The Guardian – Thursday 18th January, 1996

Richard E Grant on Withnail, the manic alter ego that made his name ten years ago, and the cost of fame as a sixties Dracula on lighter fuel.

December 1995, shooting Twelfth Night in Cornwall. Fax arrives from the Guardian arts editor: “Would you be interested in writing a piece about the re-release of Withnail? Love to read what you thought of it at the time, how it has affected your life, and what you think of it now?”

Phone back. “My name’s Richard E Grant, replying to your fax.” “Hold on” – hand over the receiver and I hear a muffled – “It’s Withnail on the phone.” And one way and another, this is precisely what has been going on ever since the film came out 10 years ago.

At its most extreme, the assumption made is that I AM this fiction for real. For a sizeable number of humans it seems this character is so real that, like Dracula, he cannot die. Just so long as there are people willing and able to keep supplies of lighter fluid available for resuscitation. Loaded magazine, that trusty organ of male culture, recently sent a female to interrogate me, with the barely disguised agenda of delineating between my cell count and the celluloid quantum of this film persona, clearly hoping to find me legless and witty.

Her anger at finding me less than 100 per cent “Absolut”, resulted in an outrage review of my wife, sofas, clothing, address; with the summation of her “insult” honed into her fiesty declaration that I was in fact “Middlesex Man”. which for those of you as yet ignorant of this sub-species, translates thus: Well-heeled suburban white male, teetotally married with child, living in an asylum of wall-to-wall lentils and liberal persuasions. Damned. Redemption peeps out ONLY when some stray comment or facial expression matches her expectation of what I ought to be like. Ah, the cost of cult-price fame.

Did you have any idea at the time that it would be such a cult? To which I can only reply: Are you mentally retarded? Of course not. Summer ’86: Fergie was preparing her nuptials to the Porky Prince and we were up a mountainside near Penrith. Shooting a film without any “names”, a first-time director, an unfathomable title (“that will have to go”), no female characters other than crones, hags and a tea-room Thatcher look-alikes proprietress, rain, no crocs or car chases, and very little plot. (Crocodile Dundee being this year’s success formula).

I did think my part the funniest role I had ever read before or since, and that, even if only two agents in Greater Manchesterford saw me in it, it was THE BREAK that every actor instinctively searches for. Landing a leading role in a first film after nine months of unemployment, playing an out-of-work actor, was sweet irony. Made all the more so when, without exception, every subsequent film role has been the result of this “audition”. Including stints for the trio of elder American uber-directors Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. My inauspicious “call from the coast” to go to Hollywood and do Warlock came within a week of the film’s release in the US. prior to which I had despaired of the film ever coming out.

The endless delays and doubts; an arse-numbing torture; rumours and reservations about the title, plot, commercial viability etc vultured about, and I began to believe it would gather dust in some Wardour Street basement, which is where I had seen the first “rough-cut” that near induced some wrist-slashing. Untill I got used to the idea that plastic surgery and acting implants were not within my price range. A prevading “kvetch” whispered that unless you were over forty or, better still, a die-hard crumbling hippy who had lived in London at the tale-end of the sixties, you wouldn’t “get it”.

Iain Johnstone’s review in the Sunday Times was prose that your heavily-biased but totally demented grandmother might dotingly have written and was the first “inked-thing” of something going on. That it has become a student cult, with teenagers who were eight years old when it first came out, is the continuing bonus and surprise. I have been invited to speak at Oxbridge and Eton, and informed that the comic cusp between adolescence and adulthood, in all its unease, insanity and loneliness, is what fixes it.

On the tube or buses, the “Withnailites” are usually identifiable. Or given to quoting lines from the film. I was in a remote village in the south of France and heard a chorus of “SCRUBBERS!!” from a carload of laughters. Buying a computer in New York and after hours of deliberation and patient help from a very short-back-and-sides salesman, was unexpectedly regaled with “I want the finest wines available to humanity, and I want them here and I want them NOW!”

Surveying most actors’ careers, there is usually one role that truly fires and sticks, and that mine should be this cowardly, mendacious, arrogant, charming old drunken darling is my good fortune. If O’Toole’s Lawrence, Pacino’s Godfather, Heston’s Hur, Keaton’s Hall, Connery’s Bond belong in the main drawer, I am perfectly happy to be in the cult compartment with Tim Curry’s Rocky Horror. I suspect Withnail and Frank’n’Furter will be doing the Time Warp again and again, long after I have lost my own hair and teeth. Which is one bonus of being re-released before I am rendered unrecognisable and dribbling in the corner of a maximum security twilight home for forgotten thesps.

Richard E Grant: before and after

Born: 1957, Richard Grant (he later added the E to distinguish himself from another actor). Grew up in Swaziland, a British colony until 1968, where his father was director of education.

Early Life In Africa: Decided he wanted to be an actor aged seven, despite living in town with just two cinemas and no theatre. Attended multi-racial Cape Town University. Co-founded radical Troupe Theatre Company, performed with them for two years, often at Johannesburg’s politicised Market Theatre.

Out Of Africa: Came to live in London in 1982 (had visited in 1969 when his adventurous parents gave him a sniff of the swinging sixties with a trip to Hair – “I enjoyed Oliver!” more).

On film: Made his debut in 1985 in Honest, Descent and True, Les Blair’s made for TV film about advertising. Big break came with Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I, where Grant established himself as the most barking British presence in the movies ever. Totally unhinged (Rik Mayall with a sense of humour). Withnail, a 30-year-old “resting” actor dedicating his life to drink, drugs and dodgy coats, became an icon of sleazy, upper-middle-class mania.

After Withnail: How To Get Ahead In Advertising, about a revolting advertising man who grows a boil that turns into his head. Also made by Robinson, but not as funny. Since then a series of cameos (Henry and June, Hudson Hawk, LA Story, Bram Stoker’s Dracula), often unhinged, but not as unhinged as Withnail. Altman came closest to bringing the unapologetically loopy out of him in The Player (Grant is the film-maker who insists on no stars and no hammy endings and ends up with Bruce Willis resuing Andie MacDowell from the electric chair) and Pret-a-porter as the ludicrously camp fashion designer conducting an affair with Forest Whitaker.

Maturity: His last film Jack and Sarah, a big hit, saw him into the urbane as he played it straight.

Outside Interests: Journalism. Occasional contributions to the Guardian and the Observer. His forthcoming diaries With Nails is said to be a wonderfully gossipy read.