk preposterous nonsense about playing King Lear being like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on a nightly basis.

“What I like about film is the industrial element. Bottom line is, you’re there to entertain people, and that aspect of lah-di-dah, going-up-your-own-fundament is missing.”

Grant saw all this from the other side while directing Wah-Wah. It is his openly autobiographical account of a childhood stamped by three factors: Africa, the last hurrah of colonial culture and the end of his parents’ painfully unhappy marriage.

Since actresses of a certain age are always harping on about the dearth of good parts, he had anticipated no trouble casting the key role of his American stepmother.

“No one showed any interest whatsoever. I was an untested quantity, but I think the notion of going to Africa for a film whose entire budget was £4 million never made it past the radar of the agents, never mind the ladies in their Beverly Hills mansions.”

Emily Watson took the role, but Grant has no hesitation in naming the Rodeo Drive refuseniks: Meg Ryan, Geena Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Was making Wah-Wah therapeutic?

“In the writing, yes. If you fictionalise your own life, it’s an extraordinary opportunity to look at it under a magnifying glass and see who you are. But, once actual production starts, you’re asked two thousand questions a day and it’s all very practical.”

Wah-Wah took five years to make (a diary of that will be published next year), but he is sufficiently undaunted to be considering adapting his novel, By Design, still feel like Swazi Boy who’s come to London to find my fortunefor the screen.

“I felt a sense of achievement with Wah-Wah beyond anything I’ve ever done,” he says. “As an actor you are always a hired hand, but writing does wonders for your self-esteem.”

And he adds, in a very credible tone of incredulity, “Even though I’m 48, at the back of my mind, I. I’m still surprised at the stuff that has happened to me.”

‘Otherwise Engaged’ opens at the Criterion (0870 060 2313) next Monday.