UK Vogue Magazine – 1995

He staggered between his last drink and his next cigarette in the cult film Withnail & I; was slave to a vociferous boil in How To Get Ahead in Advertising; nursed a ruinous morphine addiction as Dr Seward in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and cavorted in thigh-high (if not higher) stacked leather boots as the bisexual designer in Altman’s skit on the fashion world, Pret-a-Porter. Even by cinematic standards, Richard E Grant’s rollcall of dissolute characters is of quite epic proportions.

And this from the man who never touches alcohol (“I’m allergic,” he explains), who thinks smoking to be insane (“My father was killed by cigarettes at the age of 51, so it’s understandable”) and who steers clear of meat, eggs and milk (“I’m not a crank”, he assures while deliberating on an apt description of his diet for which he considers Mediterranean/Thai most fitting). Hot drinks, too, are on the Grant list of no-goes: “It comes from growing up in a hot country (Swaziland),” he thinks. Which would explain the Grant family fridge bursting with bottles of Evian. “It’s cold,” he enthuses. “I love water, I drink gallons of it. Of course, it has to be Evian – the elixir.” This is a subject upon which Grant is unusually fond of waxing lyrical. “I love anything to do with water – I love drinking it, scuba-diving in it, sitting in it.” And exercising? “Yes, swimming. Swimming in water.”

This temperate, Evian-consuming version of Richard E Grant would appear to have some empathy with the title role in his current film, Jack and Sarah. “Jack’s not a psychopathic alcoholic, if that’s what you mean. The film deals with death, grief and loss, falling in love again, those life changing experiences of which I’ve had my fair share. Jack is a father so he’s like me in that respect… I don’t drive a Volvo though.”

Off-screen, Grant is father to six-year-old Olivia, and husband to Joan Washington, a top dialect coach. They live in southwest London although much of Grant’s work has him Hollywood bound. “I haven’t got the mental strength to live there,” he concedes. “There’s a desperado element to being out of work in Hollywood. You’re treated like a leper. In England, there’s some sort of status which goes with ‘resting’” – a pursuit which Grant has not had much experience of lately. He’s just finished work on Dennis Potter’s Karaoke in which he plays a “neurotic film director”. Awaiting print is a compilation of his journals entitled With Nails which chronicles work with movie moguls including Scorsese, Coppola and Altman, and shooting will shortly begin on Promised Land, a film which explores post-election South Africa. So it would seem there’s no ‘rest’ for the wicked or the abstemious.