The Independent – 21st September, 1998

by Deborah A. Ross

Richard E Grant. Actor, novelist and diarist, whose entry for last Tuesday might have gone something like this: “Tuesday, September 15. To party, to celebrate the publication of my debut novel, `By Design’, at the Pharmacy restaurant and bar in West London. The tiresome girl from `The Independent’, the one my publishers made me have lunch with earlier, turns up. She says: `It’s just like having a drink down your local Boots, isn’t it?’ Pretend I’ve never seen her before in my life. Big, smoochy hug for Celia Imrie, who cries: `Richard! Fab book! How do you do it? Act, act, act, write, write, write…’ I’m all buttery, puppy-pleased until tiresome girl from `The Independent’ asks if this is luvvie-speak for `I hate you, you flash clever-dick’. Nibble something veggie on a little stick. Go home to beddy-byes. Dream that the tiresome girl didn’t tell me off for changing my name. Dream she didn’t say: `Richard Esterhuysen isn’t so bad. It could have been worse. It could have been Richard EstherRantzen.’ Then wake up and realise she did.”

OK, my experience, now. First, the lunch, where I wasn’t tiresome in the least. In fact, I am known to be quite attractive company in the right light and, as for my assertion Richard EstherRantzen would have been considerably worse than Richard Esterhuysen, I think I was pretty much spot on, frankly. Anyway, we meet at Leith’s in Kensington, which is quite smart, and has pleasant, lemon, colour- washed walls, unlike the Pharmacy which has been cleverly designed by Damien Hirst to look, yes, just like Boots. Drinks decanted into medical bottles, bar stools shaped like massive aspirins, huge glass cabinets displaying Anusol, which is just what you want to see when you go out of a night. Richard arrives looking gorgeously dapper in a little riding jacket thingy with velvet collar. He’s attractive in an edgy way, but not especially sexy. Too sunken-looking, like someone forgot to inflate him properly. Indeed, now I think about it, he looks rather like one of those balloons you get from the National Gallery of Munch’s The Scream, after it’s burst. However, being almost as direct and honest as I am untiresome, I decide not to point this out.

Richard says he has just come from home. He has been married for the past 15 years to Joan Washington, the voice coach, and they have a young daughter, Olivia. Richard is entirely devoted to both. He can’t even bear it when, at the later do, Joan strays for a moment from his side. “Where is my wife?” he cries. He played the road manager in the movie Spice World because Olivia begged him to take the part. She is, he says, a huge Spice fan. “She regularly dressed in Laura Ashley little-girl gear prior to the release of `Wannabe’, at which point she was transformed overnight into an eight-year-old slattern.” I say I’m concerned for Baby Spice. What’s going to happen to her when, say, Posh has her baby. Is she going to turn into Jealous Older Sister Spice? Is she going to poke it in the eye, then cry: “It wasn’t me! She did it herself.”

Richard, it turns out, is as worried as I am. He says, even, that having more than one kid is probably a bad idea. “Oh, I see couples with two, three kids and they’re not so much parents, more referees.” Oh, come now I protest, that is going too far. Siblings are, on the whole, good things, blood being thicker than water and all that. He says he has a brother, Stuart, who still lives in South Africa, where they grew up, and whom he hasn’t seen since he was 17. Why not? “Nothing in common.” Did you ever have anything in common? “No. We always had separate rooms, separate schools. Can’t even remember ever playing together.” How bizarre! “Is it?” “Yes!” You see your siblings regularly, then? “I do.” And you get on? “Well, my brother spent most of our childhood writing `Up The Gunners’ in laundry pen on my forehead while I was asleep, but I have long since forgiven him.” I think it’s immensely reassuring, somehow, to have these people about with a shared history. Richard says he just doesn’t need that reassurance which, possibly, he doesn’t. He is quite self-invented in many ways. The big question, when it comes to Richard E Grant, may even be not who he is, but who he once was and isn’t any longer. He is quite complicated, I think.

He can, yes, be a terrifically good actor. Although, that said, his choices are not always wise. Jack and Sarah – yuk! Hudson Hawk, he accepts, was a “great self-basting turkey”, and he never really cuts it as a romantic lead. In the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, he is less the dashing hero and more Richard E Grant going about in big cuffs thinking he’s Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen. He was superb as the demented scriptwriter in Robert Altman’s The Player and, of course, brilliant as the down-and-out thespian in the film that launched him, Withnail and I. He is at his best doing manic, panicky, utter-derangement-beneath-the- surface stuff, perhaps because that’s partly how he is. He might never have surpassed his performance as Withnail, actually, and I wonder if this bothers him. I mean when, years later, you are introduced to Steven Spielberg in Hollywood, and he says, “Ah, yes, Withnail”, isn’t it rather irritating? “Absolutely not. Better that than a blank. And it means after you’ve done one thing that’s great, it is your passport,” he says.

He can also be a jolly good writer. His diaries, With Nails, published last year, are wholly delicious. “25th January. Julian Sands takes me to lunch at The Farmers’ Market…Jodie Foster half- jogs by and comes over as she’s a friend of Julian’s. Lasers me with the compliment she has taken four sets of people to see Withnail and I. Oh, sweet, waffle, syrup thank- you Jodie. My brain is bleating to try and act casual, but body parts have curled up to their toes.” He is really good at getting into the mind- set of the hopeless neurotic luvvie, while being one himself. He can simultaneously be tourist and attraction, which is quite a hard thing to pull off. But – the other thing about Richard – is that he just won’t stick to what he’s good at.

On the strength of the diaries, he has now written his first novel, By Design. It wasn’t something, it transpires, he had a burning desire to do. But after With Nails, “a lot of publishers thought I had it in me to do fiction. There was a bidding war. Picador offered the most… a very lucrative and enticing offer.” The book, subtitled “A Hollywood Novel”, is the tale of Vyvian and Marga, childhood friends from an African country who have always dreamed of Hollywood. To cut a long – exceedingly so, it often seems – story short, they both end up there, he as an interior designer to the stars, she as a celebrity masseuse. Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of washed-up-actresses, on-the-make actors and many other one-dimensional, stereotypical monsters who, possibly, do exist in Los Angeles but just do not come off the page here. It is overwritten in a way that’s OK in diary form, but not, perhaps, in fiction. Talk is “nitroglycerining down the ear of some poor recipient” and, as Vyvian is being seduced, he notes: “Should she guide my now throbbing Titanic into her iceberg, I would definitely be sunk.”

He seems happy with it, though. He did a lot of research in LA. He got a lot of good advice from Steve Martin. “I was going to end it with an earthquake until Steve pointed out that at least three novels this year have ended in earthquakes.” Well spotted, Steve, is all I can find to say.

I think that, sometimes, Richard’s hunger to be someone and stay being someone can work against him. He has always had a great hunger for fame. As a young boy, growing up in Swaziland, he would say to himself: “One day, I’m going to be famous.” Why, Richard? “Because I just didn’t want to be anonymous, I suppose.” At 11, he was putting puppet shows on in his garage. At 14, he was writing letters to Barbra Streisand – c/o Columbia Records – inviting her to stay: “I read in the paper that you were feeling very tired and pressurised by your fame and failed romance with Mr Ryan O’Neal. I would like to offer you a two-week holiday, or longer, at our house…. As such, he now seems to accept pretty much anything that’s offered. It’s like, if you let anything slip through your fingers, then everything might slip away. Thereis, definitely, a kind of panic to him.

He was born Richard Esterhuysen in Mbabane, Swaziland, a tiny country on the eastern edge of South Africa, and part of the British Empire until its independence towards the end of the Sixties, by which time it had filled up with white, colonial refugees. “You know, the sort who had left India, then Kenya, then Zimbabwe, but did not want to go home to Surrey or Sussex, so ended up in Swazi.” His father, Hendrik, was the county’s director of education while his mother, Leonie, worked as a part-time secretary. Mbabane had three streets, a butcher, a baker, a bank and a colonial secretariat. “Of course, everyone knew everyone else. And no marriage stood a chance of surviving more than three weeks, as there was nothing to do except have affairs.”

Mbabane was, he continues, excellent practice for Hollywood. “Being far away from home, people could invent themselves. Everyone seemed to be a character of some sort. There was the lawyer who could recite the whole of Hamlet when drunk, but couldn’t remember a word of it when sober. There was the German ambassador who clicked his heels to attention and knocked off a lot of the Swazi ladies. There was a guy who made rockets which never took off, just skidded along the ground. There was the woman who came around one day, to announce to my father that she hadn’t had sex with her husband for 25 years, like it was some trophy of achievement….” He says he always knew he wanted to get out. And always knew he wanted to be an actor. Escape on all fronts, maybe, was what he was looking for.

The big event of Richard’s childhood came at 11, when his mother went off with a mining engineer, leaving Richard and Stuart with their father. “The social stigma was very acute. Affairs were one thing, but divorce was another. The children at school were very cruel and kept asking where she was. I used to cry at night.” His father, who eventually died prematurely of lung cancer at 51, fell apart. “It was like having to parent your parent.” Although he still saw his mother at regular intervals, the experience changed him fundamentally. “Literally, your world goes in two, and you can suddenly see, unequivocally and cynically, just how the world works. When your parents split up, and then their friends divide and sub- divide – you can see that, as much as you might be involved in something, there might be some other agenda going on. My trust was gone.” Trust in what? “Trust in the family. Trust in things being certain. You become schizoid. You can be part of something, but are aware you are outside, watching, at the same time.” I wonder if this gives him the tourist/attraction quality. He doesn’t doubt it. “In some ways, what happened was hugely beneficial.”

I ask what his mother was like as a person. “She was blonde before she was grey,” he says. What does she make of you never seeing your brother? “Nothing much.” Could you understand how she could leave? “If you are in an unhappy relationship, if it’s a living death, then you have to make sacrifices. I don’t sit in a moral tower of rectitude.” Yes, but as a parent yourself now, can you understand?

“Why do you keep asking me about my mother?”

I’m interested.

“You ask so many questions.”

I’m paid to.

“Well, stop.”

What’s your relationship like with your mother now?

“Leave off my mother!”

Richard, by this point, is enjoying my company so much that, not only does he keep snatching looks at his watch, I think he actually shakes it about at one point to check that it’s still working. Still, he studied drama at Cape Town University then came to London, where he almost immediately met Joan. His marriage, he says, is the most wonderful thing, a kind of reclamation of what was taken from him during his childhood. “Our relationship is as fixed and trusting as a relationship can be.” He has never been tempted to stray. “I probably hold fidelity in much higher esteem than I might have done if my parents had not divorced. To me, it just defeats the object of being with someone if you are going to philander.”

You do get this sense with Richard that, in terms of the self- invention business, he has decided as much who he is not going to be, as who he is. Is there an authentic Richard E Grant? I wonder. Frankly, I’m not so sure but, then, neither is he. “We all wear masks, don’t you think? We get them out at puberty, because the thought of our parents having sex is so horrifying, we have to find someplace to hide.”

Anyway, we have to wrap up now. Richard has “to do a book show on Sky, for my sins.” I tell him I intend to come to the party later. He says: “Oh, good.” Like I said, he can be a terrific actor.

Deborah A Ross. Not an actor, never kept a diary but if she did, the entry for last Tuesday evening might have read: “To Richard E Grant’s do at Pharmacy. `Hello Richard,’ I say. `Oh no, not you again,’ he says. Richard is in full-throttle `Darling, how perfectly splendid of you to come’ thespian mode. Introduces me to his friends as: `Someone who’ll want to know about your mother.’ It’s a monumental celeb fest. Neil Pearson, Kenneth Cranham, Harriet Walter, Peter Capaldi, Samantha Fox, who I bump into by a huge display of Canestan. `In an emergency, you could just break glass,’ I say. `You got frush then?’ says Sam. No, but this would be a handy place to come if I did, I say. `She’s got frush, poor fing,’ Sam announces loudly. Henceforward, have to spend the evening going about bleating `haven’t, haven’t, haven’t’ and, consequently, do not enjoy myself overly. Go home to bed. Dream I forgot to tell Richard that `Esterhuysen’ would not have been as bad as `Esther Rantzen.’ Then wake up and realise I didn’t, thank God.”

September 11, 1998

Feature by Mary Fletcher.
Photos by Alan Olley

The Quirky star talks about his film career and family life.

He made his name in “Withnail and I”, the film comedy about a struggling sixties actor, but now this unique talent is going back a couple of centuries to play a role that seems made for him – The Scarlet Pimpernel.

They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Those words describe the dashing 18th century spy, The Scarlet Pimpernal. But substitute the word “Frenchies” with “film-makers” and they could just as well apply to actor Richard E Grant.

Richard is one hot property. He’ll not only be seen in October, as the lead in BBC’1’s spectacular £5.5 million three-film series The Scarlet Pimpernal, but the star also has two cinema films set to be released before Christmas.

As if that wasn’t enough, his first ever novel will be published by Picador this month. Called “By Design”, it’s story of outrageous Hollywood intrigue and follows up on the success two years ago of “With Nails”, his wittily observed ‘film diaries’ book.

Born and brought up in Swaziland, Richard arrived in London in 1982 and starred in the cult film “Withnail And I” four years later. Since then, with films like “The Player”, “Dracula”, “The Age Of Innocence”, “Prêt A Porter”, “Jack And Sarah” and “The Portrait Of A Lady” under his belt, he’s been riding high.

After a spell of working and living in Hollywood during the early Nineties, he now resides in London with his wife Joan, a national theatre dialect coach, and their daughter Olivia, nine. But despite his obvious successes, his life has had more than its fair share of sadness.

After his parents divorced when he was 11, he was brought up by his father, who was Swaziland’s director of education. His death from cancer when Richard was 24 affected the actor deeply. But nothing touched him quite as profoundly as another death 12 years ago, that of a newborn baby who he and Joan named Tiffany.

However, the birth by Caesarean three years later of another daughter, Olivia, brought intense happiness. “She was only 4lbs when she was born, but she’s our miracle,” he says.

OK! caught up with Richard in Prague, on the set of “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, in which he plays one of the all-time great fictional heroes. Based on Baroness Orczy’s gripping adventure yams, first published in 1900, the 12 Pimpernal books record the adventure of a foppish British aristocrat with a secret life saving French aristocrats from the guillotine.

Already turned into at least seven films, four TV series, a play and musical, the Richard E Grant version has a lot to live up to. But, judging on past performances, if anyone can bring exciting new life to the classic yarns, he’s the one to do it.

We’ll see you soon in two costume drama films. “The Serpent’s Kiss” and “All For Love”. But BBC1’s “The Scarlet Pimpernal” is the one that will be seen by millions. Has it been fun to make?

It’s been tremendous. I’m like an 18th century Batman – someone who’s an incompetent fool in normal life and then secretly goes out saving people and doing extraordinary things. I get to ride horses, have swordfights, punch people and seduce beautiful women. And get paid for it.

And what would you say is the role’s most difficult challenge?

Getting the right balance between the two sides of character. If I look too idiotic when I’m playing the fop, no one will believe my beautiful French wife (played by Elizabeth McGovern) could possibly fancy me. If I look too heroic when I’m pitted against the villain (played by Martin Shaw), I won’t look as if I’m in any danger.

As the fop, your silk costumes were wonderful, but were they uncomfortable??

On the contrary. They’re incredibly flattering, and once you’ve been wearing them for a day or two, they become second nature. And because everyone else is in the same stuff, the only person who looks out of place is the one out of costume, wearing the bright green anorak.

What’s the worst part about spending the best part of four months away filming?

The penalty for what is otherwise a wonderful life is having to spend huge stretches of time away from your family – in my case, my wife Joan and our daughter Olivia. I’ve managed to fly back for the odd weekend, but I also spend huge amounts of money on phone bills.

It sounds like your family is the centre of your world…

Absolutely. They’re the ones who give you your grounding – who knows what you’re like at five O’clock in the morning, when you’re grumpy and horrible. They’ll be the first to tell you if you get any inflated notions about yourself. Initially, the idea of going off to lead a bachelor life working on a film is very attractive, but the excitement wears off after about two days.

On a film set you’re pampered and flattered. Are you hard to live with when you go home again?

Ha Ha! you’d have to ask Joan that. But it’s true that when you’re away you’re watered and fed and cosseted. You get so used to never having to do anything for yourself, that when you go home, even washing up seems like an exotic thing to do.

How difficult is it to be private when your face is so well-known?

Luckily, I’m not exactly in the mega-star class, so I don’t suffer from too much intrusion. I once went to dinner at Madonna’s house, and she told me she even had security men guarding her dustbins because unscrupulous newspaper people kept going through her rubbish. To live with that kind of scrutiny must be nightmarish.

You recently turned 41. How did you celebrate your birthday?

Because I was in the middle of filming, I had to make do with phone calls from home, rather than having my loved ones with me. But after work, I went out to a soul night at the only decent club in Prague with some of the other actors and crew. I had hours of intense dancing and then went home to bed at our hotel. it was a bit like Cinderella, because everyone had to be up early the next morning.

And how do you feel about being in your forties?

Of course, Olivia thinks I’m about 5,000! But I regard myself as being a third of my way through my life, because I fully intend to live to at least 120. Don’t laugh – I’m serious! Before I slough off this mortal coil, I want to go on the first passenger ship into outer space, even if I have to be wheel-chaired onto the space shuttle. I’ll be able to go ‘ga ga’ in space!

How did you meet Joan?

She taught me a Belfast accent at the Actor’s Centre not long after I arrived in London in 1982. I thought she was really cute with a wonderful voice and huge eyes. Unfortunately, she was married to someone else at the time. Four years later, I went back to Africa for Christmas and missed her so much that when I got back to Heathrow, I got down on bended knee and asked her to marry me. Luckily for me, she said yes.

You now have a beautiful nine year old daughter, Olivia, but it must have been the worst possible experience to lose Tiffany 12 years ago?

Tiffany died an hour after she was born because her lungs were under- developed. Registering and birth and death of your own child on the same day, and then having a funeral for a child you’ve actually heard make a noise, is absolutely devastating. You get round it, you don’t get over it.

And now you’re about to publish your first novel. How did your writing start?

I’ve been writing a diary since I was 11. Growing up where there was no television, it was a way of entertaining myself. Now it’s habitual to jot something down last thing at night, every day. My diaries led to my book WITH NAILS and now I’ve written BY DESIGN.

You’re so busy with your acting career and your writing, do you ever see yourself slowing down or retiring?

Absolutely not. I can’t imagine ever wanting to put my feet up, because my brain would atrophy. I intend to go on working as long as I can still get out of bed in the morning and someone’s still offering me a job. I worked with Sir John Gielgud on the film “The Portrait Of A Lady” a couple of years ago when he was 94. He told me he felt like a 39 year old encased in an older body. I have a feeling that’s exactly how I’ll be.

Times Magazine – August 15, 1998

Interview by Robert Crompton
Portraits by Paul Massey

The Outlander:

With his public school vowels and eccentric manner, Richard E Grant has been adopted as the archetypal Englishman. So why does he still feel like an outsider looking in?

I interviewed Richard E Grant in Prague, where he was about to finish four months of filming The Scarlet Pimpernel for the BBC. Usually, you get actors off the subject of the character they are currently playing as quickly as possible. Grant, however, had some interesting things to say about Sir Percy Blakeney, hero of Baroness Orczy’s dreadful but enduringly popular 1905 novel and at least four other filmed versions before this one: Leslie Howard in 1934, David Niven in 1950, Sid James in 1966 and Anthony Andrews in..I don’t know, probably 1982 – Sir Percy seems to saddle up every 16 years. Martin Shaw, who plays the baddy, sums up the subject matter thus: “You have to realise the The Scarlet Pimpernel isn’t A Tale Of Two Cities. Or Les Miserables. It’s more swash and buckle. I did a lot of research before I read the novel and realised that the Baroness hadn’t done any.”

“You could argue,” says Grant, “Why should one care about a man who is saving aristocrats from having their heads cut off? They [the BBC] don’t want the cast of East Enders Bastilling television centre. They were aware in the writing that this is a man who saves other people rather than just saving toffs.” Who may well have deserved what he saved them from? “Yeah.” Unless you argue purely on humanitarian lines? “Right. They’ve had to emphasise that [because] with the collapsing popularity of the Royal Family, going around saving a bunch of French Sloane rangers is not entirely justified at this point in time.”

His diaries (well-edited, published, well-received, two years ago) reveal his own left-of-centre sympathies. How does it feel playing a lickspittle of the ancient regime? “It’s a fictional character, that’s the get-out clause. It’s enjoyable. His ongoing popularity is because he is an 18th-century Batman, leading a double life. The audience knows it, and that’s the kick. Saving people in jeopardy, killing the bad people – these are the foundations of a lot of adventure literature.”

Are you a republican yourself? Grant pauses, starts to waffle, tells the truth. “I grew up in Swaziland, which is a Kingdom and still is. I came to Britain, another Kingdom. But,” he pauses, sighs. “Yeah, I am.”

He says that he has kept the “foppish dandy stuff” to a minimum (although in the scene I saw, it was all “There’s no need to be hasty my dear fellow!” and so forth). Was he playing Sir Percy macho then? Laughs. “It sounds like a contradiction in terms, my name and macho. But yeah, probably more than I anticipated.” He refers a lot to his appearance and physique, or lack of it (he is six feet two and eleven and a half stone, so rake thin). “You are so predetermined by what you look like and how you are physically.” This is an obvious truth of Comerica film-making, but nonetheless not one heard very often from an actor. Later he says: “As an actor…you delude yourself into thinking that you are able to play any kind of part, but there are very few people that do.”

Grant speaks in correct sentences occasionally spiced with expletives. He uses words like “panophy” and “cathartic”, he thinks about what he is saying and he qualifies himself much of the time. He is self-deprecating, and uncomplicated about his profession. He says, for instance, that, unlike Shaw, he did not even embark on any research. “I should lie to you and say I’ve read all the novels the Baroness ever wrote, but I didn’t.”

We spend most of two hours talking about his being an “outsider”. He feels that he is one, and he is pleased and flattering when I latch on to this trait. The thought seemed profound at the time (now it doesn’t because everyone is an outsider to some degree). “I saw Stephen Fry at a birthday party last week – I don’t know him at all – and he said to me, ‘Ah it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve been cast to play this part’ because Leslie Howard was Hungarian or half-Hungarian or his father was or something. Like Baroness Orczy was Hungarian – an outsider writing about England. I had no idea, Leslie Howard is a quintessentially English actor – it had never crossed my mind that he was anything but. Fry sort of pinpointed this thing you’re talking about.”

Grant was born Swaziland, southern Africa, in 1957. We go back to Swaziland throughout the conversation, rather as he now does in life. “The place is magnetic to me.” Indeed, he does seem drawn to talking about it. Indeed, it is probably the most interesting thing about him, I think that he thinks that too. In his diaries he refers to himself, self-mockingly, as The Swaz. He used to sing the Swaziland national anthem at auditions. He wears to watches, one set to Swazi time. He says that “When I meet people who have grown up in Africa like I did there’s an instant bond”.

His father was an education official who stayed on after independence in 1968.

Materially, Richard’s childhood was “a life of privilege which was almost 19th-centruy”. His father impressed on him, however, “That is a white person you were a kind of guest, so you learnt the language and you paid everyone the same respect”. Emotionally, his life was anything but palmy. His parents separated when he was 11 – his mother leaving her family abruptly, for South Africa and another man. Thirty years ago, out in the empire, being the child of divorced parents was a brand-new stigmas. That experience must have toughened him. They get on now, but for years Grant’s relationship with his mother was “very, very difficult”.

His relationship with his only brother still is difficult – or rather, non-existent. They last met at their father’s funeral in 1981, and they did not speak then. “He’s like a cousin that you just don’t see. I don’t feel sadness. If I had had a great relationship and lost it, I might. But I never had one. Nothing in common.” Grant says he will go the rest of his life without seeing his brother “and it is entirely mutual”. True enough: Stuart Esterhuysen does not seem like a man bent on reconciliation with his famous sibling. He told the News Of The World that he though his brother’s wife (Joan Washington, a dialect coach whom Grant met within months of arriving in London, eight years older than he) was, sight unseen, “a complete dog”.

Richard – at this point still an Esterhuysen himself – went to a progressive, multi-racial school and then on to University in Cape Town to study English and Drama. Here, he lost the Esterhuysen on the advice of his tutors (who said it was unpronounceable, which it isn’t) and, utilising his middle name, became plain Richard Grant. The E came in later after Equity told him they already had a Richard Grant on their books.

His voice, he said, has not changed much from his schooldays. “I spoke like a white Kenyan, I suppose. I certainly got ribbed at University for speaking like a toff.” In Cape Town, in the bloody year of 1976, he was, “Like every other student I knew and anyone with half a brain cell”, anti-government. He was in a multi-racial theatre company, and broke a few race laws without ever “attacking policemen or burning the flag”. There were no actors in the family. His father wanted him to be a journalist or a lawyer.

Perhaps his father would have got his wish – Grant obviously adored him – but he died. A year later, aged 25, Grant was in London, set on fame. “I thought if I hadn’t succeeded by 35 I would seriously consider doing another kind of job.” As it was he succeeded within four years, thanks to Withnail and I, a film much admired by many Hollywood players, who have employed him fairly steadily ever since. Turkeys (Hudson Hawk, Prêt A Porter, Spice: The Movie), treats (The Player, Dracula) and potboilers have come along in about equal measure – more turkeys, in truth, in recent years, hence, presumably, how he come to be playing the Scarlet Pimpernel in Prague.

Grant was missing Olivia, his nine-year old daughter, and was anxious to get home. His diaries are full of months in forlorn foreign hotels. The characterless Forum, a couple of miles from the nice bits of Prague, was home to the latest stint. Grant explained succinctly: “We’re here because it looks like 18th-century France but costs them [the BBC] absolutely fuck all. Extras cost nothing. £95 a day in England, £15 here”.

Martin Shaw had taken a flat near the Charles Bridge. I didn’t think to ask Grant why he hadn’t done the same – I think now perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted to be on his own too much. He said “It’s the penalty of this job. There are the obvious advantages, but going away, there’s no way round it.”

Would he refuse a job because it took him away for too long?

A really good part, it doesn’t matter where it is. If it were six months in the Arctic, then short of it being Steven Spielberg, I wouldn’t do it.” Spielberg is a revealing choice his desert island, or polar ice cap, director. If there is a divide among actors between theatre/films; Britain/America; worthy/popular, then Grant comes down firmly on the right hand side of those obliques.

In his diaries, he made it clear that his teenage dream was to be a star rather than an actor per se. He wanted to be in Hollywood, to be famous, to meet famous people, rather than go there reluctantly to pay the rent after 70 years in rep. “Right. where I grew up the tradition of theatre didn’t exist. I grew up on a diet of essentially American movies and American fan magazines. I was starstruck by all that.” Even now, he admitted, “The illusion in a movie is so strong…that if I had a problem, if I had a vendetta to sort out, I’d like to take it to Don Corleone-Marlon Brando, not anybody else. Even though I know how ridiculous that is.”

Through the 1970s, he would watch two films a week at the drive-in – an escape from the pain of his mother leaving, no doubt, but also because there was little else to do. Swaziland did not have television until 1980. When he sees Martin Shaw, he doesn’t think Bodie and Doyle like the rest of us, he thinks Rhodes. So he was cut off from English high culture, but also from the low. During our conversation, a World Cup game was showing in the hotel lounge behind his head. He was not interested, nor felt the need to pretend to be.

“Going back to that snobbery and having to play Hamlet,” he said. “I never had that set of rules in my head.” He has done some theatre, but found the repetition night after night “Mind-numbingly, arse-cripplingly boring). I asked if he considered himself to be a British actor. “Yes.” (Emphatically).

Were the ex-pats in Swaziland more English than the English?

“They certainly were when I grew up. At Christmas, despite the equatorial heat, they stood up when the Queen made a speech, that kind of stuff.” I asked him if he had re- invented himself when he came to London. He said no, not consciously, “That would sound very schizoid”. But people do it all the time, I said. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. “I did think when I came it would be a disadvantage to be so quintessentially middle class.”

I had been thinking that he might have toffed himself up on arrival, but for him, re-invention would have involved proling down – which he certainly has not done. His rather antiquated manners and diction, his rather charm – it all may seem remarkably like a Hollywood version of an English gentleman, but it is genuine, thanks to the ex-pat time-warp. And restricting: “A year ago I desperately tried to get into a film called Face with Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone. To play an East End psychopath. As soon as I had to speak East End it was just so chronic. I died of embarrassment and shame and apologised to them profusely. I realised absolutely I could not easily transmute into something I am quintessentially not.”

There’s an awful lot of luck involved in what you do, isn’t there?

“I think a huge amount, [although] you can argue that when you have a great piece of luck you’ve got to make good on it.” But for Withnail might you not be here now? “Definitely not.” And how did you make good on your luck? “A friend whom I’ve known for a long time, she said to me that she thought I had an ‘immigrant mentality’. That you had to make the best of what you had without any apology or equivocation whatsoever.” He later says, of the novel (a satire on the Hollywood pecking order) he completed before coming to Prague, grinding it out from 9am to 6pm every day for five months, “If you really want something enough you can sort of get it, unless it’s ridiculous. If I said I wanted muscles like Schwarzenegger it would take a lot of steroids. But it’s possible. But I obviously don’t want that enough to pursue it.”

But you did, and do, want success as an actor enough?

“I think you have to, Robert. I get very impatient with ‘I only want to do interesting work’. Well, I defy anybody to say they want to do interesting work for five people in a chicken shed in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Such a polarisation now looks suspicious, as if he may feel guilty, or frustrated, for not doing more interesting work himself. He went on. “This is one of the most popular mediums ever invented. So getting high falutin’ about it I have almost no patience with. Certainly ten years ago when I first worked in Los Angeles, people said ‘ How can you go to Hollywood?’ I said, ‘Well, if you were offered this, would you turn it down?’ Very few people said ‘ yes I would’.” He thinks that anti-film prejudice has disappeared now that young British actors can pursue film careers straight away, thanks to “Four Weddings showing that British films did not have to be either Merchant Ivory of Mike Leigh”.

So what was it that you wanted to badly?

“What was it that I wanted so badly?” He repeated the question, thinking hard, but knowing that the truth is going to sound lame. “The life of actors – the opportunity to travel, to play different parts – was so fantastical and glamorous, it seemed like a good way of earning a living that wasn’t nine to five. All of that has proved true.” He went on to say that everyone wants approbation, “Actors more chronically than other people”. Insecure? Yes, but the success of his diaries has been “incredibly reassuring and confidence-building”. Vain? “I don’t want to be bald”. (He is receding.) “I’d have somebody else’s face, yeah.”

Around this point a comparison popped into my head, another Pimpernel: David Niven. On reflection, it stands up well enough. Niven, actually a Franco-Scot, also made a good living playing super Anglos for American audiences, was also at his best playing comedy. Niven too was not quite handsome, but charming and disarming, a good chap to have around; not given to nicking the limelight from the A list, bright but unreflective; a lucky lucky man (although not that lucky: Niven’s first wife died at 26; Grant’s first daughter, born prematurely after his wife had three previous miscarriages, died after half an hour).

Niven was also the author of an entertaining, gossipy memoir. I asked Grant if he admired Niven. “He was an actor who was essentially seen as lightweight, for which I can certainly see similarities to my career….I do identify that he never stopped acknowledging how lucky he was and maybe downplayed the fact that he was maybe very skilled as well.”

Perhaps that last bit betrays the slight irritation of a man who feels that because he has realised what lies outside his limitations, he does not get the credit for what he can do within them.

Unlike Niven, Grant doesn’t like to drink, in fact he cannot drink at all, cannot keep it down, and hasn’t tried for 12 years. Nor does he smoke. Nor does he eat meat. But he is a party animal. “I’ve been accused of being off my face many times but you go, by osmosis, with the people that you’re with.”

What about other drugs?

“I have never seen a single person passing round a joint at any Hollywood party. Or pills. Or lines of coke. Just never seen it. obviously it must go on.” He talked about the death of River Phoenix. “Rather than being this big ‘oh such a great talent has been lost’ the people I came across said ‘well the information was out there, the help was out there. if someone self-destructs like that, fuck ’em, it’s their choice.'”

That immigrant mentality again. Grant goes back to his homeland every two or three years, “like a homing pigeon”. “My feeling about being there is incredibly strong, it doesn’t diminish, it increases. It sounds probably very pretentious but the scale of a human being in an African landscape….the sky seems so much more dominant than if you live in a terrace of houses with low cloud cover in the middle of London. The self-importance, or the attention accorded you if you’re an actor, gets out of proportion. There, nobody gives a damn. Nobody knows you from a bar of soap.”

That sounds to me as though he may be looking for something, seeking some purpose in his life beyond being a nice chap and having a nice life. He seeks it here, in films, a little bit; mostly, I think he seeks it there, in Africa, and in his writing. I’m sure it is to be found, Richard’s real purpose, Richard’s real soul, but it proved damned elusive to me.

Saturday Magazine – August 1998

A close mutual friend has warned me that Richard E. Grant likes to be the one who asks the questions, so it isn’t a surprise at all when the polite battery starts almost the moment he opens the door. Did I have to travel far to get here? Where do I live? How old is my baby? How long was I in labour? Was it a natural birth? Really? And so on and so forth until I feel I ought to remind him that we’re here to talk about him rather than me.

These are, in part, pre-emptive tactics. A somewhat bleak figure of a man, but with off-putting intense eyes, he tells me later how he is still reeling from an interview last year in which the first three questions directed at him were: What was it like to be married to someone so much older than himself? Was he homosexual? And why had he made so many crap career choices? “I mean, why can’t we do Q & A, like in Interview magazine? We met at 10:50am at the Petersham Hotel in Richmond with a Reynolds’ view of the Thames; we had some orange juice; I was dressed in black; you were dressed in blue; your baby and your nanny and your nanny’s dog were in the car…..”

Here we go again, but then let’s not forget that this is probably where his real talent lies: observing other people. It is what shot his self-deprecating but deliciously indiscreet film diaries, With Nails, into the best-seller list. It is also what enabled Grant, at 41, to write his debut novel, By Design, which centers around an interior designer named Vyvian (“with blood type D for Discretion”) and his sidekick Marga, a celebrity masseuse who pretends to be deaf and dumb. Plus a whole lot of other crazies Grant met while living in Hollywood, but couldn’t have possibly included in his real-life diaries for fear of being sued for libel.

But let us start at the beginning, or at least where the diaries started, back in 1985 when Grant, an impoverished actor/waiter, was offered the lead role, playing a morose drunk in Withnail & I. The role instantly catapulted him into cult fame and a slew of films, including How To Get Ahead in Advertising, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Bruce Willis’s famous turkey Hudson Hawk and Jack & Sarah. Grant faithfully chronicled it all in the diaries, from the “bonding” weekend with Winona Ryder at Francis Ford Coppola’s, to the LA party where he finally got to meet his childhood heroine, Barbra Streisand, to the time he had lunch at the Ritz with Naomi Campbell. It all made compulsive reading; as did the follow-up he wrote for a newspaper when he landed the role of the manager in Spiceworld – The Movie. It does beg to question, however, don’t directors and producers now run a mile when they see Grant and his pad of A4 coming? And isn’t he just a tiny bit worried that the publication of his novel may condemn him if not to panto then to advertising financial services on TV (something he did recently for the financial company b2)?

“It is something that worried my wife enormously,” admits Grant, “and I thought after the diaries came out, I might start getting gagging clauses. But there’s never been anything in any contracts and I haven’t had anyone coming up to me and saying, ‘I’ll never speak to you again.’ It’s never been my intention to write myself out of future employment.”

Certainly Grant has worked far to hard to get where he is, just to throw it all away. Born and bred thousands of miles away in Swaziland, the son of an Afrikaans education minister, Richard Esterhuysen, as he was then known, was an extraordinarily creative and industrious little boy. Unlike his young brother Stuart, who is now an accountant in Johannesburg, he was always writing plays and making puppet theatres in the family garage. After school, he went to study drama at the University of Cape Town. In 1982, realizing his desire for recognition was somewhat limited in South Africa, he moved to London and spent the first three years waiting tables to support himself while struggling along in fringe theatre. And the rest, if not exactly meteoric, is diary history.

But this is leaving out a huge chunk of Grant’s life. As friend will say, the key to him is his wife, the voice coach Joan Washington, whom he met at the London Actor’s Centre when she once asked him for help on Zulu dialects. Although Joan was 10 years older than Grant and had a son by a previous marriage, the couple fell madly in love and 15 years later are still described, despite the age difference, as the most compatible couple in the industry. “Joan’s his remote control,” as one friend puts it. “You should watch them both at dinner. Richard will go just a little over the top with one of his stories, she’ll give him a look from across the table and he’ll switch subjects immediately. She’s very strict and he adores her for that.”

That Grant has never succumbed to temptation – and, God knows, enough has been put in his way – may on one level have something to do with the fact he never touches a drop of alcohol. “Oh, I’ve tried,” he explains, “and, believe me, if I could I would. It’s just I have such a terrible allergic reaction to it. I had a glass of champagne at a wedding about eight years ago and it stayed in for 10 minutes. I had to leave and vomited for the rest of the day.”

But on a deeper lever, it is obviously something to do with the dreadful effect his own parent’s break-up had on him when his mother ran off with a mining engineer when he was just 11. It may also have something to do with the devotion he holds for their nine-year-old daughter Olivia. Indeed, the detailed questioning which took place at the beginning of this piece about birth experiences must have related to his own daughter’s traumatic birth and the death of her sister Tiffany, also a premature baby, who died just half an hour after she was born. True to form, he wrote all about it in his diaries, but there a few bleaker things I’ve read than Grant’s description of what happened in hospital afterwards, how nurses Polaroided the dead baby girl and then put a blanket over her as if to prepare her for sleep.

“I can’t set myself up in this moral ivory tower,” says Grant. “If I did, I wouldn’t be able to speak to half the people I know. I’m in a profession where people’s marriages are constantly threatened by attractions. But the nuclear fall-out of an arbitrary fling is huge. I see my daughter’s friends, and how divorce has affected them, and I see my daughter after I’ve had a row with Joan. Although it may not instantly affect her, you can be sure for the next day, she’ll be full of strop. Of course, either my wife or I could run off with someone else. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you in between making plans. But I don’t know if I could face myself if I did something like that. Besides which, I’m a terrible liar.”

There’s nothing even vaguely sanctimonious about Grant – I find him far too arch and sophisticated for that. But, to me, there’s a kind of duplicity about him: on the one hand, he’s such a decadent – yes, even camp – figure of a man, and on the other, such a paragon of virtue.

Perhaps this is what makes him so perfect to play Sir Percy Blakeney, aka the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the no-expense-spared production by the BBC. It will be a tall order living up to the definitive Pimpernel Leslie Howard played in the Thirties, but Grant seems cut out for the role of the “ineffectual ponce who can barely raise his teacup without cocking a finger,” as he puts it, “and then goes off on heroic sorties to France, risking his life when he doesn’t need to.”

People shouldn’t make rude remarks about Grant’s “crap career choices”. With his flourishing writing career, it will be a long time before he appears as Prince Charming in the local panto.

Essentially film memoirs, this book chronicles the making of 9 REG movies, but written by REG himself. It’s witty, funny, bitchy and insightful, and a must for any REG fan.

A brilliantly idiosyncratic and revealing account of the film business and life among its stars, "With Nails" documents, with frank and funny intelligence, what it’s like to be involved in movie-making today. 14 photos.

Click here to read some reviews of the book.

Published by Picador

Apparently With Nails is the bestselling book at Vancouver’s Black Sheep bookshop.
Check it out here