The Sydney Morning Herald – 11th November, 2000

By Peter Gotting

Richard E. Grant’s career has very much been Withnail and I.

His character, Withnail, in the 1987 cult film, is still with him. It still defines him as an actor.

“If you play somebody that’s so distinctive as that drug-addicted oddball, I suppose you do get drafted into that area,” he says. “People who are not obviously conventional.”

But he has never played another unemployed, alcoholic actor. Grant, 43, has instead appeared in large commercial films such as the “huge, mega-box office bomb” Hudson Hawk and the Spice Girls movie Spice World.

And he’s just finished filming the Australian family film Hildegarde, shot on the Gold Coast. It is about three children who chase the abductors of their pet duck. Grant plays the “Pom villain”.

The film is not so much in the tradition of Babe, he says, as the animals do not talk: “They quack and do all the things animals do.”

He chooses his varied roles, he says, on the basis of the script and the people involved. And by what his daughter, Olivia, wants.

“My main attraction to doing [Hildegarde] was to come to Australia, and be paid to do so, and that I have an 11-year-old daughter.”

It’s the same reason he played the Spice Girls’ manager in Spice World. “She said if there’s any film you are going to be in, you have to be in this Spice Girls film. Nobody had delusions we were making some great masterpiece of art. It was just in the vein of all those pop-schlop movies that mostly came out of the Monkees and the Beatles and Cliff Richard in the ’60s.”

Born Richard Grant Esterhuysen in Mbabane, Swaziland, Grant moved to London in 1982, where he spent five years unemployed before his big break with Withnail and I. Since then he has appeared in films such as Henry and June, The Player, Prêt-á-Porter and the BBC adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

It is understandable his daughter influences his career decisions. In 1986, his first daughter, Tiffany, was born two months premature and died within an hour, the horror of which is detailed in his memoirs and film diaries, With Nails. Olivia was born one month premature after his wife, Joan, spent three months in hospital.

Another influential figure in his life is his father, Henrik, who was the Swazi minister for education. He died just before Grant moved to London. On both wrists Grant wears a watch, one of which belonged to his father and is set to Swaziland time.

His next project is his own film, Wah Wah, which he wrote and will direct next year. Set in Africa at the end of the ’60s, “it’s basically my father’s story”, he says.