UK Harpers & Queen Magazine – March, 1993

By Heather Hodson

True to anti-hero form, Richard E. Grant is overwhelmingly glamorous. He confounds the rule that screen actors, met face-to-face shrink. When Grant strides into the studio, he looks disconcertingly healthy for someone who has spent most of his career playing reprobates. (During the photo-shoot, our make-up girl assumed that he was no more than 31: “You can tell from his skin, it’s nice and springy.” He’s 35.) It isn’t surprising: he doesn’t drink, smoke, eat meat or do drugs, and you won’t see him air-kissing at the BAFTAs; Grant prefers domestic life in Twickenham with his wife Joan Washington, a dialect coach at the National, and their four-year-old daughter Olivia. “Happier than a pig in shit” is how Paul McGann, Grant’s co-star in Withnail & I, once succinctly described him.

Such habits couldn’t be further from the dissolute characters he excels at, vide the scrofulous aristocrat in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, the obsessive copywriter in How to Get Ahead in Advertising (another Robinson collaboration), Robert Altman’s twitchy scriptwriter in The Player, and, most recently, the smacked-out doctor in Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Next month he takes libertinism to the stage in his West End debut as Algernon Moncrieff, played as an arch bounder in Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

“Oh, I despair sometimes,” he says in mock sorrow over his professional history of deviants. But Grant can’t contain his delight at having worked with Hollywood’s grandees, and is sanguine about Tinseltown’s propensity to type-cast English actors: “It’s a colonial situation, so of course the Brits get the weirdos, murderers, psychos or the more marginalized characters……It’s inevitable, unless you convince them that you’re American, and forsake your Englishness to become an American contender.”

And Grant is terribly English. He speaks traditional BBC, with soft, round vowels. Raather like thiss. EXcellent, MARvellous and ABsoLUTEly act as full stops. But the faint clip of his accent was formed in Swaziland, where he was born in 1957. Grant attended Africa’s first multi-racial school, acting in plays with Nelson Mandela’s daughters. After a degree in English at Cape Town University he formed the multi-racial Troupe Theatre Company, but in 1982 packed his bags for England, “full of blind hope and ambition.” Peppercorn salaries and bouts of unemployment followed, until in 1986 he auditioned for the part Daniel Day-Lewis had just turned down in Withnail & I. Grant’s debut was uniformly acclaimed. Since then, when directors need a dissipated English eccentric, his face always comes to mind.

Grant undoubtedly has all the dandified elegance of a Wildean character, a challenge he views “With a mixture of huge excitement and adrenaline terror.” He is aware of the difficulties in moving from screen to stage: “If you get slated, you have to keep appearing every night. With a film by the time it’s out you’re on to the next thing. And with Wilde, you’re up against it. All those legendary performances……” But he has the support of Dame Maggie Smith, who plays Lady Bracknell and who, since they met last year while filming Suddenly Last Summer for BBC2, has been “A first-class ticket of encouragement.”

Irreproachably nice he may be, but he is also very funny. Anecdotes are non-stop and self-deprecating. On his chest size: “When Nicholas [Hytner] told me I might have to remove some clothes on stage. I almost had a seizure. I said, ‘CHRIST, Nicholas, but have you seen my torso?’ I started contemplating chest implants.” On his legs: “The thought of revealing my sparrow legs to an audience every night……” On his method acting: “Bruce said to me during the rehearsals of Withnail, ‘You can’t play an alcoholic unless you’ve been there.’ So one night we sat up and he made me get drunk. CHRIST it was AWful. Bruce and Paul couldn’t stop laughing.”

After Algy Moncrieff, Grant will appear, not surprisingly, as two more degenerates: in Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence, playing “An upper-class New York cad”, and in Suddenly Last Summer as Natasha Richardson’s ghastly avaricious brother in a seersucker suit’. But despite all the bounders, Grant cherishes the role of the tragic hero. “It’s a cliché, but I’d love to play Hamlet. You’ve got to do it before you’re 40, though. The idea of a man over 40 having problems with his mother moves into the area of the grotesque.”