UK Vogue – 1989

Richard E. Grant seems to have spent large chunks of 1988 sitting in restaurants and extremely long cars. These, after all, are where deals are traditionally lost and won in Hollywood, and since playing the name part of the quirky, funny Withnail & I last year, Grant has been in a great deal of demand professionally. “People over here looked very askance when I said I was going there for three months. What can I tell you? I lived in the Hollywood Hills, sat next to people at dinner I’d previously only ever heard about and worked non-stop. It was an actor’s dream.”

Back in Britain (his heart remains true to Chiswick), he still professes to being overwhelmed by the success of Withnail & I, a tiny budgeted film. “long on words and short on plot”, written and directed by Bruce Robinson and decidedly English. Now thirty-one, with a lengthy apprenticeship in rep and television adverts which he is keen to put behind him, Grant cherishes the sudden spurt of post-Withnail offers as lovingly as Withnail would a bottle of Scotch. First was a mini-series, Thieves of the Night, shot in Israel and based on Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, but his next big screen appearance will be in Warlock, in which he swashbuckles his way through the minus 20 degrees C wastes of Boston as a seventeenth-century gentleman transported into the twentieth. Most surreal sounding of all is How to Get Ahead in Advertising, his second collaboration with Bruce Robinson, which stars Grant simultaneously as Dennis Bagley, an advertising executive and Bagley’s talking boil. And he was worried about doing adverts.