Australian HQ Magazine – 1998

By Colin Hughes

In Hollywood, Richard E. Grant has been doing more than making it as a fine actor. With a pencil as sharp as his wit, he’s been taking notes for a scathing satire on megastardom.

Richard E. Grant’s about-to-be published first novel is about celebrity. As he says, “best to write about what you know.” In it, a Hollywood star describes the four faces celebrity wears. There’s the screen face, the “many metre high-rise version” that appears on billboards; the supermarket face (“daren’t look miserable in case you’re spotted”)’ the recognize-me-but-I’m-normal-too face (which is “carefully controlled easygoing”); and a “homey” face, reserved for nearest and dearest (also a put-on, because you have to pretend to be happy and confident when your mum asks where your next job is coming from). The character then admits to a fifth, the “naked-panic” face, reserved for the bathroom mirror and lovers only.

When Grant showed the passage in draft to his wife, Joan Washington, a voice trainer, she laughed out loud. She knows how true it is. It’s that multitude of masks that casts a doubt on whatever actors say about themselves. We don’t trust them to be what they project. Yet we also know that actors have ordinary doubts and fears and privacies. In Grant’s case it’s doubly odd, because when he writes about actors pretending to be what they aren’t, we also know that he is one (and a good one, at that). Where does the truth lie?

Grant delights in the paradox. Indeed, he revels in the surreal interplay between what is deeply felt and easily pretended. What a game, you see him thinking; but a game he plays very seriously, because all the time he’s performing or telling tales he’s also exploiting the rich source of his own emotional experience.

Here’s a man who came from nowhere to be the overnight star of Withnail & I (so utterly identified with the character that people think he is Withnail), who went on to make a string of big films with great directors (Altman, Scorsese, Coppola), who counts superstars among his best friends, publishes his hilariously perceptive diaries to wide acclaim, writes a (not at all bad) novel, and aspires to direct his own screenplay at the earliest opportunity. No wonder he gets nicknames like Outrageous (from Gary Oldman) or Relentless (from Steve Martin).

Nor is it any wonder that people so often want to shout, “Stand up, the real Richard E. Grant!” – but they’re missing the point. The real Grant is already standing up over there, cocking his high forehead to one side, watching you from behind that charming, slightly agonized smile. You get to see the bits he’s chosen to show, in the way he decides.

The narrator-protagonist of Grant’s new novel, By Design, grows up on a comfortable English household in a small African state. Wanting urgently to escape its sleazy pretension he contrives a new life for himself in Los Angeles designing homes for megastars. The character chronicles the screen monsters he encounters in a maniacal satire that is Grant’s natural mode but also keeps his private life literally hidden from view, behind a wall that looks like a garden hedge. He relishes a role in the in the Hollywood madness but a part of him is always observing, uninvolved.

This is so obviously a tilted self-description that is reads like a joke at Grant’s own expense. He grew up in Swaziland, a beautiful tiny country on the eastern edge of South Africa. One of the last imperial outposts, Swaziland was granted independence at the end of the 60s, by which time it had filled up with white-mischief refugees – colonials escaping from other formerly Brit territories who couldn’t bear who couldn’t bear to go “home” to Sussex and Surrey.

Bruce Robinson, who chose him to play Withnail, says: “I couldn’t believe Grant was an African – he seemed a Bournemouthian – but I guess it was a residual of this ‘superior’ albeit loathsome imperialism in his blood that created his brilliant Withnail. I’m sure Africa was full of swine like Withnail in the late 19th century. Arrogant and useless white trash, loud as yobs, except educated.”

Grant says that he feels “ambivalent” about his homeland now. He talks about the analogies between the film industry and colonial Swazi society: how it had a strict hierarchical pecking order, but that “people invented themselves, everybody seemed to be a character of some sort”. He admits that: “I found all the intrigue and the gossip and the shenanigans that went on endlessly fascinating. What I loathed was that my own life ended up being the subject of a major scandal when my parents divorced.” He was 11 when his mother, out of the blue, woke him up one morning to say she was leaving and not coming back. She was having an affair with a mining engineer and ran off to Johannesburg. Grant’s father was wrecked, and the boy found himself almost having to “parent my own parent”.

He acknowledges that his mother’s sudden departure was painful, “but it’s a long time ago, I don’t think about it on a daily basis at all”. The he adds so briskly that he’s obviously deflecting any further questions: “No, the death of my father is far more a touchstone, a guide, an ‘if only’. I’m the same age now as he was when he got OBE’d and the country got independence and he divorced.”

The family lived in a smart house (three servants indoors, three out) overlooking Ezulweni, which means Valley of Heaven. Grant’s father, Henrik, was the Swazi minister of education, so popular with the black population that the new government kept him on in the job post-independence. But he was a heavy smoker, fell ill with cancer of the lung which spread to his brain, and died at 51.

Grant says his greatest regret is the feeling of “helplessness when somebody is suffering and dying and there’s nothing you can do”. In the diaries he reports that his reaction to seeing the first rushes of Withnail was wanting “to weep that my father is not alive to see this”.

He seems accepting of his mother now (she split up with the mining engineer but wed another man later on) but the relationship with his younger brother, Stuart, is far more prickly. When Grant scored fame, the News of the World carried a breathtakingly bitter interview with Stuart, by then an accountant in Johannesburg, which sniped at his older brother for putting on airs and graces – “Richard was more like an estranged sister to me than a brother.” Stuart also accused Richard of swanning into their father’s funeral in 1981, hair carelessly dyed orange, after having absented himself during the illness. That was the last time they met – and they didn’t speak to each other then.

“I’ve had no contact with him, and never did before,” Grant says about the interview. “It’s something that came out, like a pustule, and disappeared again. I’ve been asked: ‘Is there some feud? When did you fall out? I mean, I never fell in, in order to fall out. There was just never any common ground.”

What is clear is that the young Richard showed every sign of wanting to escape – literally, in the sense of getting away from his country, his people, his background – but also metaphorically, into another more glamorous and beguiling world, initially in his own head but later on the stage, on the screen and in his own stories.

Grant leads a disciplined life. He eats ultra-healthily (no coffee, no tea, no dairy products, no alcohol) because he wants to live to 120. To write the novel he set aside five months, started each day at 9 am, broke for an hour for lunch, finished at 7 pm, five days a week till he got it done.

That kind of dedication is all of a piece with his obsessive diary writing. It’s not unusual for children to keep a diary where they can play out the universal miseries of teendom, but few keep up the scribbling into adulthood, conducting a daily conversation with themselves as Grant has done. He also has a “memory room” at his home, where he stores all the precious memorabilia of his life.

At Waterford, the liberal boarding school he attended in southern Africa, “he was one of those boys who was liked but who was definitely on the dork side,” recalls a former classmate, Maryann Cullinan. “Richard was very quiet at first, never very pushy, and then he became lively and bubbly and expressed that personality.”

It was drama that brought about the change in him. Stephen Jennings, now an actor in Johannesburg, was year behind Grant in Waterford. He recalls him doing an improvised skit at school, in which Grant played an author sitting at his typewriter tapping out a kind of “on a dark and stormy night” story. Jennings played an intruder, acting out the story as Grant typed it out loud. “The audience laughed but I don’t think they knew what improvisation was. He didn’t care, he’d tried something new. I have a photo of the skit and the character is him – thin, erect, masculine but elegant, manic but ‘clean’, with a wild energy that comes out not blindly, but smooth and focused.”

Grant himself recalls being captivated by film goddesses (he worships Barbara Streisand, a passion formed at the Swaziland Cinelux). And he vividly remembers the eye-popping experience of seeing Hair and Oliver on a visit to London with his father and stepmother in 1969: “I preferred Oliver,” he says.

His theatrical ambitions burst into full flower while he was at the University of Cape Town. In his diaries, he reports a conversation in a plane with Joel Silver, producer of Hudson Hawk, who asks what drove him to act. Grant replies: “Revenge! To prove to all those little fuckers who said, ‘You can’t, you’ll never make it,’ that I could.”

In his second year at University, Grant helped set up the Troupe Theatre Company, a touring group producing avant-garde and left-wing theatre that resonated amount anti-establishment audiences. Says Sean Taylor, another member of the group who is now acting in Johannesburg: “We were incredibly full of ourselves. But we also did some very exciting theatre.”

Despite the avant-garde credentials, Grant was never particularly political – a bit leftie, anti-apartheid of course, but not an activist. Now he says he finds it hard returning to South Africa but is wary of explaining why for fear that he will offend people: “I just think economic apartheid has replaced the other kind. I don’t know that people have really changed….” he starts to trail off and then adds: “Whites are congratulating themselves on aiding and abetting the change, but you know that the majority, well, it’s not really what they’d like to have!”

There is a faint suspicion among his Swazi and South African acquaintances that Grant is a little embarrassed about his South African connection: they notice how he evades questions about his university days in interviews. Certainly his friends all knew he would “go to Europe” once he’d completed his studies. His father’s death removed any lingering reason to remain.

For the first five years he languished in London, struggling to get work (money was not a big problem: he inherited a considerable sum). Any actor who has read the opening sequence of his diaries can recognize the years of waiting for the break, one or two parts, a bit of Regent’s Park open air, always seeming to be busy, striving to jack up confidence.

Grant believed in himself, and he knew the break when it came. He had made a small award-winning film for TV about advertising, called Honest, Decent and True. That led to his audition for Withnail & I with Bruce Robinson, who describes Grant as having “ a kind of bitter charm that I was instantly attracted to – at his first audition he read it all wrong, except ‘Fork it!’ (referring to some filthy egg). He said it with such accurate passion, such loathing, while simultaneously lobbing his script at me, that I knew I had a Withnail.”

Withnail & I brought stardom. Hollywood, and a life divided between tortuous weeks on film sets and domestic idyll in London. Why was the film such a success? Seeing it now, a dozen years on, you’re struck by how easily it could have been dismissed as dated juvenilia. It works, still, partly because of the film’s memorable lines and images, and partly because of Grant’s gripping, manic intensity. Robinson says:

“Richard is a brilliant actor, although I don’t think he could play, or I could direct Withnail now – we know too much, and it would bugger us. When we made the film we were innocent. He had no idea what he looked like on screen, and I had virtually no idea how to get him there. Because we didn’t know the rules, we took risks.”

He could have vanished into obscurity, typecast forever. In fact he has been staggeringly successful, performing a much wider range of roles than people are inclined to realize. Directors mined his capacity for playing crazies – from the demented script-writer in The Player through to the megalomaniac in Hudson Hawk (a film he hates to be reminded of), and the Spice Girls’ frenetic manager in Spiceworld. But his talent is broader than that – Henry and June, Dracula, Pret-a-Porter, Age of Innocence. As Robinson says: “Don’t let that fey, shrivelled little wallflower of an ego fool you. He is enormously talented and he knows it! He can act, he can write, he can play the fucking flute. And he costs less than Burt Reynolds!”

For a 12-year film career, the list of credits is impressive. In fact, you get a distinct impression that Grant decided never to turn down a plausible part. He would, though, turn down theatre. Although he went back to the stage briefly after Withnail it was a painful experience that he clearly never wants to repeat. He performed opposite Dame Maggie Smith in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Gossip says the Dame froze him out, but he won’t discuss it – just goes silent for a long while, as if reluctant to utter a word. “It was a very unhappy production,” he finally says. Then another long pause. “Dame Maggie Smith was very unhappy in it.” Like many confirmed screen actors he finds the grind of night-after-night theatre performance “absolutely brain-damaging” and sees no puristic virtue in working the boards.

So, loads of success, no superstardom. And he seems to prefer it that way, choosing his famous friends rather obviously among the ranks of self-deprecating skeptics and scathing wits, rather than the grand and glossy: Steve Martin, Gary Oldman, Sandra Bernhard, Hugh Grant (absolutely no relation). He finds the megastars “riveting” to be among. But he says the monsters he portrays in his new novel aren’t a patch on the real thing: “Oh they’re much more monstrous than that in real life.” Nevertheless, he portrays them sympathetically. “I defy anybody not to have their head turned by megastardom,” he says, “because it is a completely abnormal existence. You live a life of extreme fantasy, you’re wonderful, you’re paid millions, everyone thinks you’re beautiful, brilliant, everyone’s gagging to hear your every word, capture your every expression, and then the next day you learn you’re ugly, you speak all wrong, you’re not talented after all, your last three movies were shit, and you’re gone. It’s so fast and ruthless.”

This is what the book is all about, but it’s also, very plainly, Grant’s own experience of one minute being adored, and the next being slated or scorned.

This year, just before shooting off to his house in Provence for a month’s break with the family, he took his daughter to Legoland. Suddenly he noticed a gang of kids pointing and laughing at him – “Laughing??!?” he says, genuinely annoyed and offended. “I mean, that doesn’t happen to you does it, complete strangers pointing at you and laughing?” Why were they laughing? “Oh I don’t know” he grumps, “I don’t know.”

He once wrote that his greatest fear was that “people see me as I see them”. It’s not misanthropy but rather an extreme sensitivity to the absurd awfulness of other people. His friend Stephen Jennings says perceptively, “The paradox of Richard, which is a great part of his charm, is that he cares deeply about what people think, and at the same time doesn’t give a damn – if you’ve got a proclivity for biting wit, you can’t afford to.”

Grant works hard at keeping his pins firmly on the ground, mostly through a successful marriage that has survived his breakaway success. Joan Washington is eight year older and has a son, Tom, from an earlier marriage. Grant met her in 1982 soon after he arrived in London (friends suspect she helped train away his South African accent), and they have a daughter, Olivia. The couple’s first child, Tiffany, lived just long enough to be named; she is now buried in an unmarked grave near their home.

At the end of our conversation, Grant wanted to know how I thought the novel would be received. Probably people will be surprised that it’s as good as it is, I told him, because he is an actor, and there’ll be a certain amount of disbelief or resentment that he can succeed with more than one talent. In other words, the reviews will be grudging. “That’s it,” booms Grant, lying back in his chair and thrusting out his gangly long legs, mime-writing the words on an invisible billboard in front of him: “’Grudging – The Guardian. I love it.

We’ll put it on the back of the paperback.”