Radio Times – 23rd to 29th January 1999.

“I am driven. I like to get as much from every day as if it’s my last”

Determination made him an actor, Withnail and I brought him fame.

Now Richard E Grant, star of The Scarlet Pimpernel, is planning what to do with the next 80 years. Photograph by Snowdon.

An ectomorph with a huge forehead and sunken cheeks, dressed in black, he has the baleful look of an unemployed undertaker and greets me amiably with a flattering lie – “Hello, young man” before contemplating with resigned pessimism the parasitic and often churlish nature of the celebrity interview. “The best format is question and answer. But that isn’t done often because journalists’ questions look clichéd and they wouldn’t have five paragraphs to ‘psychoanalyse’ me – a prefect stranger – or enjoy writing a ‘slash-fest’. I’ve heard tapes of interviews with legendary famous people and the difference between what the journalist wrote and the sycophancy with which they conducted the interview in order to get to get information so sickens them they can’t bring themselves to admit that, in truth, they’re a huge fan. If they did they’d probably be fired.” Oh woe, where does that leave me, neither fan nor foe?

He speaks hesitantly, often not finishing sentences, and although we have quite an intense conversation over lunch about marriage, the mother who abandoned him, the brother he dislikes, he doesn’t make eye contact once, staring either at the restaurant’s wallpaper or out over the Thames near Richmond to where he lives with his wife Joan and their ten-year old daughter, Olivia. When I challenge him about it he explains, unconvincingly, “I’m trying to think of coherent answers that won’t bore you to the ground.” He wears a watch on both wrists. One, bequeathed by his father, is set to the time in Swaziland where he grew up. The American comedian Steve Martin, with whom he corresponds daily by e-mail, nicknames him, “Relentless”, and there is a definite intensity. “I am driven,” he admits, “although that sounds as if I have someone sitting on my shoulder with a whip. I just like to get as much from every day as if it’s my last.” This is a strenuous ambition as he says he expects to live to 120 and, at 41, has completed only a third of his life. “There’s longevity in the family – my grandmother just died aged 96 – and I don’t want to miss out on what’s there. Beyond 120 might be a bit grim. Mind you, I could get run over by a bus after lunch.”

He orders salmon and declines wine. “I’m allergic to alcohol. It makes me violently ill.” He knows, because Bruce Robinson, writer-director of Withnail and I, the cult movie that rescued Grant from near terminal obscurity in 1986, insisted he drank a bottle of champagne to understand how his character – a boozy, unemployed actor – felt. “Gruesome. I vomited every ten minutes.” His latest part, Sir Percy Blakeney, the foppish aristocrat who disguises himself and then saves French gentry from the guillotine, in the latest version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, required a different sacrifice. “They duped us. They said we’d be filming two months each in England and the Czech Republic [Prague look like 18th Century France], but it became four months in the Czech Republic when they realized how much cheaper it was there. I’ve have done the same if I was a producer, but you get sick and tired of being away from home for that length of time. I try to work as much as I can in England so I’m never far from a Tesco or Marks and Spencer.”

He has not modelled himself on any previous Pimpernel – Leslie Howard and David Niven were two notable ones. “The part is much stronger than the actor playing it. It’s not unlike an 18th Century version of Batman or Superman. Sir Percy is a perfumed ponce, apparently ineffectual and not very charismatic, who has a James Bond alter ego with an adrenaline-junkie life that takes over in the evening. It’s universally popular because we all have a version of who we think we are, which is different to how the world perceives us.” He glances at the Dover Sole on my plate, and continues, “I have no idea if you go bungee-jumping, voodoo dancing, or wear rubber knickers at night. People reinvent themselves all the time.” Including himself? “You’ll have to ask others, but I met someone recently who I hadn’t seen for 34 years and he said, ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ even though I’ve lived a whole life since then. You are who you are. I watch videos of my daughter, and her character has always been so clear.”

Growing up in the final days of the colonial era of Mbabane, capital of Swaziland, where his father was Minister of Education, he showed an early interest in theatricals, making a model theatre out of shoeboxes, writing and performing his own entertainment’s at the age of eight. “My parents though it was a passing phase. We knew no actors socially – they didn’t exist in Swaziland.

There was always the worry – ‘How can you succeed in something you know nothing about?’ On paper it’s not a profession you should spend any time trying to pursue, but they are obviously enough of us who say, ‘Bollocks to that.’ For many actors, revenge is a motive, to get back at people who said you’d never make it. It amuses me that those who were most vociferous in telling me I hadn’t a hope in hell are now the ones most glad to know me. I have a fantastically detailed memory, so I recall precisely my biggest obstacles, but I don’t go around with a black book saying, ‘Hah, hah.’”

Nevertheless, in 1985, just before he was cast in Withnail, he nearly gave up. “I was out of work for nine months and you can’t say you’re an actor when you’re decorating, working in a restaurant, or driving people to the airport. I’d have done anything to make something of my life. I find it difficult to understand the notion that you’re owed something by the state. When I see young people sleeping in doorways I’m depressed because it’s a terrible waste.”

After university in South Africa, he founded his own multiracial theatre troupe, before coming to London in 1982, six month’s after his father’s death. “Apart from my family, London is the ongoing love affair of my life. It’s an extraordinary city and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. It would do my brain in to be incarcerated in the countryside. People tend to be much more right wing and bigoted as soon as they move out of the urban sprawl.

They know your business. I love being anonymous. Mbabane was a very small town where everyone knew what everyone else was doing, and there was nothing to do except have affairs. It was very incestuous – not unlike the film community in Los Angeles.”

His younger brother Stuart, now an accountant in South Africa, who is two years younger, watched Richard E (for Esterhuysen) growing up with an incredulity that was later to erupt in venom when he told a tabloid newspaper that he had an estranged sister, a “pansy” who played with dolls. They have not met since their father’s funeral. “He fits the bill of a thwarted underling brother. The list of successful people who are not on speaking terms with their siblings is huge, so it’s par for the course. We never got on. It isn’t as if there is a relationship that fell apart. I don’t find it strange and there’s no big drama. Most parents with several children spend their lives refereeing fighting kids.”

Besides, there was an even greater trauma in his childhood. One morning at six o’clock, when he was nine and a half, his mother, Leonie, came into his room to say she was leaving that day to live in South Africa with a mining engineer. That must have been very tough? He shrugs, “Well it was hard for her, too. It must be, to get to the point where you have to leave. I wasn’t bitter. Just bewildered. Thereafter he and Stuart saw her once a month and on alternate school holidays. There were brought up by their father, Hendrick, whom he adored and who had been honoured with the Swazi name, Mathlaganiani (“a man whose thoughts run faster than his feet”). When he died of lung cancer and a brain tumour he was only 51 and, to an extent, that increased Grant’s determination to live for the day. “But I suppose it goes back to your temperament. If you’re self-motivated and looking for things to stimulate you that is how you operate.”

Although he gets on well with his mother, he once implied he kept away from serious relationships for years because he didn’t want to be devastated like his father. “At university and drama school I wanted to travel the world, and getting married didn’t go hand in hand with that. But I lived with girlfriends and had long relationships. If I wanted to avoid getting hurt I wouldn’t have done that. I was prejudiced against marrying. I thought it might be avoidable. I still think it’s perfectly fine to live together but there are all sorts of reasons – tax and so on – conducive to marriage.”

Ten years ago he married dialect coach Joan, who is eight years older than him and has an undergraduate son, Tom, by a previous marriage. Another of his temporary resolutions – not to have children – was abandoned and they had a daughter, Tiffany in 1986. Sadly, she was born two months prematurely and died after an hour. Joan was advised not to try again, but they subsequently had Olivia. “I’m thrilled to have one child and won’t have any more. I don’t want to be outnumbered” he jokes. “Our daughter has our undivided loyalty and attention from both parents which is absolutely perfect.”

Since the age of 11 he has kept a diary. “People came to Swaziland on two or three-year contracts. You’d form close friendships and then they’d leave. The only way of keeping contact was to write, so it became habitual. There was no TV or any other stimulant.” He adapted part of the diary for his acclaimed With Nails, published in 1996, a brilliantly ironic account of ten years in the life of an actor, with particularly humorous vignettes of Hollywood, where he lived for 18 months and starred in the disastrous Hudson Hawk, among other films. “LA is a fantastically convenient place to work but I wouldn’t like to be unemployed there because it’s so success oriented. The moment you get off the plane and drive down the freeway there’s a billboard telling you who’s hotter than you.”

Last year his first novel, By Design, got mixed reviews, but he will continue writing – he has produced diaries of the making of both Spiceworld, the Spice Girls’ movie in which he plays the pop group’s manic manager, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. “I’ve been through the honeymoon period of a first book, and the prejudice – ‘a bunch of diaries by an actor!’ – and when you write a novel you’re up against the literati, particularly if you have another career that’s perceived to be successful. My novel is really about celebrity. Here we are at the end of a century, not believing in gods, but we still need to idolise something so we transfer our faith to royalty, movie or sports stars. If an actress has a breast implant she gets on the cover of some magazine. And it’s a real sign of the times when supermodels are worshipped.”

He would not like to be a full-time writer. “It’s so isolating. I spent five months alone except for my family – five days a week from nine in the morning until seven at night. You become institutionalised in your own house. I’m gregarious by nature so it was a relief when I went straight from that to The Scarlet Pimpernel with a huge number of young people. I love actors. They mostly have a good sense of humour. They have to. The humiliation is worse than in any other profession.” He’s had his fair share, and recalls “the most painful experience of my life” when he was Algernon to Dame Maggie Smith’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Dame Maggie refused to speak to, or recognise, her co-star. “She was famously unhappy,” he says mildly. “It did my brain in. The idea of performing in front of a live audience is anathema. I get terrible stage fright and hope I never have to be in a play again as long as I live.”

He has not seen The Scarlet Pimpernel and doubts he will. “I try not to see anything I’m in. I watched Hudson Hawk with my hands in front of my face. I hated it. I’m self-conscious and always think, ‘Do I really sound, look, or act like that?’ You notice everything wrong with you. I’d rather avoid that.”