Sky Magazine – 1989

“I’ve got a tombstone-slab length face, receding hair and a 98lb body that gets sand kicked in its face,” says actor Richard E Grant, cinema’s latest sex symbol. “Honestly, it’s comical!”

Comical or not, the fact remains that Grant’s first feature film role, as the outrageous alcoholic actor Withnail in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, proved him to be remarkably magnetic and talented. Still, he jokes about being second choice after Daniel Day Lewis. “Thank heavens he went off to The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” says Grant. “If I’d messed that up, I wouldn’t have deserved another chance.” As a direct result of Withnail – the 32-year-old Swaziland-born actor is starring in four films released this year. In Warlock, out this month, he plays a 17th century hero who arrives in the future to pursue a deadly warlock (Julian Sands).

In How To Get Ahead in Advertising, out this summer, his second feature for Robinson, Grant plays an advertising executive who has a talking boil on his neck. “It’s a tale of the late 80s yuppie man taken to an extreme of greed and lust.” His other forthcoming appearances are in Mountains of the Moon and Killing Dad.

But work takes a back seat to his baby daughter. Though happily worn out by parenthood, Grant still finds energy to be amusing and amiable. “I thought about having a nose job,” he laughs. But my wife (dialect coach Joan Washington) said, ‘The day you don’t get work because of your nose, then you can have your nose fixed….”