Oxford University Trinity Magazine – Issue 5, 1996

Withnail star Richard E Grant talks to Justin Huggler

Richard E Grant is in danger of becoming an annual fixture at the Union. His last visit was so successful that the moment he set foot back in Oxford to give a reading from his newly published diaries, he was whisked off to the Union debating chamber for an encore performance.

I find Grant posing for a gaggle of photographers, effortlessly alternating between charming grin and suave moodiness, but with an air of slight embarrassment throughout the whole proceedings.

He looks surprisingly old and sombre. There is none of that sprightly charm that typifies his big screen performances. He has the tall figure of Withnail, but not his extrovert flamboyance.

Here is the actor without his make-up, shy, quietly-spoken and, it seems, nervous at the prospect of performing to the Union. He tells me that he is worried that no-one will come, because he was here so recently.

When I suggest that his last appearance here was so good he should consider a second career as a professional raconteur he seems astonished: “I think Ned Sherrin was the last of the people to do that for a living.” He insists that he found his last Union appearance easy, because he was talking about what he does for a living. “It’s not like I’ve been asked to come here to speak about the works of Chekhov or Bulgakov.” When a comparison to Kenneth Williams is suggested, he grins: “There are no Carry On films for me to be in”. He then rejects the comparison: “Williams was innately funny.”

So, what about acting? How does Grant view his profession? “Entertainment. No more, no less; that’s what it is. You can say that something can change someone’s life. You can get intellectual about it and say it’s a mirror up to nature, it can change the way people think, and all those noble things. But it seems to me that when people set out to try to do that, the end product is so worthy and so boring and dull as a result.”

Grant warms to his theme, his intelligent and enthusiastic analysis bizarrely punctuated by self-conscious pauses. “But the thing that has no gravitas, or subterranean subtext, or whatever you want to call it, can each people’s hearts.”

Yet Grant seems unaware of just how much his performances have reached some people’s hearts. He says that his status as poster icon, as the drunken out-of-work actor Withnail, is “news to me”. Self-effacingly he points out that he got the part when Daniel Day-Lewis turned it down.

It was Grant’s big break: the cult film transformed him from unknown actor to international film star.

Since making Withnail and I, Grant has worked with Hollywood giants, such as Robert Altman on The Player and Prêt à Porter, and appeared on the West End stage, alongside Maggie Smith, in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Yet he eschews any credit for creating the character: “I didn’t write a single word of dialogue.” He points out that Withnail was entirely the creation of writer-director Bruce Robinson, who based the character on a friend of his. Grant considers himself “lucky” to have had the chance to play the part.

When questioned as to whether he’d like to be involved on the other side of the camera, Grant reveals that he is writing a film script. However, he stresses that this is not an attempt to compete with Bruce Robinson. It is “a comic drama”, for which Grant is trying to find financial backing and a producer. He wants to direct the film himself, and to make it here in Britain.

He in fact has experience of directing: he directed as a student, and then spent two years directing plays for a theatre he co-founded when he left university. So what of his early years, trying to forge a career as an actor? “The advice that I was given all through my childhood was: ‘You will never do it; you can’t do it; you will never do it. Who do you think you are?’ I wanted to be an actor, and it’s negativity that strengthened my resolve to do it. If you’re going to do it, you’ll do it, no matter what. Whether you’re successful in other people’s eyes is something you can’t really exert much control over.”

As for the future, Grant concedes that if he gets his film off the ground it may “change my entire working life”, but for now he’s an actor, and he loves it. “It’s fantastic fun. Obviously it’s crammed with self-doubt and you get knocked about in films, but at the same time you get huge rewards.”

Although he is interested in writing and directing, he is defensive about the acting profession: “I love movies and I love the theatre. They’re the life that I’m involved in. It always strikes me as odd that, on the one hand, actors are particularly vilified for being luvvies, or whatever, but if you read any magazine, newspaper or birthday list, the people they bother to write about are very often entertainers. Whether it’s because people don’t believe in God any more, I don’t know.”

On the technical side of acting, Grant is uninterested in “the method” or similar formulaic approaches. He does, however, stress that it is a “hands-on, active” process: “If you learn the lines, that in itself involves having to do something. I’ve not found anybody who can really define precisely how it works. Your particular personality may work in conjunction with the writing. If the two things combine and work together, then a sort of combustion takes place. As soon as you start talking about it you get into cookery or industrial terms.”

At this point, Richard E Grant is summoned away to the Union chamber. He sighs and his face creases with what can only be tension. Walking through the corridors of the Union buildings, he pauses to expel a Withnailesque roar of preparation, then plunges in. As the glare of the chamber lights catches his face, the muscles are relaxed, the tension has disappeared. The low, quiet voice of the interview subject becomes the high, clear voice familiar to cinema-goers, the face is young and smiling again. The actor is performing. The actor is back in his element.

©1996 Oxford Student Publications Limited

1996

REG was recently a host on the European MTV awards.

He’s seen here presenting the Best Male award with Bjork to James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins.

Thanks to Nikki for these screen shots.

MTV Interview About Food Of Love

Thanks to Nikki for these screen shots.

The Times Magazine – 1996

By Richard E Grant.

REVIEWS: To read or not to read? The problem is: if you don’t, you are guaranteed to get the following call: “WHATEVER you do, DON’T worry about that trash in The Guardian, and fancy taking objection to using capitals and exclamation marks!!!?” Well, until the call came, I was totally unaware that my book had been so critically annihilated in one corner, while being given “life off” most everywhere else. How galling it must be to that scribbler that it should be in the charts.

If you kid yourself that they don’t matter, or that nobody reads them or cares anyway, or that they will be classically “soaked in vinegar and loaded up with chips by dusk”, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Short of sticking your head down the nearest volcanic plug-hole, you get to hear, either way.

The last pit-stop for performing and book-signing was held in a large tent in Hay-on-Wye. Interviewed by my mentor Bruce Robinson, whose usual modus vivendi of insult and subterfuge was flummoxed by having to praise me in front of 400 strangers. Not accustomed to such uncharacteristic droolings, he attempted to work himself up into a “rant” only to find himself quagmired in praise for Roy Hattersley, whom he’d witnessed on the same podium the day before. Clearly, his unusually low bile-level had had enough and, upon seeing the numbers of people lined up to get a signature, he topped-up with: “JEEZUS! It’s like a queue to get out of POLAND.”

QUEUES I HAVE KNOWN.

Half-term, in a Provencal bank in a remote village, sotto voce voices up front at the counter. Ruptured by the entry of two “Anglais”. First heard yelling in the interim glassed “holding-zone” that is part of banking security procedure. You buzz the entry button, then momentarily become a live mannequin in the secure glass box before being bleeped through and into the queue. Only these fellow country persons have never been quarantined like this before and are now in a aquarium of panic.

Once released, the middle-aged siblings are huffing and puffing trying to locate a lone traveller’s cheque. My daughter asks me something and before I can answer, two faces are nostril-hair-close: “ARE YOU ENGLISH?” they bleat, as if I was deaf. Followed by a garbled double-act of “drove down all the way, never been to France, got an address of a distant cousin, radiator’s blown, you see, can’t speak the lingo, just a bit of wee-wee.”

Absolutely barking. When they finally make it to the front, the French notes are counted out once by the cat hair-covered sister, shuffled over to the bewildered brother, who licks, thumbs and slows his way through the pile, returns them to sis, who gives them their third rifling. By which stage the line has lengthened and les Francais all sport abattoir expressions appropriate to an imminent mad-cow culling. Collective French lip-pursing and puffing all round, in that idiosyncratic baby-fart way, as the couple “MERCI MERCI” their way to their steaming heap.

I ASSUMED THAT, as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon 27 years ago, it wouldn’t be too much to expect banks and post offices to have come up with a solution to the customer “problem”. See if this correlates with your time in there. Between noon and three, when business stampedes in, why is it that eight cashier windows are peopled, but only two are in operation? Meanwhile, the drone in Foreign Exchange balefully stares into the middle distance.

This time I stupidly broke rank with the snake of pensioners, suits and pie-shop owners standing in line to ask “WHY?” Jolted from comatosia, a pair of eyeballs swiveled in disbelief at this insurrection. The explanation was a verbal hieroglyph. “So there’s no way you might help quench this queue then, Sir?” “Uh, you could speak to the manager, only he’s on his lunch break, but if you came back in an hour…..”, by which time gaskets have blown somewhere and my legs have Colonel Bogey-ed me home. To discover a glossy stash of junk mail extolling the joys of mortgage, overdraft, double loan and triplicate non-interest info, accompanied by pictures of smiley couples holidaying, DIY-ing and stroking their new hatchbacks.

“NO FOREPLAY IN PUBLIC PLACES.” God forbid this sign should ever politically correct itself alongside “Keep off the grass, please”. ‘Tis the season for’t, man! As is our wont, the merest glimmer of summer and every lunch-hour scrap of green, common and garden is a flesh-feast, as bodies are offered up like it was National Barbecue Day. At this time of the month, though, the exposed acres of marshmellowey flesh are still dough-coloured and pre-boiled. The notion that we are a nation in “reserve” is confounded by the multiple Last Tango in Paris posters cloned around any park. (That pic of Marlon and Maria, face to face, legs to legs.) Although it has to be said that the butter remains firmly slapped between the curling sarnies rather than anyone’s crevices.

Stopped and gaped at a man who, having just fed the ducks, gripped his partner’s face and proceeded to suck and munch back and forth across it, as if she were a corn on the cob. Surrounded by pigeons and transfixed toddlers.

A Greek holiday was once indelibly inked by the nightly mantra extolled by a newly released Mancunian woman (trussed in an overripe combo of lace, Lycra and scuffed high-heelery): “Aave koom a long, long way fur this gluss of Bor-tar-ree Row-zay, Stavros!”

“DADDY, YOU KNOW that song ‘Scaramooch, scaramooch, fandango’ – What does it mean?”

“Not a clue. Where did you hear it?”
“I saw it on TV sung by that funny-looking man with a little beard.”
“How old was he?”
“Very, very old.”

Rapido mental shifty through the just-and-over-fifties, as Elton, Mick, Keith, Roger and co blip beardlessly by. Stumped, she then thrilled forth a semblance of the tune and Freddie Mercury’s name synapsed back. And I was instantly driving down the 20-year memory motorway between Swaziland and Cape Town, where I was heading to start university, with Bohemian Rhapsody, the number one song beamed around the planet.

“Freddy Mercury had a moustache – is that what you mean?”
“NO!” she snorts, her seven-year-old’s worth of irritation showing at the blatant stupidity of her ignorant adult. “I told you, it was a little BEARD.”
“What was he wearing?”

“A safari-suit, standing around a camp-fire and jigging.”
This incarnation of the late Mr Mercury struck me as truly surreal, for he was forever spangling about in Lurex and Lycra, but his brand of “camp” bore little relation to a night out with the Scouts.
“What kind of jigging?”

Her patience with this Sherlocking was spent. “It doesn’t matter….”
Fast forward to a jaw-slackening gape when I heard the familiar strains emanating from the late-night box, and seeing “an old guy with a little beard round the camp fire” scaramooshing his way through every boundary of the unacceptable, as the left side of my brain went elementary. “My dear, it’s Rolf Harris.”

Now, were this a paradigm of how history was writ, whose version is valid? An iconic moment for me, a decrepit nonsense to her. Freddie IS dead.

LEST I CURMUDGEON myself into a corner, let me tell you about a half-hour sitcom that impromptu’d forth in the Hertz hire shop at Nice airport. The chief pleasure derived from witnessing someone else getting publicly roasted. You wait in an un-airconditioned Portakabin that is a human microwave. Staffed by six legs, four of which belong to trainees who constantly have to refer every customer request to the two legs in charge. With the result that you get this bizarre relay of conversation that suggests we are all separated by continents rather than by a narrow counter.

In stomps a Jiminy Cricket lookalike whose nostrils are flared at roughly the same angle as his pants. “I TOLD you, I DEMAND a BIG CAR. I have travelled all over the world and NEVER had to drive a small car, so I want to know where my big car is”, shoving his shrunken-self to the front of the line.

Now, it does not take a rocket scientist to notice that there is nothing larger than a Lada in the fleet outside, but he is having none of it. My wife enlarges an eyeball in the direction of his head, and for the first time I notice the savagery of his toupee. A concrete-coloured cowpat which, in the heat of his fury, has clearly broken loose of its moorings.

He has court-martialled them all into the equatorial forecourt and is pointing and “voila-ing” at any four-wheeler larger than a Mini Metro. He Rumpelstiltskins himself into one and can barely see over the dashboard, and catapults out. What ensues looks like seriously threatening Anglo-French relations – which, in the light of vache-folle disease, is risking it.

Everything is now in fast French, until finally Yvonne secures keys to “somezing biggar” in a last-gasp attempt to restore that long-forgotten notion that “Zer customer eez alwayz right”.

MOTHER ASKS HER two-year-old what he would like to wear today. “Ice-cream” is his emphatic reply, as if hoping it might just slip her notice.

I AM OFF TO IRELAND to start filming and require a couple of wigs. Stevie, the wig-mistress, arrives with plastic bags full of hair. In order to get a mould of my skull, she wraps my head up in clingfilm, Sellotapes back and forth, felt-pens on the hairline and, having made a sort of giant condom of me, pulls it off, shows me a picture of what the finished effect ought to look like, packs up and says: “See you over a pint of Guinness.” When I tell her I am incapable of keeping down a teaspoon’s-worth, the depth of her expression has me worrying. “That’s like going to Vegas and declaring you don’t gamble.”

“PLEASE WRITE a quote next to your name in the book, please.” Oblige with “Chin-chin”, causing instant blush and bewilderment.
“Why did you write that?”
“It’s another way of saying cheers.”
“Oh! Well, it means ‘Penis-penis’ in Japanese.”
Sayonara.

Polish Premiere Magazine – 1996

The desperate cry of Ilona Pastorek’s mother and the words: “Promise, that you will find the killer” begin to obsess the main character Victor Mark [Richard E. Grant], a policeman from a small Czech town which has been horrified by the enigmatic murders committed on little girls in the neighbouring wood. In all three cases sexual motive is excluded, but everybody believes that as the little girls were undressed and there was a lack of evidence of violence, the killer was on good terms with girls before killing them.

This is the starting point of “The Cold Light Of The Day” by Dutch director Rudolf van den Berg.

The screenplay, by Doug Magee, was based on well known story by Friedrich Durrenmatt, entitled“The Promise”, which has inspired TV producers and film directors for years. The previous adaptation was made by Ladislav Vajda in 1958.

The action of the Van den Berg’s film takes place in present-day Czechoslovakia because the authors found that the East European context of the landmarks and the tensions related to them would help to heighten the psychological tension. However, it is only the background to a more universal story – that of the battle between doubtful morality areas and a frenzy “born” from a more noble passion – and is equally important in the mind of a possessed “madman”.

From the very beginning Victor, an intelligent policeman honest and devoted to his job, criticises his superior, Pavel Novak’s [played by James Laurenson] hypothesis that Alex – the bazaar dealer – is the killer. The course of inquiry taken and the constant accusation directed towards Alex appears to be a manipulation of justice which is only “explained” when it is revealed that Victor’s boss wants to achieve a result before upcoming local elections take place. Psychological torment used by Novak towards the suspect, resemble the practices he learned from his time in regimed service. In the past, Alex’s father was the victim of these practises. Alex’s father was a university professor who was once accused of subversive activity.

Alex, falsely accused, commits suicide and Novak soon receives congratulations for “solving” the case and his electoral progress is assured. Victor starts an inquiry on his own – though not as a policeman. He feels he cannot be a policeman after such a miscarriage of justice and searches privately for the real killer, truth and justice and to set his own mind at rest.

From a painful moral experience – and the promise given to one of the victim’s mothers – he tackles the case with obsessive determination. Put simply, he suffers greatly from the drama. His marriage has suffered and finally ends, and his beloved daughter must stay with her mother. He analyzes all of the evidence related to the murders and consults a friend of his who is a psychiatrist. Slowly he begins to make headway.

An chance meeting in the forest with a small girl Anna [Perdita Weeks], causes him to conceive a diabolic plan. He wants her to be the bait for the criminal, yet he is aware of the risk he takes in doing so – His obsession with the case wins out however.

Victor begins acting as an avenger and creates a provocative game of cat and mouse with the murderer. However, the situation becomes complicated. His opponent is sly and elusive, and Victor can’t stand the sustained tension that he has made by arranging the mysterious charade. An all-out spectrum of vital disasters “hangs over” him – it’s only the beginning of the game with the murderer.

“It was a proposal I couldn’t reject”, said the director Rudolf van den Berg. “This story has the emotive detective story tense, but a psychological thread is the essence of it – with the relative questions between good and evil – and the borders of freedom in activity and the so called “good” matter. All the characters are ambiguous – we can see their game with the surroundings and with themselves.

“The Cold Light Of The Day” has modern references, but the method of production by the prominent Slovak cinematographer Igor Luther [”Tin drum” by Schlondorff, “Danton” by Andrzej Wajda], transmits them to timeless “film reality”. Luther’s shots confer the aura of a gloomy fairy tale to the screen, fulfilling a moody psychologically thriller with moral complications visible in the behavior of the main characters.

Out Of The Blue Magazine – 1996

If every actor’s dream is the role that will make them, the nightmare is being doomed to play identical parts for the rest of their career. It was a fate that could have befallen Richard E. Grant who found fame with his first film, Withnail & I. While success as the drunken anti-hero set his star in the celluloid firmament, succeeding roles threatened to fix Richard’s angular frame and features in a twisted grimace.

“I had no notion that, almost without exception, every film offered since would be the result of playing an alcoholic, out-of-work actor,” he says.

Few of his other roles have been more salubrious: a manic agency executive in How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a less than likable scriptwriter in The Player, a womanizing dissolute in The Age of Innocence, a drug-addicted doctor in Dracula and a bitchy, bisexual designer with shaven head and kiss-curl in Pret-a-Porter.

But judging by his excursions in The Portrait of a Lady, co-starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich, and as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Trevor Nunn’s screen version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Richard’s finally stepped out of the long shadow cast by the immoral, imperious Withnail.

In The Portrait of a Lady, adapted from a Henry James novel by Oscar-winning writer-director Jane Campion, Richard plays Lord Warburton, who loves and loses the heroine Isabel Archer, played by Kidman.

Nor does the course of true love – or his costume – run smoother in Twelfth Night. “For Sir Andrew I have a blond wig, a blond moustache, slightly too-small public schoolboy’s clothes and play a pitiful fool suffering unrequited love,” Richard explains.

The cast of Helena Bonham Carter, Imogen Stubbs, Nigel Hawthorne and Ben Kingsley comprises the cream of classical theatre, but Richard avoided reading the whole play. “I don’t have that reverential attitude which says that if you haven’t done Shakespeare, you don’t deserve to have an Equity card. Because I’m playing somebody so stupid and so confused, I thought it would help to keep me in a state of confusion.”

It’s all a far cry from Richard’s first brush with the bard, when, newly arrived in Britain from his native Swaziland in 1982, a chance meeting with Jonathan Miller led to his working as general dogsbody on Miller’s production of Hamlet.

Not the lowliest job he took while resting, says Richard. “I washed cars, waited on tables, painted and decorated – you name it! It was absolutely ghastly because you truly believe you’ll never work again.”

Such torture isn’t entirely self-inflicted, he says. “I don’t know that you really choose acting so much as it chooses you. I gave myself until 30 to break through and decided that if I wasn’t working vaguely consistently five years later to go and do something else.”

“I’d been out of work for nine months when I got Withnail & I. The director wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, but no one was better qualified to play a resting actor.”

Despite subsequent success in Hollywood, Richard has no intention of relocating to America. Recently, he turned down the offer – and “millions” – to star in America’s TV version of Men Behaving Badly.

“Tracey Ullman insisted I accept. ‘You’ll never have to work again,’ she said. But five years in the States…” he shudders. “My daughter would never speak to me again.”

Only daughter, Olivia, is the apple of his eye. In his film diaries With Nails, he writes movingly of her premature arrival – two years after he and his wife, drama coach Joan Washington’s, first child Tiffany died soon after birth.

Home for the family is a comfortable house close to the Thames in Twickenham. “I love going to work in America,” continues Richard. “But I couldn’t bear to be in LA and not employed. Success is worshipped above all, no matter what shape or form it comes in. In England, if you’re not working it is not a catastrophe, in Hollywood it’s a disease!”

Fortunately, the parts are rolling in and Richard describes himself as being “gainfully employed” on The Golden Afternoon, a British-based film about a famous hoax that fooled a generation into believing in fairies. Despite success, he admits to still being haunted by the spectre of never working again. Non-acting interests – writing and painting – help alleviate this anxiety.

“I marvel at the talent of great painters. Knowing that I could never approach their vision or technique doesn’t lessen my enjoyment of painting as a hobby. Writing a daily diary, however, is more of a compulsion,” he says. “I’m aware that what I write is very superficial – not great fiction, but I enjoy it. Like every actor, I’m working on a screenplay. I’ve been sent so many awful screenplays that it gives us all blind hope.”

“I’d like to direct it too. I’m sure something has rubbed off on me from working with Coppola, Scorsese and Altman. I’d make a very benign director, there’d be no shouting or bossing people around on my set.”