Interactive Passenger Magazine – Issue 14 Jan/Feb 2006

Richard E Grant’s motto could pretty much be “Life’s too short to sit still.” But not if you go by appearances. The unconventionally handsome actor, writer and director looks very laid-back in his indigo denims and crisp, white shirt, lounging nonchalantly in a chair in his dressing room at the Bath Theatre Royal. And there’s a look of quiet control behind those disconcertingly turquoise eyes.

It’s just about an hour before curtain-up of Simon Gray’s comedy Otherwise Engaged, which plays at London’s Criterion Theatre until the end of January. Surrounded by the rich fragrance of oriental lilies and an array of good-luck cards, Grant couldn’t be less like the melodramatic, shambolic, struggling alcoholic actor whom he so brilliantly brought to life in Withnail and I, the cult 1987 film that made his name. That was before he notched up a further 30 movies, including Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, The Player and Prêt à Porter, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

Friends know that beneath his calm surface, however, lies a furnace of nervous energy, fuelling a work schedule that gives a new meaning to the word “multitasking”. When he’s directing, he’s usually also writing and acting; when he’s writing, he’s doing voice-overs and attending business meetings; and when he’s acting, he’s also lending his support to worthy causes, including raising funds for his old school, Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland, the first multiracial, co-ed school in Africa, and doing interviews.

No wonder he enjoys the one bit of forced inactivity in his life – the daily South West Trains journey from his home in Richmond to London Waterloo. It’s only three or four stops on the fast service, and takes around 20 minutes, but he loves it. Although, even then, he’s not exactly idle.

“I always have a book with me – I read incessantly on the train. I’ve missed stops because I’ve being caught up in reading things,” he laughs. “I use it every day because I love going by train – you can read and write, listen to music… and once you’re on you don’t have to deal with traffic or parking or road rage or any of those nightmares associated with driving.” Then, tranquil journey over, it’s back to his manic schedule. His friend, actor Steve Martin, has nicknamed him “Mr Relentless”.

“I’m not sedentary in any way,” says the man who runs four miles every morning around Richmond Park. He drags himself out of bed, whatever the weather, to face a “mind-clearing” 50 minutes of loping around some of the 2,000 acres of Richmond Park, which he has looked on as his “countryside on the doorstep” for the past 23 years. “Everything in me screams, ‘Don’t do this!’ But I know I’ll feel much better once I’ve started.” And exercise, he says fervently, is fantastic for helping sort out the mind. That’s important when your head is buzzing with a hundred different ideas and projects all at once. “I like to be involved in lots of things all at the same time. I’m always plotting and planning stuff – I’ve got that kind of a brain. But I don’t know whether that comes from having a low boredom threshold, or whether it’s just the fear that I’m going to miss out on something.” He gives a lopsided, smile. “Yes, I think that’s probably it. I want to get as much as I can out of everything.”

Despite an endearing self-deprecation – he has described himself as looking like “an extra-long condom”, and his work as “my poncings” – the boy’s done good. Particularly for someone raised in a tiny town in Swaziland whose name reads like a bad hand at Scrabble. Mbabane is not the most likely birthplace for a wannabe film star but, from his early years, that was all Richard Esterhuysen wanted to be. His turbulent boyhood in 1960s Swaziland, where his father was Minister of Education, will be revealed for the world to see in the forthcoming autobiographical film Wah-Wah, which he both wrote and directed – the “absolute best, most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life”, he says.

The movie opens with an extraordinary scene. A small boy is pretending to be asleep in the back of a car, while a man and woman have sex in the front seat. The scene is one that still haunts Richard, nearly four decades later. He was the boy on the back seat, and making love a few feet away in the front was his mother and his father’s best friend.

Despite marrying again, Richard’s father never recovered from the unfaithfulness of his first wife, and sank into chronic alcoholism. When Richard was 15, his father even fired a pistol at him, in a drunken bid to kill him.

It’s there, warts and all, in the film, which stars Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson as Richard’s parents, Julie Walters as a family friend and Emily Watson as his stepmother. There’s even a cameo role from his adored 16-year-old daughter Olivia, born after he and his wife, voice coach Joan Washington, suffered the agony of three miscarriages and the death of a newborn daughter, Tiffany.

Writing the screenplay for Wah-Wah, using diaries he has kept since witnessing his mother’s adultery, was a cathartic experience for the 48-year-old actor. “I have completely revealed my childhood from 11 to 14, as much as anything to be able to understand it myself, and feel compassion for the people involved in things that were cataclysmic in my life…

“And I know that in doing something that is incredibly personal like this, you can reach people you’ve never met. Because what goes on in families is fairly common to everybody.”

Wah-Wah has been heaped with praise for being poignant, honest, moving – and humorous. Audiences have both laughed and cried, he says, with a touch of deserved pride. “Even though it’s set in Africa, it’s about families and what goes on: addiction and adultery and coming of age. All the things that have touched some people at some point in their lives. So, it’s very satisfying to know that it came from my heart, and that it has reached other people’s hearts.”

Richard still adores Swaziland, which he left as a teenager to study drama in South Africa. Arriving in London as a hopeful actor was a tough time. Before making his name in Withnail and I, he spent an agonising nine months out of work, staring at a silent phone.

To kill time, he would go to WH Smith in Richmond and flick through every single magazine for an entire morning. He still does it. “I stand there for hours and read all of them – I’m a magaholic. I love them! If they [the staff] start rearranging the magazines near me to give the hint, I am oblivious. Because when I go into magazine mode, I don’t notice anything else. I am transfixed.”

Apart from magazine browsing, his favourite Richmond pursuits include horse-riding and playing tennis in the park, catching plays at the Richmond and Orange Tree Theatres, taking in the summer, spring and Christmas fairs, and eating at least once a week at the river-front Petersham Nurseries.

“My neighbours took over the nursery and have gathered the most extraordinary team of incredibly talented people, and now everyone from Madonna up, down and sideways eats there. The chef, Skye Gyngell, is the consultant food writer for Vogue, and every single dish she cooks is wonderful. It started as a casual café thing, and really took off. Now it’s Richmond’s must-have lunch reservation – you have to book to get a table.” He also likes nipping across the river to Sandy’s, the fishmongers in Twickenham, which, he says, sells the best white crabmeat he’s ever had in London.

His first house in Richmond was behind the ice rink, but after 12 years, he and Joan moved to Petersham, where they have lived for the past eight. “There’s a graveyard over the wall, so that’s where I will be plonked. I have an absolutely gorgeous house, so I can’t see myself ever moving. I love Richmond.”

Growing up in an isolated African kingdom gave him enough of a taste of small-town, rural living to know that he didn’t want any more. “Richmond is perfectly situated between Piccadilly Circus and Heathrow airport. And living just opposite the park is great – it’s so huge you have the illusion of being in the country without the inconvenience, or the small-mindedness you can encounter if you live in a tiny place. I like having access to everything in London, which, I think, is by far the most varied and exciting city I’ve ever been to. And, in Richmond, we’ve got all the usual shops, yet you can live completely anonymously, and I like that. Having grown up in a place where everyone knew your business, and having spent time in Los Angeles, which is a fairly incestuous community no matter how sprawling it is, I like the fact that nobody knows what or who you are, or how you spend your life in London.”

But Swaziland remains close to his heart. He decided long ago that if ever it all went pear-shaped, or became too much, he would flit back there. “It’s still very appealing. I thought, when I went back to Swaz to do the filming for Wah-Wah, why am I putting myself through this? Why am I getting up at some godforsaken hour and going to bed so late, and having more work to do when I get home, and enduring all this pressure of money and time, and 3,000 questions asked of me a day…I thought, why don’t I just go and buy myself a pineapple-beer stall on the side of the road? It’s the most potent beer you can have, made from fermented pineapple husks and water.”

Not that he’s ever tasted it, of course. Despite his convincing portrayal of drunken Withnail, slugging back lighter fluid in his desperation for a booze kick, Richard E Grant doesn’t touch a drop. Not for any self-righteous reasons, he explains – although, thanks to his father’s alcoholism, he witnessed at first hand the damage addiction can do. He doesn’t drink because he lacks the enzyme to process alcohol in his bloodstream, he says, a trait apparently shared with half of all Japanese people and some Aborigines, Native Americans and Inuits. He also doesn’t eat any dairy products, because he discovered that laying off them stopped his migraine attacks.

He admits to being a tad neurotic and being “knackering” to live with, roller-coastering between troughs of low self-esteem and highs of ego-massaging achievement. Travelling helps him keep things in balance, he says. “Within two nanoseconds of being in a place where nobody knows you from a bar of soap, you realise that the things you thought were so important or catastrophic are just irrelevant. That’s reassuring.” His wife, Joan, is also a great antidote for his twitchy, fretting tendencies. “Joan is Scottish and much more grounded than I am. She’s very un-star-struck, whereas I’ve been left a nervous gibbering wreck, unable to speak, when I’ve met people I really admire.

“I’m given to extremes, and she is much more emotionally steady than I am, which makes for a really good combination.”

It clearly works well, as they will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary in November. But he admits that Joan’s patience sometimes gets “stretched like bubblegum” by him. Whenever he gets uptight about a role, she pulls him back down to earth by pointing out: “It’s only a bloody part – not a lunar landing.” “I think I got the master key to the penthouse suite, cellars and every storey in between of ‘Paranoia Heights’, which I’ve been known to visit on occasion,” is the wry way he puts it. He clearly has a way with words – and appreciates that skill in other people. In particular, he loves John Lennon’s line that “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” And his own personal mantra? “Here and now. It’s only here and now, that’s all there is. Heaven and hell is here,” he says firmly. “I am absolutely convinced that this is it, that nothing came before and there’s nothing coming after, and I find that very reassuring. When you stop breathing, that is it.”

Mr Relentless gives a life-embracing, wide, white-toothed grin. “So, make the most of it!”

RICHARD’S RECOMMENDS

The Café, Petersham Nurseries
off Petersham Road, Richmond
(020 8605 3627; www.petershamnurseries.com)
Open lunchtime only Wed-Sun 12:30-15:00, is a pleasant 20-minute walk along the river, or a short no 65 bus ride from Richmond station.

Sandy’s
56 King Street, Twickenham
(020 8892 5788; www.sandysfish.net)
Open Mon-Sat 08:00-17:00, is a five-minute walk from Twickenham station.

Taken From www.e-motionmagazine.co.uk