L.A. Times

Those who missed the 1987 British comedy the first time around can join its fervent followers with its return on cassette.

By: Donald Liebenson – Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based freelancer who writes about home video

Count on the video re-release of “Withnail & I” to be celebrated by a heretofore secret society of devotees, a growing cult whose fanatical devotion to the film borders on the pathological. Comedian Margaret Cho says she has seen the 1987 misfit British comedy more than 40 times. Paul Rudd, co-star of “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” claims to have seen it 60 times. Steve Martin simply calls it “one of the best comedies of the 1980s.”

“Withnail & I” is available on the Anchor Bay Entertainment label for the suggested price of $14.95. That the video has been off the market five years has only fueled its underground status and made the original video release a prized commodity for retailers lucky enough to own a copy. At Rocket Video on La Brea Avenue, a copy the store recently procured (“We paid a lot of money for it”) has rented 26 times in less than a month. Since 1988, Vidiots in Santa Monica has gone through five copies (some wore out, others were stolen), which have cumulatively rented an estimated 955 times. One customer recently paid $200 for a copy. It is with no understatement that Jay Douglas, Anchor Bay vice president of acquisitions, said, “We’re glad to have the film. We feel we’re doing a public service.”

Not that he fully appreciated just what he had when he acquired “Withnail” as part of the Handmade Films library, which includes films with more consumer awareness and box-office cachet, including “The Long Good Friday” and “Mona Lisa” (already released) and “Time Bandits” and Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” (next summer). “The conventional thinking was the most commercial of the films would have been ‘Time Bandits’ and ‘Life of Brian,’ ” Douglas said, “but the most calls we’ve gotten are about ‘Withnail & I.’ I’m still trying to figure out how I missed it the first time around.” He’s not alone. The film grossed $1.4 million in its original U.S. run–a decent showing for an art-house film of that era–but it obviously has escaped the attention of much of the moviegoing public.

“Withnail & I” was directed by Bruce Robinson, an actor and writer who was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for “The Killing Fields.” The semiautobiographical “Withnail” was based on his experiences with a fellow drama student named Vivian, who, Robinson notes in the 10th-anniversary edition of the screenplay, “was brilliant at being Vivian.” Richard E. Grant, in his first film role, stars as the Byronesque Withnail, with Paul McGann as “I.” They are decrepit young actors in 1969 London who are “drifting into the arena of the unwell” and who take an ill-fated holiday at the miserable country home of Withnail’s flamboyantly grandiloquent Uncle Monty.

Grant said he faced two obstacles in getting the role. First, he was allergic to alcohol and didn’t smoke cigarettes, two activities his character did to excess. Second, Daniel Day-Lewis was up for the role, and at the time he had just gained acclaim for “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “A Room With a View.” “He was offered everything at that point,” Grant said. “[But] he chose to do ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ When I worked with him on ‘Age of Innocence,’ I literally got down on my knees and said, ‘Thank you, O Daniel.’ ”

In England, “Withnail & I” has inspired proselytes to make pilgrimages to the film’s locations, such as Regent’s Park in London, where a solitary Withnail delivers a climactic wine-enhanced soliloquy from “Hamlet” to a cage of wolves. The film has also spawned a drinking game in which participants try to match drink for drink what the characters imbibe (the lighter fluid, which a desperate Withnail downs at one point, is not recommended). It was serendipity that “Withnail” was re-released theatrically this year in England while Grant was touring the country to promote his published collection of film diaries. “During the question-and-answer,” he said in a phone interview, “the thing people wanted to know about was this movie–what you would think would totally be trivial, the most ridiculous information, they couldn’t have enough of it. I said, ‘What is wrong with you people, you’re sick in the head.’

Grant said he finds it extraordinary that this unassuming, low-budget film could arouse such ardor a decade later. “At the time that we made it,” he said, “they said the title would have to be changed. . . . There was no sex other than Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Monty making assignations toward Paul McGann. It had none of the things that were supposed to make people go into a theater. But it just struck a chord in England in a way that nobody could have foreseen.” The “Withnail” phenomenon seems more like a subculture, rather than a community affair in the way of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Star Trek.” In England, students make up much of the most passionate “Withnail” fan base, says Ian Nathan, an editor for Empire, a British film magazine that has long championed the movie. “The whole idea of living in squalor and alcohol being a guiding principle in life are very much part of Britain’s student culture,” Nathan said. “The characters are very much lone figures with an us-against-the-world attitude that people really appreciate.”

In the United States, “Withnail” has found its audience on video. One employee at the Beverly Hills Video Center said, “A lot of people come into our store for the first time just because we have this movie.” Said Margaret Cho: “I liked the look of the video box. I watched it and I just screamed and howled. It’s one of the funniest films ever made. But it’s not that simple. It reflects the changing of the times and of the seasons in someone’s life. My ritual is that when I have to leave early [in the morning] to go on a trip, I’ll watch a little bit of ‘Withnail’ while waiting for the car so I will be soothed for my long journey.” Actor Donal Logue, of the just-canceled CBS series “Public Morals,” rhapsodizes about the film, peppering his ruminations with its dialogue: “There isn’t a moment that isn’t rich. I think in film there is the element of the ghost in the machine. I’ve worked on a lot of movies, and they’re logistical nightmares to make. For a movie like this to come together, where all the elements caught everybody at their stride, to me it’s a marvel, like a great musical experience when all the elements are chiming correctly.”

Paul Rudd views Grant’s performance as “a tremendous acting lesson.” “When you get to that level of drunkenness . . . you imagine yourself to be exactly like Richard E. Grant is. After a few Scotches, I would love to think of myself as sharp-tongued, erudite, a cynic who is painfully funny.” Like those who can quote “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” verbatim, “Withnail” fans find a common bond in some of the script’s most memorable lines: “We’re on holiday by mistake.” “Yet again that oaf has destroyed my day.” “I mean to have you–even if it must be burglary.” Grant often hears these words recited back to him. “People will not let me forget it,” he said. “When I’m working in the States or gone through airports or been in Godforsaken places where I wouldn’t have expected anybody to have found this movie, there is always one person who has that look in their eye and will come over and say that they know about this movie, as though they’re the only person on the planet that knew about it.” Grant regards the film as his calling card in Hollywood. He recalled meeting Robin Williams at an Oscar party and, at the behest of Julia Roberts, being introduced to Steven Spielberg on the set of “Hook.” Both, he said, addressed him as “that Withnail guy.” Tim Curry, who 20 years later still fends off questions about “Rocky Horror,” warned Grant about this. “When I was working on ‘L.A. Story,’ ” Grant said, “I met him through a mutual friend. He said to me that no matter how long I lived, it was going to haunt me. I said that I’d rather be haunted than totally ignominious and anonymous.”

“Withnail” is not yet scheduled for a theatrical re-release in the United States, but a representative of Toronto-based Paragon Entertainment, which owns Handmade Films, said talks with distributors are in progress. Until then, the video release will make “Withnail” more accessible–a mixed blessing to its fans, who are on the one hand proprietary but on the other willful in compelling non-initiates to watch. “Everyone who knows me has seen the film,” Cho said, laughing. “It’s the introduction to me.” “The true fanatics insist it’s nice to have a gem that is somewhat secret,” Rudd said. “But for the people involved [in making the film], you want as many people to see it as possible. I’ve probably turned 30 people on to the movie, so I’m obviously not too private in my enjoyment of the film.”

Australian HQ Magazine – 1998

By Colin Hughes

In Hollywood, Richard E. Grant has been doing more than making it as a fine actor. With a pencil as sharp as his wit, he’s been taking notes for a scathing satire on megastardom.

Richard E. Grant’s about-to-be published first novel is about celebrity. As he says, “best to write about what you know.” In it, a Hollywood star describes the four faces celebrity wears. There’s the screen face, the “many metre high-rise version” that appears on billboards; the supermarket face (“daren’t look miserable in case you’re spotted”)’ the recognize-me-but-I’m-normal-too face (which is “carefully controlled easygoing”); and a “homey” face, reserved for nearest and dearest (also a put-on, because you have to pretend to be happy and confident when your mum asks where your next job is coming from). The character then admits to a fifth, the “naked-panic” face, reserved for the bathroom mirror and lovers only.

When Grant showed the passage in draft to his wife, Joan Washington, a voice trainer, she laughed out loud. She knows how true it is. It’s that multitude of masks that casts a doubt on whatever actors say about themselves. We don’t trust them to be what they project. Yet we also know that actors have ordinary doubts and fears and privacies. In Grant’s case it’s doubly odd, because when he writes about actors pretending to be what they aren’t, we also know that he is one (and a good one, at that). Where does the truth lie?

Grant delights in the paradox. Indeed, he revels in the surreal interplay between what is deeply felt and easily pretended. What a game, you see him thinking; but a game he plays very seriously, because all the time he’s performing or telling tales he’s also exploiting the rich source of his own emotional experience.

Here’s a man who came from nowhere to be the overnight star of Withnail & I (so utterly identified with the character that people think he is Withnail), who went on to make a string of big films with great directors (Altman, Scorsese, Coppola), who counts superstars among his best friends, publishes his hilariously perceptive diaries to wide acclaim, writes a (not at all bad) novel, and aspires to direct his own screenplay at the earliest opportunity. No wonder he gets nicknames like Outrageous (from Gary Oldman) or Relentless (from Steve Martin).

Nor is it any wonder that people so often want to shout, “Stand up, the real Richard E. Grant!” – but they’re missing the point. The real Grant is already standing up over there, cocking his high forehead to one side, watching you from behind that charming, slightly agonized smile. You get to see the bits he’s chosen to show, in the way he decides.

The narrator-protagonist of Grant’s new novel, By Design, grows up on a comfortable English household in a small African state. Wanting urgently to escape its sleazy pretension he contrives a new life for himself in Los Angeles designing homes for megastars. The character chronicles the screen monsters he encounters in a maniacal satire that is Grant’s natural mode but also keeps his private life literally hidden from view, behind a wall that looks like a garden hedge. He relishes a role in the in the Hollywood madness but a part of him is always observing, uninvolved.

This is so obviously a tilted self-description that is reads like a joke at Grant’s own expense. He grew up in Swaziland, a beautiful tiny country on the eastern edge of South Africa. One of the last imperial outposts, Swaziland was granted independence at the end of the 60s, by which time it had filled up with white-mischief refugees – colonials escaping from other formerly Brit territories who couldn’t bear who couldn’t bear to go “home” to Sussex and Surrey.

Bruce Robinson, who chose him to play Withnail, says: “I couldn’t believe Grant was an African – he seemed a Bournemouthian – but I guess it was a residual of this ‘superior’ albeit loathsome imperialism in his blood that created his brilliant Withnail. I’m sure Africa was full of swine like Withnail in the late 19th century. Arrogant and useless white trash, loud as yobs, except educated.”

Grant says that he feels “ambivalent” about his homeland now. He talks about the analogies between the film industry and colonial Swazi society: how it had a strict hierarchical pecking order, but that “people invented themselves, everybody seemed to be a character of some sort”. He admits that: “I found all the intrigue and the gossip and the shenanigans that went on endlessly fascinating. What I loathed was that my own life ended up being the subject of a major scandal when my parents divorced.” He was 11 when his mother, out of the blue, woke him up one morning to say she was leaving and not coming back. She was having an affair with a mining engineer and ran off to Johannesburg. Grant’s father was wrecked, and the boy found himself almost having to “parent my own parent”.

He acknowledges that his mother’s sudden departure was painful, “but it’s a long time ago, I don’t think about it on a daily basis at all”. The he adds so briskly that he’s obviously deflecting any further questions: “No, the death of my father is far more a touchstone, a guide, an ‘if only’. I’m the same age now as he was when he got OBE’d and the country got independence and he divorced.”

The family lived in a smart house (three servants indoors, three out) overlooking Ezulweni, which means Valley of Heaven. Grant’s father, Henrik, was the Swazi minister of education, so popular with the black population that the new government kept him on in the job post-independence. But he was a heavy smoker, fell ill with cancer of the lung which spread to his brain, and died at 51.

Grant says his greatest regret is the feeling of “helplessness when somebody is suffering and dying and there’s nothing you can do”. In the diaries he reports that his reaction to seeing the first rushes of Withnail was wanting “to weep that my father is not alive to see this”.

He seems accepting of his mother now (she split up with the mining engineer but wed another man later on) but the relationship with his younger brother, Stuart, is far more prickly. When Grant scored fame, the News of the World carried a breathtakingly bitter interview with Stuart, by then an accountant in Johannesburg, which sniped at his older brother for putting on airs and graces – “Richard was more like an estranged sister to me than a brother.” Stuart also accused Richard of swanning into their father’s funeral in 1981, hair carelessly dyed orange, after having absented himself during the illness. That was the last time they met – and they didn’t speak to each other then.

“I’ve had no contact with him, and never did before,” Grant says about the interview. “It’s something that came out, like a pustule, and disappeared again. I’ve been asked: ‘Is there some feud? When did you fall out? I mean, I never fell in, in order to fall out. There was just never any common ground.”

What is clear is that the young Richard showed every sign of wanting to escape – literally, in the sense of getting away from his country, his people, his background – but also metaphorically, into another more glamorous and beguiling world, initially in his own head but later on the stage, on the screen and in his own stories.

Grant leads a disciplined life. He eats ultra-healthily (no coffee, no tea, no dairy products, no alcohol) because he wants to live to 120. To write the novel he set aside five months, started each day at 9 am, broke for an hour for lunch, finished at 7 pm, five days a week till he got it done.

That kind of dedication is all of a piece with his obsessive diary writing. It’s not unusual for children to keep a diary where they can play out the universal miseries of teendom, but few keep up the scribbling into adulthood, conducting a daily conversation with themselves as Grant has done. He also has a “memory room” at his home, where he stores all the precious memorabilia of his life.

At Waterford, the liberal boarding school he attended in southern Africa, “he was one of those boys who was liked but who was definitely on the dork side,” recalls a former classmate, Maryann Cullinan. “Richard was very quiet at first, never very pushy, and then he became lively and bubbly and expressed that personality.”

It was drama that brought about the change in him. Stephen Jennings, now an actor in Johannesburg, was year behind Grant in Waterford. He recalls him doing an improvised skit at school, in which Grant played an author sitting at his typewriter tapping out a kind of “on a dark and stormy night” story. Jennings played an intruder, acting out the story as Grant typed it out loud. “The audience laughed but I don’t think they knew what improvisation was. He didn’t care, he’d tried something new. I have a photo of the skit and the character is him – thin, erect, masculine but elegant, manic but ‘clean’, with a wild energy that comes out not blindly, but smooth and focused.”

Grant himself recalls being captivated by film goddesses (he worships Barbara Streisand, a passion formed at the Swaziland Cinelux). And he vividly remembers the eye-popping experience of seeing Hair and Oliver on a visit to London with his father and stepmother in 1969: “I preferred Oliver,” he says.

His theatrical ambitions burst into full flower while he was at the University of Cape Town. In his diaries, he reports a conversation in a plane with Joel Silver, producer of Hudson Hawk, who asks what drove him to act. Grant replies: “Revenge! To prove to all those little fuckers who said, ‘You can’t, you’ll never make it,’ that I could.”

In his second year at University, Grant helped set up the Troupe Theatre Company, a touring group producing avant-garde and left-wing theatre that resonated amount anti-establishment audiences. Says Sean Taylor, another member of the group who is now acting in Johannesburg: “We were incredibly full of ourselves. But we also did some very exciting theatre.”

Despite the avant-garde credentials, Grant was never particularly political – a bit leftie, anti-apartheid of course, but not an activist. Now he says he finds it hard returning to South Africa but is wary of explaining why for fear that he will offend people: “I just think economic apartheid has replaced the other kind. I don’t know that people have really changed….” he starts to trail off and then adds: “Whites are congratulating themselves on aiding and abetting the change, but you know that the majority, well, it’s not really what they’d like to have!”

There is a faint suspicion among his Swazi and South African acquaintances that Grant is a little embarrassed about his South African connection: they notice how he evades questions about his university days in interviews. Certainly his friends all knew he would “go to Europe” once he’d completed his studies. His father’s death removed any lingering reason to remain.

For the first five years he languished in London, struggling to get work (money was not a big problem: he inherited a considerable sum). Any actor who has read the opening sequence of his diaries can recognize the years of waiting for the break, one or two parts, a bit of Regent’s Park open air, always seeming to be busy, striving to jack up confidence.

Grant believed in himself, and he knew the break when it came. He had made a small award-winning film for TV about advertising, called Honest, Decent and True. That led to his audition for Withnail & I with Bruce Robinson, who describes Grant as having “ a kind of bitter charm that I was instantly attracted to – at his first audition he read it all wrong, except ‘Fork it!’ (referring to some filthy egg). He said it with such accurate passion, such loathing, while simultaneously lobbing his script at me, that I knew I had a Withnail.”

Withnail & I brought stardom. Hollywood, and a life divided between tortuous weeks on film sets and domestic idyll in London. Why was the film such a success? Seeing it now, a dozen years on, you’re struck by how easily it could have been dismissed as dated juvenilia. It works, still, partly because of the film’s memorable lines and images, and partly because of Grant’s gripping, manic intensity. Robinson says:

“Richard is a brilliant actor, although I don’t think he could play, or I could direct Withnail now – we know too much, and it would bugger us. When we made the film we were innocent. He had no idea what he looked like on screen, and I had virtually no idea how to get him there. Because we didn’t know the rules, we took risks.”

He could have vanished into obscurity, typecast forever. In fact he has been staggeringly successful, performing a much wider range of roles than people are inclined to realize. Directors mined his capacity for playing crazies – from the demented script-writer in The Player through to the megalomaniac in Hudson Hawk (a film he hates to be reminded of), and the Spice Girls’ frenetic manager in Spiceworld. But his talent is broader than that – Henry and June, Dracula, Pret-a-Porter, Age of Innocence. As Robinson says: “Don’t let that fey, shrivelled little wallflower of an ego fool you. He is enormously talented and he knows it! He can act, he can write, he can play the fucking flute. And he costs less than Burt Reynolds!”

For a 12-year film career, the list of credits is impressive. In fact, you get a distinct impression that Grant decided never to turn down a plausible part. He would, though, turn down theatre. Although he went back to the stage briefly after Withnail it was a painful experience that he clearly never wants to repeat. He performed opposite Dame Maggie Smith in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Gossip says the Dame froze him out, but he won’t discuss it – just goes silent for a long while, as if reluctant to utter a word. “It was a very unhappy production,” he finally says. Then another long pause. “Dame Maggie Smith was very unhappy in it.” Like many confirmed screen actors he finds the grind of night-after-night theatre performance “absolutely brain-damaging” and sees no puristic virtue in working the boards.

So, loads of success, no superstardom. And he seems to prefer it that way, choosing his famous friends rather obviously among the ranks of self-deprecating skeptics and scathing wits, rather than the grand and glossy: Steve Martin, Gary Oldman, Sandra Bernhard, Hugh Grant (absolutely no relation). He finds the megastars “riveting” to be among. But he says the monsters he portrays in his new novel aren’t a patch on the real thing: “Oh they’re much more monstrous than that in real life.” Nevertheless, he portrays them sympathetically. “I defy anybody not to have their head turned by megastardom,” he says, “because it is a completely abnormal existence. You live a life of extreme fantasy, you’re wonderful, you’re paid millions, everyone thinks you’re beautiful, brilliant, everyone’s gagging to hear your every word, capture your every expression, and then the next day you learn you’re ugly, you speak all wrong, you’re not talented after all, your last three movies were shit, and you’re gone. It’s so fast and ruthless.”

This is what the book is all about, but it’s also, very plainly, Grant’s own experience of one minute being adored, and the next being slated or scorned.

This year, just before shooting off to his house in Provence for a month’s break with the family, he took his daughter to Legoland. Suddenly he noticed a gang of kids pointing and laughing at him – “Laughing??!?” he says, genuinely annoyed and offended. “I mean, that doesn’t happen to you does it, complete strangers pointing at you and laughing?” Why were they laughing? “Oh I don’t know” he grumps, “I don’t know.”

He once wrote that his greatest fear was that “people see me as I see them”. It’s not misanthropy but rather an extreme sensitivity to the absurd awfulness of other people. His friend Stephen Jennings says perceptively, “The paradox of Richard, which is a great part of his charm, is that he cares deeply about what people think, and at the same time doesn’t give a damn – if you’ve got a proclivity for biting wit, you can’t afford to.”

Grant works hard at keeping his pins firmly on the ground, mostly through a successful marriage that has survived his breakaway success. Joan Washington is eight year older and has a son, Tom, from an earlier marriage. Grant met her in 1982 soon after he arrived in London (friends suspect she helped train away his South African accent), and they have a daughter, Olivia. The couple’s first child, Tiffany, lived just long enough to be named; she is now buried in an unmarked grave near their home.

At the end of our conversation, Grant wanted to know how I thought the novel would be received. Probably people will be surprised that it’s as good as it is, I told him, because he is an actor, and there’ll be a certain amount of disbelief or resentment that he can succeed with more than one talent. In other words, the reviews will be grudging. “That’s it,” booms Grant, lying back in his chair and thrusting out his gangly long legs, mime-writing the words on an invisible billboard in front of him: “’Grudging – The Guardian. I love it.

We’ll put it on the back of the paperback.”

October 1998

I got to meet REG a few months ago at a literature Festival in Cheltenham, UK (promoting BY DESIGN).

He gave a Q&A session for a sold out audience of hundreds of people. This was followed later by a book signing session. He was a great laugh and very witty and articulate.

My girlfriend and I got to speak to him on two occasions throughout the day and he made an effort to actually talk to people which is so cool. He even remembered me by name when I asked him to sign my book and pose for a photo later on in the day!!

He recently talked about how he’s negotiating to direct a movie based around his life in Swaziland, plus he’s had several offers to make BY DESIGN into a movie. He’s also mentioned having a couple of other major movie projects on the agenda (as well as another book), but we’ll have to wait and see!

Cheers!

John Abraham

Photo © Michelle Ayres

The Guardian Unlimited – Sunday 4th October, 1998

The following passage comes from an article about Ewan McGregor by Miranda Sawyer.

Ewan McGregor is one of the most extraordinary people you could ever meet; but what is startling about him is his delightful, dumbfounding ordinariness. His freakish normality. Richard E Grant noticed it when he worked with him on The Serpent’s Kiss. He called Ewan “astonishingly grounded considering the career tornado around him, it’s amazing his head doesn’t turn around 360 degrees”.

The Irish Times – 26th September, 1998

Richard E. Grant has proved with his writing that he is as skilled onpaper as on screen. He talks to Penelope Dening

With Nails, Richard E. Grant’s wonderfully irreverent diaries of Hollywood and other film madness, showed that the man who fixed himself forever in the film firmament of comedy with that seminal take on luvviedom, Withnail And I, is also a fine comic writer, as skilled at timing a laugh on paper as on camera.

Although Grant never intended With Nails to be a “sludgefest” like Julia Philips’s dissection of Hollywood’s underbelly, You’ll Never Work In This Town Again (“and she didn’t”), Tinseltown wasspared the full wasp-meets python treatment due to the shackles oflibel. Even so, his wife of 15 years, the voice-coach Joan Washington was terrified there would be a backlash. Not so, it seems. “The most potentially scurrilous chapter was the making of the ill-fated Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis,” says Grant.

“I’ve just been working in Scotland making a film called The Match and Tom Sizemore, who’s in Saving Private Ryan, said to me, ‘Oh I’m a great friend of Bruce and he says to send his best.’

Now, whether he has read it or even knows about it, I don’t know. But I think these things do tend to get back to people, so if he had been offended the last thing he would have done would be to send his regards via somebody else.” Fiction, however, presented no such problems. No surprise, then, that his publishers thought a novel might be worth a punt, and By Design is the very creditable result in which the worst excesses of massed Hollywood egos are chronicled by Grant’s enigmatic narrator, interior designer Vyvian, whose services extend as far as his clients’ bank balances will allow. (“Blood type D for discretion.”)

“I wanted somebody who would have constant and incredibly intimate access, and this was confirmed by all the interviews I did with the real thing in Los Angeles last year. These decorators all said we don’t know why a movie or a story hasn’t been written about us before because within two seconds on the recommendation of somebody else, we have the run of the house.

You’re taken on complete trust and you find out whether people are sleeping together, you see everything, their beds, their toilet paper, you hear the fantasies of what they want, their jealousies, their desperate one-upmanship.” Not that Grant has ever employed a decorator himself. “The notion of buying someone else’s taste is complete anathema to me. But I’ve been into these movie stars’ houses where you know they haven’t bought these things, and you know that they haven’t read these books because some of them can’t string four sentences together with any kind of literacy. Yet they’ve got leather-bound first editions of Dickens and stuff like that. And all that stuff is great feed.”

By Design was written in under four months. With The Scarlet Pimpernel set to start shooting in Prague last March, he says, there was no choice. “I knew I couldn’t possibly write at the same time as playing that part and being in a foreign country, so I just put my nose to it and wrote the thing. But you are very isolated and you get sort of institutionalised, in this room alone all the time nine to seven every day, and real life seems very loud and busy.” In comparison With Nails had been a doddle. “For me a diary is just part of the day’s activities. I’ve been writing them since I was 11. It’s a sort of meditation on the day as it were – something that I love to do and it’s completely habitual, as is letter writing and emailing. And that is entirely due to the geography of where I grew up.”

Richard E. Grant was born Richard Esterhuysen in a small town in Swaziland, a tiny country that nudges up to the eastern edge of South Africa and which in the 1960s was still part of the British Empire. His father was the local director of education (the E. stands for his original surname of Esterhuysen), his mother worked as a secretary until she ran off with another man when Richard was 11.

Always passionate about theatre (starting with puppet shows as a kid) Grant studied drama at university in Cape Town before coming to England in the early 1980s, by which time letter-writing to family and friends had become the norm. Landing the role of the eponymous Withnail in 1985 was the break that every actor dreams of, and his waspish yet endearing portrayal of the neurotic, alcohol-fuelled thesp who’s never going to make it ensured that – unlike his character – he did.

Although Richard E. Grant has featured on the credits of a dozen or more high-profile feature films since – working with Coppola, Altman and Scorsese to name but three – Withnail remains attached to Grant like a Siamese twin, loved but irritating as hell. Because the handsome man, with a touch of the undertaker in dead-pan black, still looks uncannily like Withnail – younger if anything, and certainly healthier. Watery blue eyes bulge slightly as he smiles like a small boy caught scrumping apples, replaced at a blink by a falcon glint when we indulge a mutual loathing of a mutual acquaintance.

Non-smoker and non-drinker, gossip is Richard E. Grant’s drug of choice. He asks as many questions as he answers (How old are you? What’s your real name?) arms flail and fingers stab the air as he derides actors who say they found fame by default, shouting “THEY LIE. THEY LIE.” He is consistently and wittily entertaining with no trace of the I’m-a-star-and-don’t-you-forget it aloofness favoured by other, less talented film-folk than he.

His current mentor is Steve Martin who he met working on LA Story nine years ago. “He’s an actor and a writer and he’s got a book about to come out in America, so you have an absolutely empathetic, sympathetic ear, knowing that somebody’s going through the exact same thing that you’re going through. And we get on fantastically well.” They don’t speak on the phone, but email each other three or four times a week.

“If you telephone somebody – particularly if they’re in another time zone – you either get an answer machine, which drives me nuts, or they’re about to go out, or you just haven’t got them at the right time. Whereas with a letter you can collect your thoughts and anecdotes and you also get into somebody’s mind which you never do any other way. It’s very intimate.” One of the joys of the research staying chez Martin in LA (“two weeks of honeymoon”) was being given the run of Roddy McDowell’s “astonishing” archive of diaries and other memorabilia of old-time Hollywood legends, not to be published within 50 years of McDowell’s death.

“I was intrigued by what these old stars do with their time. I know what retired English actors do – most of them don’t have a lot of money – but people who have been legends in their own life time in America, most of them know exactly what’s going on and would love to work. As it is they’re just sad figures wheeled out for tributes and funerals.” The need to work is the one common denominator that unites all actors, Grant contends. “No matter how good or bad or what strata of the profession that they’re in, everybody wants to work.” And whether you get work or not “is not about talent, it’s not about how good you are. It’s about these other factors in the ether that you have no control over whatsoever.”

Yet Grant has a high regard for today’s big hitters. “I wouldn’t dare be patronising by saying that the majority of American actors are overpaid dumb idiots. They are not by any chalk. What I’ve been riveted by is that the public persona of somebody is so set by the kind of roles that box office circumstances or looks have narrowed them down into playing.”

As for Richard E. Grant’s new public persona of author, he finds it “all very ego-massaging”. “I always thought that people come to see a film I was in because they liked the script, the director, the producer, the subject matter, the other actors in it. Whereas with a reading you unequivocably have to say that these people have come to see you. By the same token if they don’t turn up, then it’s also very clear that they don’t want to see you.” But they must come in droves, I say.

He smiles that Withnail smile. “If it sounds as if I don’t expect it, it’s because I don’t. And that’s my point. Film making is entirely collaborative, it absolutely and entirely depends on the script. So when you’ve written a script or a book yourself, you can’t blame anybody else.”

Richard E. Grant will give a reading from his new book at Waterstones, Dawson Street, Dublin, today at 7.30 p.m. Tickets £2 from the shop.