UK Time Out Magazine – 8th May, 1996

By Steve Grant

Photography by Gavin Evans

Richard E Grant hasn’t looked back since he landed the part of an out-of-work, alcoholic actor in “Withnail & I” – until now, that is. His new book, “With Nails”, records his frank feelings about the parts he won and the stars he worked with in the decade since that cult classic. I’ve always divided waiters into two categories: those who would piss in the soup and those who wouldn’t. Judging by his performance in “Withnail & I”, Bruce Robinson’s cult classic and the only film to celebrate and capture the happy chaos of the very late ‘60s, I would have had Richard E Grant down as one of the former. It’s a judgment not made easier by the knowledge that Grant did a stint as a table-hop in the early ‘80s when he arrived from his colonial home in Swaziland without a contact in the world. It was in Tuttons, a Covent Garden eatery then popular with Time Out staff. As it turns out, Grant says that he was one of the most highly prized of the expat pack: ‘I didn’t drink, I didn’t steal, and I was never late.’ In fact, after an hour or so in his company, it’s obvious that Grant is as likely to snarl at the customers or jerk off into the yogurt dip as Demi Moore is to take you ‘out the back’ at Planet Hollywood.

Grant’s film diaries, “With Nails”, are due out this month after Picador won a phone-bidding deal. Beginning at the time of “Withnail & I” and taking in films like the disastrous “Hudson Hawk”, the model-strewn “Pret-a-Porter” and the ambitious “Henry & June”, Grant’s diaries are a people-packed guide to the process of film-making, although both editors and lawyers have cut down the original 200,000 words by half.

He’s been keeping busy; he was recording a rap version of “Hamlet” when I caught up with him, and as well as appearing in Dennis Potter’s “Karaoke” he’s just finished in the Jane Campion film of Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” and the Trevor Nunn’s cinema version of “Twelfth Night”, in which he plays Malvolio. It’s a truism, but one which Grant reiterates in print, that ‘almost without exception, every part I’ve been offered would result from me playing an out-of-work alcoholic actor’. These offers have included work with directors of the caliber of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and Philip Kaufman, but Grant is unhesitating when asked who is his favourite: ‘Jane Campion, the most awesome 360-degree intellectual I’ve ever worked with, someone who takes film-making to the absolute limits, every day and with every shot.’

The actor ruefully quotes Alan Bennett’s remark that any kind of writing is an act of betrayal. He’s not talking about the showbiz stuff now, which is never really spiteful or sensational, but about genuinely painful moments in his personal life, the daughter who died shortly after being born, of the premature and painful death of his father from lung cancer. Grant’s luck in getting the part of Withnail is legendary: Daniel Day Lewis turned it down, something Grant was able to thank him for when they worked together on “The Age of Innocence”; Kenneth Branagh and Tim Roth, among others, were up for it, and Robinson was only convinced about the unknown and skinny Grant when the actor gave a perfect delivery of two words: ‘Fork it!’

Now “Withnail” has a shelf-life of its own, recently re-released both in the cinema and on video, and a key film in the development of people who were as young as eight when it was released in 1986. Grant’s even spoken on the subject at Eton and the Oxford Union. He seems genuinely perplexed by how the two experiences, the loss of the baby and the gaining of the part that was to make him, happened almost concurrently. His reaction to the latter is thus: ‘Right now, I could happily convert to Catholicism, the Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, Jehovah’s Witnoids, you choose the denomination – I am obeisant. I have a bone-deep conviction that this is the BREAK. I suspect this sure, centered sense of something happens rarely and some part of me is grateful that I am conscious of it now.’

But the description of the death of the child who, he politely corrects me, is not stillborn, but lived for half an hour, is devastating: ‘She is handed to my stricken wife first, and had I all the powers of Mars and miracles I would give this child life. And I don’t know for how long, my baby is put in my arms. Hand. For she is the size of a little bird. She is warm but dead. And PERFECT. Ten toes, ten fingers. Eyes, mouth, all. Broken. No breath. Our hearts are broken and will we ever cease weeping.’

Grant can’t way to this day whether one experience helped the other, one of the awful moral realities that actors have to deal with: he certainly didn’t need any help with the tearful last scene in which he quotes Hamlet as Paul McGann’s ‘I’ goes off to fame and the ‘70s. It’s one of the many ironies of the film that Grant is an avowed anti-smoker, especially after what cigarettes did to his father, and someone who physically can’t tolerate drink in large quantities. When he drank lighter fuel, Robinson conned him by filling the can with a particularly foul brand of vinegar. It was part revenge because all the avowed chain-smokers among the crew were gagging on Grant’s honey-flavoured herbal smokes! He sometimes makes apologetic remarks about his cosy ‘middle-class’ existence, his 13-year relationship with Joan and his doting love for his young daughter Olivia, as well as his abstemiousness. But dull he certainly ain’t’: what Grant does possess is obvious domestic happiness, carefully practiced char, and good manners, the latter being one of the things that his father instilled in him. ‘He told me that life would be easier if I developed a belief in good manners, a consideration for others, and it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had.’

He says that his parents’ break-up affected him tremendously. Didn’t he get constant come-ons from women, or indeed, from men? ‘Well, I think that children who come from broken homes get affected in different ways. They either become rampantly promiscuous or innately monogamous, and I’ve always been in the latter category; I’ve always had long relationships with the one person. I’m also a terrible liar, so I find it hard to take flirtation beyond the chat-up level, and of course as I spend almost all my non-working life with my wife and/or my daughter I tend rather to avoid temptation. They really are the focus of my life. But, that said, tomorrow she could get up and leave me for a bullfighter’ What would he do then? ‘I’d probably end up stabbing both of them.’

Grant describes himself as ‘the stalker of his own life’ and is certainly a fine conversationalist; when I ask him whether he can avoid being over-protective about his daughter, who will be an only child because Grant and Joan dread the problems of sibling rivalry, he comes out with the elegant: ‘Between the theory and the practice falls the shadow.’ His book will no doubt intrigue, and is full of good-nature stories about the likes of Madonna, Uma Thurman (‘as potent a delight as my first every sighting of Monroe’), Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman and Hugh Grant, whose ‘Weddings’-style comic banter is cleverly recreated. He admits to finding Hugh’s recent spot of blow-job other ‘hilarious and no surprise to those who know him well’. Because he’s accident prone? ‘No, because he’s lecherous. Anyway, it’s completely relaunched his career.’

So far, he says, only Barbara Hershey has told him to keep any remarks she makes to him in future ‘off the record’, nor is there too much danger that he won’t work again. He says that writing has come naturally since his adolescence: ‘As I grew up in the colonies I had to face the fact that any friendships I had would be finished as soon as that person’s family were transferred elsewhere, so I developed the habit of writing long letters as compensation.’

If ‘With Nails’ confirms anything, it’s that acting is primarily a matter of good writing, but that it’s often pot luck as to whether a film will be a smash hit or a turkey. Grant says that even though he is often “Withnailed’ in the street by people screaming out ‘scrubbers’, he has also been followed about by groups of people who think that the fiasco, ‘Hudson Hawk’, was a masterpiece! ‘I met Lily Savage at a function the other night and he said that “Killing Dad” was one of his favourite films and he played it over and over again. I mean, God, can you believe it!? I think you can never tell how something will seem after it’s been intercepted by all those antennae out there.’