Granting an audience ... Richard E Grant is surrounded by the Australian Idol hopefuls that he agreed to mentor. Picture: Jeff Herbert

AS elocutionist Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Richard E Grant knows the power of choice words.

So when asked to mentor the remaining contestants on Australian Idol yesterday, Grant’s choice of words on the program have proved quite telling.

Describing the talent quest as “brutal” and a fast-food approach to fame, the esteemed English actor slammed the series for making then breaking dreams.

In yet another PR blow for the show, Grant predicted a poor future for the finalists he was asked to teach the secrets of movement and projection.

“I think the hardest thing is that the finalists get all this exposure but then usually go back to working at KFC or something,” Grant told Sydney Confidential on set at the Theatre Royal yesterday.

“It’s brutal. I know that on similar shows in England we had these people became such household names but a year later no one remembers who they are.

“They get this instant fame and it can go away just as instantly as it comes,” he said.

While maintaining an “I can do it” attitude was important, Grant and his Fair Lady co-star Taryn Fiebig agreed they worried for the Idol wannabes “at the other end.”

“It’s not that they are not talented, it’s just the way things seem to go,” Fiebig said of the critical process.

She also made reference to the runner-up syndrome, which cast the winners on a road to nowhere, but helped the second place-getters like Shannon Noll and Anthony Callea.

The harsh glare of the Idol spotlight has proved a help and hinder to its graduates this year.

This week’s evictee Thanh Bui has revealed how “really really difficult” the series was on his esteem.

“There was a lot of comments – it was either touchdown or nothing much. There was no in-between for me and it was hard.”

Despite consistently strong ratings for the Channel 10 show this year, it has come under fire from many in the music industry for its “diminishing return”.

Last year’s winner Natalie Gauci was expected to release her prize – a solo album – this year,but those plans have been put off by record company, Sony.

The previous year’s Idol, Damien Leith also released a covers album this year, with his album of original tracks not charting as well as expected.

Time Out Sydney / Issue 47: October 5 – 21, 2008

Best known as Withnail in cult classic Withnail and I, Richard E Grant is trading booze for ballroom dancing, and coming to Sydney in the rather more sober role of Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

By Alexandra Coghlan

You’ve a reputation for turning the tables on interviewers, and often seem uncomfortable as the focus of attention. What made you want to become an actor?

I grew up in Africa before the media-storm, and hadn’t really realised that talking about yourself and your work was such a big part of the job. When you are playing a role, that’s what you want to think and talk about. I’ve always been much more interested in other people than in blathering on about myself.

So, for you, acting is all about curiosity?

Yes, curiosity about everything, and a love of adventure and novelty. I’ve never done a Shaw play before, I’ve never done a musical professionally, and I’m going to live in a foreign city, Sydney, for four months – the whole adventure of My Fair Lady is still ahead.

Are there any actors that you think do give good interview?

I envy people like Jack Nicholson who come across as witty. That’s what you long for as an actor – the last thing you want is to seem boring. Very often I find that you may admire an actor enormously, but when you actually hear them talk about a part, they put you to sleep. All the Himalaya Mountains shit-talk that goes along with discussing a film [assumes earnest and whiny voice]: “I had to get up at four o’clock every morning, and I had to study for ten years and lose half my body-weight…” All of that fills me with deep embarrassment.

You’ve not done much theatre before. Why is that?

I had a very unfortunate experience 15 years ago doing The Importance of Being Earnest with Maggie Smith, and basically lost my nerve for the theatre for a long time; I just felt that I couldn’t do it. Losing your nerve as an actor is the most terrible thing, but you get it back – you have to.

Being required to sing on stage for the first time must be quite terrifying…

Yes, I’ve been having intensive singing lessons. But Higgins was a part originally written for Rex Harrison, who spoke-sang it. I’ve heard versions of the show where his songs have been sung out properly and it just seems wrong because you lose the wit and the verbal gymnastics of the lyric-writing. Higgins is not meant to be Pavarotti, otherwise they wouldn’t have asked me and I wouldn’t have agreed to do it!

Did you have to audition for the part?

No, I was just asked. Stuart Maunder, the opera director, had seen me on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope and cast me from that. I’d never actually met him, so it was a huge leap of faith on his part.

In our age of political correctness and gender equality why do you think we still find romance in a man ‘creating’ his ideal woman?

The Cinderella syndrome of someone being transformed from one thing to another is a process that underpins most reality television – makeovers, facelifts, life swapping – it’s absolutely in the DNA of our culture and the way we operate. The shift from the ugly duckling to the swan is a kind of magic that we all still want to believe in. In My Fair Lady though, Eliza is anything but a passive doll. She is incredibly feisty, and it is actually that attitude that Higgins responds to and falls in love with.

Musicals are typically seen as rather girly. What would you say to persuade unreconstructed males into the theatre for My Fair Lady?

“For all male chauvinist-pig bastards who hate musicals – this is the one for you!” How’s that?

My Fair Lady plays at the Theatre Royal from Thu 9 Oct.

(Photo by Sergio Dionisio/Getty Images)

Heavy Hitters come out for My Fair Lady

10/10/2008
Tim Brunero

Stars come out for My Fair Lady premiere.

Bob Hawke was there. Barry Humphries was there. Miranda Otto was there. Andrew Denton was definitely there. But in a first for a Sydney red carpet for a long time at last night’s premiere of My Fair Lady, there were almost no Underbelly stars.

But whoever was or wasn’t there the assembled heavy hitters who managed to turn up showed for one reason – to see screen legend Richard E Grant as Professor Henry Higgins. And the crowd wasn’t disappointed.

Grant dazzled with his physical and surreal style, racing around the stage and driving the narrative with his barely sane depiction of the eccentric professor.

But Grant wasn’t the only actor that delighted the opening night crowd – Australian legends were also met with a rousing cheer.

Veteran TV actor John Wood was met with laughs as the musical’s eloquently selfish father Alfred P Doolittle.

And Nancye Hayes got a huge cheer when she appeared as Mrs Higgins, perhaps it was because her first ever role was in the same musical way back in 1961.

Directed by Sydney stage legend Stuart Maunder My Fair Lady is on at the Theatre Royal.

Source: LIVENEWS.com.au

The Australian Online – 8th October, 2008

By Rosalie Higson

WHEN he turned 50, actor Richard E. Grant thought he’d pretty much done it all when it came to show business.

But tomorrow night, Grant makes his first stage appearance in Australia and his first performance in a musical as the obsessive, bad-mannered professor in My Fair Lady.

“Singing with an orchestra is one of the great thrills I’ve experienced,” Grant said at the Theatre Royal in Sydney yesterday. “After the age of 40 you’re not quite sure how many big thrills are coming your way, and this is certainly one of them.”

Since Grant’s breakthrough role as the drugged-up young actor in the 1987 comedy Withnail and I, he has acted in dozens of films and plays, written three books including his diary With Nails, and directed a film based on his childhood in Swaziland.

Singing on stage was a challenge — “Are people prepared to pay to see me do this?”– but Grant’s voice coaches promised to tell him if he was going to be professionally embarrassed.

Fortunately, he passed muster yesterday, singing one of the show’s memorable songs, The Rain in Spain.

Grant gives the professor an exhuberant manner, although for sheer volume he is outclassed by soprano Taryn Fiebig as Eliza and John Wood as her outrageous Cockney father in the Opera Australia production.

Director Stuart Maunder said every actor who played Higgins in the musical — such as Rex Harrison — put his stamp on it.

“(At 50) Richard is probably 10 years older than the play suggests and it works beautifully, because the bottom line is it’s a Cinderella story and not actually about romance in the classic sense,” Maunder said.

“It’s much more about a meeting of minds and two souls.”

My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1916 play Pygmalion, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.

The story of the transformation of Cockney flowergirl Eliza Doolittle by the eccentric upper-class Professor Higgins is an evergreen on stages around the world.

“Professor Higgins is one of the best-written roles for a male actor that isn’t Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde or Sheridan,” Grant said.

“I think Lerner and Loewe expanded and exposed the hidden emotional part that is embedded in Pygmalion and brought it out, and all the songs advance the story and embellish and reveal things about the characters.

“It’s probably done more for Shaw than anything else.”

Taryn Fiebig, who plays Eliza, with Richard E. Grant, who says he is giving Henry Higgins a little bit of sexual spark.
Photo: Edwina Pickles

The Sydney Morning Herald Online – 7th October, 2008

By Emily Dunn and Elicia Murray

MY FAIR LADY is famous for crisp consonants, round vowels and very, very big hats, but Richard E. Grant believes he will bring something new to Opera Australia’s production of the classic show.

“I’m giving it some sex life.” he told our sing-along correspondent, Louise Schwartzkoff, at the launch of the second Sydney season, which opens tomorrow at the Theatre Royal.

Grant has replaced Reg Livermore, an actor 18 years his senior, in the role of Henry Higgins, bringing the two leads closer together in age.

“It’s more credible now that there could actually be some romantic involvement between them, and that’s given it new life,” said Taryn Fiebig, who plays the cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle.

Grant has never performed in a musical, but when the show’s director, Stuart Maunder, saw him interviewed on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope, he decided he would make a perfect Henry Higgins.

“I’m not quite sure what that means, because Higgins is an arrogant, misogynist shit,” said Grant. “But he does have a level of charm. He may be petulant and he does get hysterical, but he has no malice whatsoever. He’s not mean, which is good, because otherwise he’d be unbearable.”