OnFormMagazine.com – 9th September 2012

Currently filming in Los Angeles, Richard E. Grant took time out to meet with ONFORM’s Emma Inglis.

In a suite, in the iconic Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, Richard E. Grant is enjoying all of what Hollywood has to offer. “Gorgeous weather, room service and valet parking. The life of LA!” But not just LA. Grant gets to do the life of London, Paris, New York and Las Vegas. His current project, Hotel Secrets, is a cracker and promises him an abundance of lavish hotel suites and flawless room service. “I am hosting a six-part documentary series for Sky Atlantic about famous hotels and the stories behind them, that will air this autumn, interviewing everyone from Donald Trump to designers, owners, chefs, guests, up, down and sideways.”

Up, down and sideways – it seems a fitting description for the irrepressible Richard E. Grant. After all, he does appear to pop up everywhere, with everyone, and turn his hand to everything. Not so long ago he joined Tracy Emmin and Heston Blumenthal in the BA Great Britons Programme. “I was invited by British Airways to judge their Olympic short film competition, alongside Heston Blumenthal discovering a new chef, and Tracey Emmin’s search for an artist to paint British Airways’ planes with a winning design. There were over 600 film script entries, short-listed to half-a-dozen by a team of judges, after which we interviewed the finalists to pitch their stories.”

The winner was Prassana Puwanarajah, with a script called Boy, about a carpenter who maintains the track at the Velodrome whilst dealing with the loss of his son, a track cyclist. “Prassana’s script was unanimously chosen as the winner and then produced and directed by an amazingly accomplished team, starring Tim Spall in the lead role.”

All this and jetting off to Melbourne and the Italian Riviera to star in Kath and Kimderella, a swansong film based on the phenomenally popular Australian comedy series Kath and Kim. “I play a marriage broker in the fictitious court of the King of Pappiloma, a Monegasque principality in the heel of Italy, relentlessly pursued by Magda Szubanski, who mistakes my disdain for love and lust.”

Yes, Richard E. Grant is busy, travelling here, there and everywhere; up, down and sideways. But then, Grant has not really had a quiet day since Withnail and I, the cult film that made his name some twenty-five years ago. For those not in the know, Withnail and I is the tale of two struggling actors, Withnail played by Grant, and ‘I’ played by Paul McGann. Short of booze, fags and money, they decide to swap cold, damp London for a holiday cottage in the Lake District, owned by Withnail’s gay uncle Monty. The film was was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, based on experiences and housemates from his youth. (The ‘real’ Withnail, Vivian Mackerrell, a colorful eccentric, died of throat cancer, aged 51, which Robinson once attributed to his consumption of lighter fluid, portrayed in an infamous scene from Withnail and I.)

Even now, over two decades later, Grant recalls the part warmly. “Withnail was a gift of a role in every way. It led to almost every other job I’ve had over the past 25 years, and afforded me great friendships with the cast, especially Bruce Robinson, who makes me laugh harder than anyone else I know. Of all the parts I’ve played, the dialogue is indelible and I can still remember a great deal of it. All credit to Bruce.”

Bigger credit to Grant, though. Sure, the dialogue sparkles, and some of Withnail’s lines have gone down in cult Eighties’ cinema-viewing history, alongside those of, say, Spinal Tap and The Blues Brothers, but there is more to the film than that. Grant’s Withnail is a triumph. Few roles have been so splendidly and convincingly inhabited by an actor. Grant is Withnail. He plays the tortured drunken artiste to perfection. All the more impressive considering that Grant doesn’t drink; his liver is unable to metabolise alcohol. Grant has been drop-dead drunk only once in his life, and that was at the insistence of Bruce Robinson to prepare for the role of Withnail.

Across the Atlantic, there was excitement after Withnail, and Grant got his first invitation from Hollywood to star alongside Julian Sands in Warlock (a kind of medieval Terminator). Shortly after that, he teamed up with Robinson again to play a scruple-free ad exec in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. The film didn’t go down that well with critics – but Grant did. Suddenly, Richard E. Grant was seen as the perfect villain – or antihero – and the roles flooded in. There were parts in Steve Martin’s L.A. Story; Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Robert Altman’s The Player, Gosford Park and Prét a Porter; and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Then there was the notorious flop, Hudson Hawk, in which Grant starred alongside Bruce Willis, whom he later described in wholly unflattering terms.

It was all creative grist for Grant’s mill. In 1996, he published his first book, With Nails: The Film Diaries, a warts-and-all account of the film industry and life amongst the stars of Hollywood. “After publishing a diary about the making of Robert Altman’s Prét a Porter in a Sunday newspaper,” recalls Grant, “I was approached by various publishers, asking if I had kept a diary during the making of other films, which is how With Nails came about, charting the story of a complete nobody landing a lead role in a film, which led to a career that landed me in Hollywood. I tried to be as honest as I could about the reality of making films, as opposed to the press version, where things are always ‘bright and beautiful’.”

There is little about LA that is bright and beautiful in Grant’s diaries. Hollywood comes across as a place full of egomaniacs, stuttering film shoots and mind-boggling inefficiency. Never more so than when Grant describes, in amusing detail, the making of Hudson Hawk. The movie industry fares no better in Grant’s second book, By Design, a fictional tale about two friends from Africa who end up on Sunset Boulevard, which he wrote a few years later. As with With Nails, the book leaves the reader with the distinct impression that there’s nowt so queer, shallow, or paranoid as Hollywood folk. As later affirmed by Grant in The Guardian, “Hollywood is on what they call a s**t tide, meaning a tide where stuff comes in and goes out very quickly. People come in, get a part in something, get in a magazine, then they go away and you never hear of them again. The sun shines, the level of paranoia is bottomless, and everybody you meet has an agenda. And that’s it. Show business, twenty-four hours a day. If you’re doing well, you’re a target. Nobody’s interested in you, except how you can be of use to them. And you can’t engage with anyone, you can only engage with their agenda.”

Grant’s diary writing did not begin in Hollywood. He has kept a diary since his childhood. It was Grant’s mother that initiated his diary-keeping, but not in the way that one might think. Grant explains, “I’ve kept a diary since I was ten years old, having inadvertently witnessed my mother getting up to mischief with my father’s best friend on the front seat of a car, whilst I was supposedly asleep in the back.”

Scrabbling to make sense of finding his mother in flagrante, in the family Mercedes, Grant put pen to paper. Not so long ago, he wrote in the Daily Mail, “I had no idea what to do other than to clamp my eyes tight shut and hope I wasn’t ‘found out’. No one to tell. No one to talk to. No one to share with. Like the statue of the three monkeys on the mantelpiece: ‘Hear no, see no, speak no evil’. This was the moment at which I began keeping a diary.”

It should have been a blissful childhood. Grant was born Richard Esterhuysen in Mbabane, Swaziland, a tiny country bordering the eastern edge of South Africa. There were lush grasslands to explore, the huge granite boulder at Sibebe Rock to climb, lakes to bathe in, and the river rapids of the Umbeluzi to race down on an inflatable rubber ring. Grant recalls that “Living outdoors made for an utterly unrestricted boyhood, apart from snakes in the summer. I had a tree house and a pool and spent a great deal of time horsing around and making up things to do.” His father, Henrik, was Swazi’s Minister of Education, while his mother, Leonne, worked as a ballet teacher and a part-time secretary. Mbabane was small. Everyone knew everyone else. Indeed, that, it seems, was part of the problem. Grant has been quoted as saying that, in Mbabane, no marriage stood a chance of surviving more than three weeks, because there was nothing to do except have affairs.

Shortly after his mother’s affair, Grant’s parents divorced and his father plunged into a fury of alcoholism, once firing a gun at Grant for pouring away his whisky. Some ten years later, his father died from cancer. He was fifty one; Grant was twenty four and had just finished studying English and Drama at Cape Town University. The dying man gave Grant his watch, which he still wears today, permanently set on Swaziland time. Grant clearly adored his father. An interviewer once asked how he could forgive a man who tried to shoot him. Grant replied that it’s “Easy to forgive someone – if you loved them.”

Grant’s childhood was the basis of his film Wah-Wah, which he wrote and directed in 2004. Set at the end of the 60s, as Swaziland is about to receive independence from Great Britain, the film observes the disintegration of the Compton family through the eyes of its young protagonist son, Ralph. A talented cast play Ralph’s family: Gabriel Byrne, Emily Watson, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson and Nicholas Hoult. Filming Wah-Wah was a liberating experience for Grant. He says of the film, “Revisiting my past from the safety of middle age was truly cathartic and as painful as my parents’ divorce and my father’s alcoholism were to endure. The film is really a love letter to him and our life during the last gasp of the Empire.” Out of the film came another book, The Wah-Wah Diaries. It is a witty, chaotic account of movie-making, and includes a hilarious portrayal of French producer Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, who comes across as one of the most obstreperous producers in filmmaking.

The emotional trauma of Grant’s childhood might explain why family is so important to him today. He has been married to Joan Washington, a dialect and acting coach, since 1986, and speaks with awe about her capabilities. “She has an incredible ear for accents and, like Henry Higgins, can identify where people come from, and has worked with almost every actor you can think of. She understands actors from the inside out.” (Washington is currently coaching on the Ralph Fiennes film about Dickens called The Invisible Woman.) In his wife, Grant believes that he has found the perfect partner. “Born in Aberdeen, her Scottish east-coast work ethic is so down-to-earth that it’s proved to be the perfect marital antidote to the yo-yoing vagaries of my life as an actor. We began talking to each other in 1983 and our conversation has not stopped since then. I owe her absolutely everything.”

They have one daughter together, Olivia, of whom Grant is patently proud. “She has just completed UEA’s Creative Writing and American Studies degree and wants to go into film production and screen writing, which she is passionate about.” There was another child, Tiffany, born prematurely, during the first few weeks of filming Withnail, who tragically died shortly after her birth. In Now Magazine in 1999, Grant spoke movingly about losing his child. “Not a day goes by without me thinking about her… We still talk about Tiffany… not in a macabre, candle-burning kind of way. But we still honour the day she was born and died. When something like that happens, it binds you to the person you’ve shared it with.” Grant is also stepfather to Washington’s son, Tom, from her first marriage.

When not ‘yo-yoing’ around the world filming, Grant lives with Washington in Richmond, South London. When at home, there is the pleasure of daily jogs in Richmond Park and walks along the tow path from Richmond to Kew. Apart from a few short spells abroad, London has been Grant’s home since he left Swaziland in 1982, and still remains his favourite city. “It was always my dream to live and work in London and, like Dick Whittington, I found my pot of gold when I emigrated three decades ago. Of all the cities I have worked and lived in around the world, nothing beats London. I have the patriotic zeal for all things British that possibly only an outsider can feel, and I have never ceased to admire how tolerant and accommodating people are of every idea and ethnicity.” But the pull of Africa, of Swaziland, is still strong and, like a homing pigeon, Grant goes back at least once a year.

Britain was in the grip of a war with the Falklands when twenty-five-year-old Grant first arrived here back in the Eighties. Grant recalls ships leaving Portsmouth for the Falkland Islands on the day of his arrival. The whole country was gripped by an extraordinary patriotic fervour, and Thatcher’s popularity was at an all-time high. It would be a period of history that Grant would revisit some thirty years later when cast as Thatcher’s political nemesis, Michael Heseltine, in the recent biographical film based on Thatcher’s life, The Iron Lady. Grant researched the role by watching clips of Heseltine on YouTube, reading his autobiography and speaking to those who knew him. (Lord Heseltine had little to say of Grant’s portrayal of him, apart from criticising Grant’s hair, which was dyed for the role.) Meryl Streep played Thatcher and deservedly won an Oscar for her flawless performance. For Grant, acting alongside Streep was a dream come true. “Although my role was little more than a cameo, the opportunity to work with her is something I never dared dream would happen. She is the best of the best of the best, and her roster of roles and awards is unequalled and unparalleled in screen history. If that sounds gushing, it still doesn’t begin to convey how inspiring it was to watch her work and spend time in her company – forty carat gold.”

In the star-struck Grant, one senses there still exists something of the wide-eyed boy from Mbabane, Swaziland, who still can’t quite get over life’s good fortune, let alone take on board his success. Richard E. Grant is forty carat gold, too. But charmingly, he doesn’t seem to know it.