Just a quick news note to say that REG is going to be on radio2 tonight at about 11pm. Can’t give an exact time but it might pay to start listening a bit earlier.

Also on tonight is “Secret History: Comet Cover-up” in which Richard does the voiceover. It’s on Channel 4 at 9pm.

13th June 2002

By Richard Allinson.

Transcribed by Denise Hale.

During the phone call you can hear civilised party noises. The hum of conversation, occasional laughter and the gentle clinking of glasses.

Anyone who has ever been subjected to telephone training knows that you should smile when you speak, as it comes across in your voice, and Mr Grant is definitely smiling in this interview.

Richard Allinson (RA): We’re going to go to one of the most glamorous events in the social calendar. Well, I’ve been reliably informed it is anyway. We’re going to go to the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair Charity Gala evening. If you ever get stuck in London, in Park Lane, they actually transform one half of Park Lane into this massive, great, Roman edifice thing. Behind which is about 400 million quids worth of Fine Arts and Antiques. One of the star patrons of the evening is THE Richard E Grant. And we’ve caught him on the phone tonight. Richard, welcome to late night Radio 2.

REG: Thank you very much.

RA: Is it terribly glam there tonight?

REG: It is. Well as you’ve just mentioned there’s 400 million quids worth on the stands, and probably that in each person’s bank account of the people that are here. I’ve never seen such a concentration and glut of rich people in one place in my life.

RA: You’re joking?

REG: Absolutely extraordinary. And Elizabeth Hurley is the chief patron of the event. And I think the first public appearance she’s made since she had her baby a couple of months ago. And she looks unbelievable.

RA: Really?

REG: Yeah

RA: That’s not fair is it really?

REG: Traffic stopping.

RA: You’re … laughs …you’re trembling.

REG: I’m trembling.

RA: Control yourself man.

REG: Alright.

RA: Whose there then? You mentioned Liz.

REG: I’ve seen Liz. She, and her good friend Chérie Blair, did the auction raffle announcements. And I’m not titled or wealthy enough to know all the names of the people who are here tonight. But I think every nob and toff in the land is here. From Europe and beyond.

RA: laughs. Cause it is the gala night. And it’s in aid of a charity which is very close to you, isn’t it?

REG: It is. And that’s the reason for my involvement is that I’m a friend of Maya von Schonburg who is the mother of a severely disabled child. And the reason for this glut of incredibly wealthy people, all gathering here together, is to raise money for a charity called KIDS. Which provides home care and first-hand help for people with disabled children. To help the families as well as the children. So it’s not just isolating care for the child it helps educate and empower the parents as well. Organizing everything from holidays, to the way you get in and out of a building, medical care and all those things. It’s an incredibly worthwhile event. And I realize the irony of a bunch of unfeasibly rich people in glad rags turning out to eat a fabulous meal, in the name of charity is, forever, a kind of contradiction and irony. But if it raises the money then it is worth it.

RA: Well exactly. It puts them in the right frame of mind to open their wallets.

REG: Yes.

RA: Fingers crossed.

REG: Yes I think they are going to raise in excess of £200,000 tonight.

RA: Cause there’s a charity casino there, isn’t there?

REG: There is. So they’ll be fleecing the mega rich billionaires. Of which there are many. Very, very rich people have a sort of shiny gleam to every part of their clothing and body.

RA: But Richard you’re wealthy. You have that shiny gleam.

REG: Oh thank you Richard. Laughs.

RA: We’ve seen you in Gosford Park gleaming shinerly.

REG: Yeah! Playing a servant.

RA: Laughs.

REG: Exactly. Yeah.

RA: I’m amazed you got the time off to do this. Cause we had Arabella Weir in the studio not so long a go.

REG: Oh yeah.

RA: She was spilling the beans on you and Posh Nosh.

REG: Alright yes. I’m doing a film at the moment in Africa. About Napoleon’s last years on Saint Helena. Playing the English governor who was falsely accused of poisoning the old, Corsican Emperor. So I wasn’t sure if I would be able to be here tonight. But I’ve got 4 days off, so I squirreled in. And I’ll be working with Arabella in the autumn. So I’m glad she’s not bad mouthed me yet. Laughs

RA: Not yet. Laughs.

REG: No not yet.

RA: Have you seen anything there that you want to buy then?

REG: Yeah. A pantechnic’s worth … but in your dreams. I could never afford to buy the stuff. But it’s like window-shopping. There are beautiful people to look at and beautiful things to admire. So it’s worthwhile.

RA: Richard it’s just one more blockbuster away. That’s all it is.

REG: One blockbuster away.

RA: Thanks for joining us tonight Richard.

REG: Alright Richard.

RA: And you can enjoy yourself now.

REG: Thanks a lot.

RA Take it easy.

REG: Bye.

RA: Night Night…… Richard E Grant at the Grosvenor House for the Antique Fair Charity Gala evening. Raising, well hopefully raising, and hopefully meeting lots of money by the sounds of it.

Fades into ‘Air That I Breathe’ by Simply Red.(With thanks to Sarah for de-lurking and informing REGiment of broadcast. Hope you de-lurk more often.)

Denise J Hale
Transcribed 1st July 2002

We now have an audio recording of the interview which you can listen to below.

Watch Magazine – June/July, 2002

By Paolo Hewitt Photography: Lawrence Watson

In 1986, Richard E. Grant was handed a script entitled Withnail And I. Within a year he was a household name and about to build a career as one of Britain’s most celebrated actors. Paolo Hewitt spoke to the man who wears two watches at all times. Further on, Richard selects his all time favourite movies.

Thursday, midday at the cafe in Harvey Nichols where the actor Richard E. Grant sits waiting at a table. As I approach, Grant rises to meet me and it is then that I notice he is wearing two watches on either wrist. One is set to British summertime, the other to the time in Swaziland.

“I would wear ten on each arm if my wife wouldn’t shoot me,” he enthuses, settling down. “I love watches. My wife once gave me a Cartier watch and I would love a Patek Philippe. I have a box of watches at home. It all goes back to when I was seven and I was given a watch. My parents had been to Switzerland and I got one as a birthday present. I will always remember the thrill of that.”

Right now, Richard E. Grant’s profile is neither high nor low. Which is how it has been for many years. This is an actor who bucks modern trends and tends not to draw attention to himself in the media. He prefers to concentrate on the delivery of good work in the firm belief that from there all things will follow. So far this low key approach has proved correct. He has worked continuously in the cinema for the last sixteen years.

His latest film is the Robert Altman-directed Gosford Park which is still holding well at the box office. No wonder. The film is classy, extremely well made and features a plethora of name British actors – Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Clive Owen, to name but four. Yet for many people, it is Grant’s icy cold butler that steals the show.

He is now preparing to play opposite Richard Roxburgh in a new version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound Of the Baskervilles before moving on to play a major role in a film examining Napoleon’s final years. Interestingly, the film will be directed by Antoine De Cadenet, best known in the UK as the presenter of Eurotrash.

“In France,” Richard explains, “Antoine is known as a film director, an actor and a writer. Over here he is just known as the Eurotrash guy, There is so much more to him.”

This comment prompts me to ask him if he has noted the English tendency to be highly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t stay in the box assigned to them.

Grant smiles and nods knowingly ” I found that out when I published my two books, With Nails and By Design, that you mustn’t get out of your place. Journalists really don’t like it.”

Richard’s first book, With Nails, contained the diary he kept during the making of several of his films, By Design is a novel set in Hollywood. The heavy critical sniping afforded the latter project wasn’t strong enough, however, to dent his belief in his writing talents.

He has just finished a screenplay about his father’s life — he was a well-regarded Minister Of Education in Swaziland — and is now raising funds for the film. He also has permission to film in his home country of Swaziland where he was born on May 6th, 1957. He describes the country of his childhood as an, “Equatorial Ealing, circa 1950. They only got television in Swaziland at the end of the ’70s. So it was a time warp, last-gasp-of-empire, luxurious, easy colonial lifestyle.”

His school was called Waterford and Nelson Mandela’s children were contemporaries. He enjoyed his schooldays immensely so much so that he is now a trustee of the school and an enthusiastic fund-raiser of bursaries for cash-strapped but academically gifted kids to attend the school. (Ebel watches very kindly agreed to donate a Ladies Beluga timepiece to this charity.)

Richard got the acting bug early He acted in school plays, the local theatre, anything that would take him. But his chances of shaping a career out of acting in Swaziland remained non-existent.

“Saying that you wanted to be an actor in Swaziland,” he reveals, “was as daft as saying you wanted to be an astronaut. The chances were zero. I’m just so grateful that it worked out.”

Grant’s obsession and drive was sustained by that great rush of American movies made between 1969 and 1977 and directed by an iconoclastic generation of new directors such as Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Bob Rafelson. Their work was dominated by one impulse –- to make ground breaking movies. The formation of this new type of cinema followed Grant’s admission to Capetown University to study the theatre.

He passed his degree and in 1982, he came to England to find out if he had any acting talent. He was twenty-five years old.

“I had two suitcases, a couple of boxes of cassettes, a Walkman, a phone number and this blind hope that I could find my fortune here,” he recalls. ” I gave myself ten years. If it didn’t work out I was going to go home and make pineapple punches in a bar.”

To support himself Grant took on a variety of second-hand jobs – painting and decorating, driving – whilst in his spare time, he found acting work in the usual outlets of fringe work, repertory tours, and Shakespeare in Regents Park. 1986, he was handed a script which would literally change his life. It was called Withnail and I.

“They gave me this script which had no stars, no women and no car chases,” he says. “Meanwhile the biggest film of that year was the action adventure film, Crocodile Dundee.”

The film boasted many firsts. It was Grants first lead role in a film. His co-star, Paul MaGann had never acted in a movie, whilst Bruce Robinson, had never directed before. A promising start.

“From our point of view,” Richard recalls, “it was a real us against the world mentality that we developed and we had a very good time making it. I remember the crew saying to all of us, it will be a very long time before you work on a movie as good as this one. It was true. The feeling from the crew, as well as making a film which nobody really wanted to he made, was really good. I became life-long friends with so many people from that film.”

On its UK release, Withnail and 1 lasted a month at London’s Odeon Haymarket cinema and then disappeared from view.

Then it came out on video. From there, an appreciative audience gave it what every work of art most desires – massive word of mouth recommendation. It was re-released in the cinema to huge critical and commercial acclaim, has recently been made available on DVD and is the subject of numerous internet sites.

Grant followed the movie with Bruce Robinson’s next protect, How To Get Ahead In Advertising. It was seen as Withnail’s follow up and it bombed. But Grant didn’t. His spot-on portrayals of uptight men, constrained by back ground and class yet forever suggesting a latent menace, has been viewed favourably by name directors, many of whom inspired him so much in his youth.

He worked with Martin Scorsese on Age Of Innocence, his hero Francis Ford Coppola on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and has featured in three Robert Altman movies: The Player, Pret A Porter and Gosford Park.

Yet once his work is in the public domain, Grant walks away from it, ignores it. The work is now out of his control.

“Seeing yourself up there so large,” he explains, “it is a contradiction because on the one hand you are saying, Give the role to me over X number of people. Yet when you watch it you always think, how on earth did I get this job in the first place? Paranoia shoots in. Then you have to think to yourself well having done it for twenty years now, you obviously do some thing that other people think is alright or else they wouldn’t employ you.”

He glances at his London watch and his piercing blue eyes adopt a pleading look. Time to go, time to disappear, a time still ruled by the need to do good, to do well.

Watch magazine would like to Thank Ebel for their donation to Richard E. Grant’s charity and to John Lobb for their full support and co-operation.

Richard writes about his all time top movies here.

Watch Magazine – June/July, 2002

Cabaret
(DIRECTOR: BOB FOSSE, 1972)

I loathe musicals in general but loved this one, precisely because the singing only happens where people actually sing, i.e in a cabaret club or a German beer garden, which means that you are spared the acorn-clenching, pube-straightening embarrassment of folk bleating into song in the middle of anywhere. Based on Isherwood’s informative years in Berlin during the ’30’s, The story was directed by Bob Fosse who used the songs to counterpoint the rise of Nazism with chilling effect. Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli gave career best performances as the emcee and Sally Bowles, respectively. The females in the cabaret band looked like real old slags and the clientele straight out of a George Grosse cartoon. The sense of people caught up in an historical landslide and unable to decipher the disaster ahead had an obvious parallel with the political situation in neighbouring South Africa and its tragic head-in-the-sand tactics. The film perfectly captured this conundrum. I also hugely admired the cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth who made you feel you that you were actually seated at one of the smoky tables in the Kit Kat club watching a cabaret.

I saw it again in Budapest just as the iron curtain had been lifted and the Hungarians stood in long lines to see it, responding with visceral emotion to the Nazism which clearly struck them as ‘current’ as opposed to something that happened in the dim and distant past. Very potent and powerful, and Liza Minnelli, dressed in a plunging halter neck and hot pants, looked pretty sassy to a fifteen year old.

Nashville
(DIRECTOR: ROBERT ALTMAN, 1975)

Robert Altman’s country and western, multicharacter, grand old soap opera is stuffed with small town intrigue, gossip, rituals, sing-a-things and provincial pomp amidst tatty circumstance. It is not that far off the incestuous nature of small town colonial life. All the actors got to write their own songs, improvise and collaborate on the script, which seemed a totally revolutionary way to go about making a film. I dreamt that if any director was worth working for, it had to be this maverick, little realising that twenty years down the line, I would have the privilege of working with the maestro three times – The Player, Pret a Porter and Gosford Park. I obsessively got to see this film a total of 27 times, never tiring of the multiple story lines and corner-of-frame details. Film buffs were rewarded this year with the publication of the ‘Nashville Chronicles’, which were all about the making of the movie. Indelible highlights include Gwen Welles’ misguided song and strip, the miniskirted Barbara Harris belting out the finale to cover the assassination, Lilly Tomlin singing gospel in an all African-American choir, Geraldine Chaplin giving a yellow-bus car cemetery the poetic treatment, Karen Black’s crosseyed self-centered diva turn…….plus, plus, plus…..

Some Like It Hot
(DIRECTOR: BILLY WILDER, 1959)

The all time perfect comedy with perfect casting. It boasts a tight-as-a-clam script by Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond, great dialogue, insane situations and its spirit of farce under-towed by a gangster flick featuring the real life one-time hood, George ‘Spats’ Raft. Thinking of this film makes me think of Joe E. Brown wheezing with lust and laughter for Jack Lemon’s female impersonation, Monroe warbling, ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, Tony Curtis’s Cary Grant impression and seething rage at everything going wrong, Jack Lemmon’s castanet cantata….on and on. This movie never fails to deliver. I should also say that this film was another drive-in experience but this time accompanied by various snoggings and fumblings on the back seat.

Don’t Look Now
(DIRECTOR: NIC ROEG, 1973)

This film is director Nic Roeg’s version of the Du Maurier story, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, set in a wintry deserted Venice. It contains the best sex scene in a regular film I’ve ever seen and that’s because they really looked like they loved each other and were doing it for real. Along with ‘Cabaret,’ this film too made incredible use of cross-cutting and fast editing to great dramatic effect. The sense of foreboding is palpable. As for the actors, Sutherland hailed from a small Canadian town, had a long face and made it into the movies without having to look like Robert Redford, giving hope to another long-faced kid from a small town in the middle of nowhere with dreams of being in flicks but who wasn’t Redford square jawed. I actually got to kiss my teen idol, Julie Christie, playing her toy boy husband in Dennis Potter’s last outing, ‘Karaoke’. The only thing was, I was made up to have a black eye, broken lip and swollen jaw, which somewhat quelled the ‘moment’. Still, it was a teenage fantasy come partly, albeit professionally, true.

Toy Story II
(DIRECTOR: JOHN LASSITER, 1999)

Alongside ‘The Godfather II,’ it’s the best sequel of the past ten years. Great characters, story effects and chase sequences. Witty, original, touching and moving by turn. The restoration of ‘Woody’ by the old skinny Gepetto figure is up there with the best bits in ‘Pinocchio’. It made me feel all of ten years old again without feeling schlocky or feeling patronized. Plus you get the bonus of the sardonic songs and computer animation that has more ‘reality’ than most of the ‘Phantom Menace’s’ C.G.I, effects put together. I am just so grateful that I have a daughter and can pretend that I went to see it as many times as I did in the cause of good fatherdom.

A Clockwork Orange
(DIRECTOR: STANLEY KUBRICK, 197l)

I grew up in Swaziland, a last-gasp-of-empire colony in SouthEast Africa, which is bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. Being the ‘Switzerland’ of Africa, it was allowed to show films banned in either neighbouring country. A Clockwork Orange was a regular tourist feature, as was being able to buy Playboy magazine and watching movies on a Sunday, which just about gives you an idea how socially restricted things were then. The movie was shown at the only cinema, called the Queensway, and always at ten pm and midnight, charging double the going rate for an ordinary flick. My best friend and I were hell-bent on getting into this X-rated epic and tried all manner of forward hair-brushing, voice-lowering and hipster pants-wearing ploys to get past the old boiler in the box office, this being 1972, and me a pimply faced teenager. We finally tried a dose of undiluted charm and flattery which went like this: we pitched up at 9.55, ducking and diving, hoping not to be seen by any lurking parent we might know. Then, jamming our faces to the box office window, we told our adversary, ‘D’you know who you are the spitting image of?

‘No,’ she replied with interest’

‘Elizabeth Taylor.’

The grecian haired lady blurted out, ‘D’you really think so?’.
‘Absolutely.’ ‘Spitting image. Now, my friend and I are studying the novel at school and wonder if you could make an exception on educational grounds, just this once and let us in?’.

She checked to her left and right then tore off two tickets and whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ To which I gallantly replied, ‘Thanks Liz’, eliciting a flurry of gums and smiles. We bolted inside.

We had heard all manner of how ‘horror show’ the film was and had listened to the soundtrack trying to imagine what it all looked like. We examined the poster for more clues but nothing quite prepared us for the shock of actually seeing it. Having only ever visited London a few times, the vision of a violent, ‘droog’ riddled city, albeit set in the near future, was sobering. Malcolm McDowell’s iconic ‘Alex’ was nothing short of hypnotic and I felt a post-dated frisson meeting him when he appeared as himself in a cameo in ‘The Player’. In fact I became star struck and lock-jawed.

Such was the film’s power I decided then and there in that cinema that when I next visited London, I’d kit myself out in armour-plated anti-thug gear to fend off any marauding ‘droogs’.

Pulp Fiction
(DIRECTOR: QUENTIN TARANTINO, 1994)

Or how to follow up ‘Reservoir Dogs’ with something as good. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in the restaurant shoot out for starters, Travolta’s career-swivelling comeback from the ‘Look Who’s Talking’ wastelands, the Royale Burger dialogue with Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta’s dancing with Uma Thurman, doing voodoo eye back and forth before plunging the needle into Uma’s chest, the soundtrack that declares its ‘fuck-you-fuck-me’ credentials upfront, Bruce Willis in anti-smirk form, it’s sheer audacity and chutzpah and so much more.

The Godfather
(DIRECTOR FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 1972)

The Queensway cinema burnt down, so a couple of doctors had the brainwave of opening up a drive-in cinema on a farm outside the capital, as the climate was so hot. Hot enough, actually, to turn every car into an instant sauna or else risk an infestation of mosquitoes if the windows were left open.

Coppola film turned up about a year after it had been released around the world and had won a pile of Oscars, so it came with high expectations. The problem with a drive-in is the sound system, which consists of a small metal speaker which gets clamped onto a window so the sound is all mono. Added to which, Marion Brando had a mouth full of cotton wool, so his dialogue was entirely indecipherable. However, despite the sound setbacks, we prevailed and were totally mesmerised by this family portrait of the Mafiosi, were staggered by Sonny Corleone’s Peckinpah-like assassination at the toll booth, and riveted by the cast – most of whom I’d never seen or heard before – which in retrospect reads like a who’s who of the very finest. But more than anything, the Godfather made me determined to eat spaghetti bolognese for the rest of my life. I subscribed to two monthly film magazines and slavishly film-buffed up on all the facts, never really believing, despite dreaming, that I would become a professional actor and that I would ever make it into the movies. I never would have guessed that thirteen years later I would get a part in ‘Dracula’ directed by Coppola himself.

The Godfather II
(DIRECTOR: FRANCIS PORD COPPOLA, 1974)

By 1974 the Queensway had been restored and reopened as the Cinelux, the luxe being wall to wall-to-ceiling blue carpeting, the glue for which hung in the torpid air for well over a year. Every time 1 catch a whiff of that particular product, the Godfather tune plops into my cranium. This film is the only instance I can think of where the sequel is as good as, if not better than the original, with the supreme bonus of Robert de Niro playing Don Corleone as a young man. The expansion of the Corleone family and their rise to power in Sicily via Cuba, Miami, Vegas, New York and Lake Tahoe is operatically plotted and paced. The film has some unforgettable set pieces and is full of brilliant domestic detail – Diane Keaton being thrown out of the Tahoe estate, the murdered hooker and the politician story, Mo Green’s massage table death, Fredo’s ‘fishing trip’ where he joins the fishes, Pacino’s death mask features at the end……

Forward to the DVD decade and the Godfather trilogy is available in its unadulterated whole. It has been re-cut chronologically and makes for epic viewing. As for the third in the trilogy, I watched ‘Godfather III’ at a midnight showing in Hollywood along with four lone punters and was drawn in by the familiar family story, despite a lack of horse-in-the-bed highs that mark the first two.

Here are two more articles about Richard. Both of them are from 1989 and appeared in Film Review Magazine, but in different months. The first article, “Taken for Granted”, can be seen here.

In the second piece, Richard is asked questions about his acting, his techniques and how he brings the characters he plays to life. It also tells us that he has produced a lunchtime play in London! You can read that one here.

Thanks to Jolie for passing these articles on to the site.