October, 1993

Richard featured on Danny Baker’s “After All” television show sometime between September and November 1993 (we’ve sought out the “middle ground” and guessed October).

Unfortunately we don’t have any pics of this encounter, but we do have a recording of the interview, courtesy of Danny Baker’s website, which you can listen to below.

Download Quicktime now

UK You Magazine – 1993

By Geoff Wilkinson.

Richard E Grant is currently appearing in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych Theatre in London.

Wife Joan Washington is a voice coach. They have one daughter, aged four, Olivia. Richard and Joan’s first child was stillborn after complications developed in the pregnancy. “Until that time I had no idea how common it is to lose babies and what it actually meant. At the same stage in the second pregnancy, the danger signs became apparent. I owe Olivia’s life to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. She was born by Caesarean section at three minutes to one, Wednesday lunchtime. She was tiny, just 4lb, with jaundice, although she didn’t need to go in an incubator. They said she was strong. I’m sure Olivia will be our only child because of the problems we had holding on to one, and because I travel so much and my life is working. I’m glad I have a daughter because I’d prefer my wife to be her role model.”

“I built Olivia a proper marionette theatre for all the 30 Pelham puppets I had as a teenager. When she started to speak she always said “actually”, like Joan. She’ll say, “That’s a big, fat, ugly person,” and the only one she could get that from is me, when I’m in a hurry at pedestrian crossings.

“My wife has said she’d put her foot down straight away if she didn’t like Olivia’s first boyfriend. I said she could come and seek solace with me. Joan said, “She does that already.”

UK Harpers & Queen Magazine – March, 1993

By Heather Hodson

True to anti-hero form, Richard E. Grant is overwhelmingly glamorous. He confounds the rule that screen actors, met face-to-face shrink. When Grant strides into the studio, he looks disconcertingly healthy for someone who has spent most of his career playing reprobates. (During the photo-shoot, our make-up girl assumed that he was no more than 31: “You can tell from his skin, it’s nice and springy.” He’s 35.) It isn’t surprising: he doesn’t drink, smoke, eat meat or do drugs, and you won’t see him air-kissing at the BAFTAs; Grant prefers domestic life in Twickenham with his wife Joan Washington, a dialect coach at the National, and their four-year-old daughter Olivia. “Happier than a pig in shit” is how Paul McGann, Grant’s co-star in Withnail & I, once succinctly described him.

Such habits couldn’t be further from the dissolute characters he excels at, vide the scrofulous aristocrat in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, the obsessive copywriter in How to Get Ahead in Advertising (another Robinson collaboration), Robert Altman’s twitchy scriptwriter in The Player, and, most recently, the smacked-out doctor in Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Next month he takes libertinism to the stage in his West End debut as Algernon Moncrieff, played as an arch bounder in Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

“Oh, I despair sometimes,” he says in mock sorrow over his professional history of deviants. But Grant can’t contain his delight at having worked with Hollywood’s grandees, and is sanguine about Tinseltown’s propensity to type-cast English actors: “It’s a colonial situation, so of course the Brits get the weirdos, murderers, psychos or the more marginalized characters……It’s inevitable, unless you convince them that you’re American, and forsake your Englishness to become an American contender.”

And Grant is terribly English. He speaks traditional BBC, with soft, round vowels. Raather like thiss. EXcellent, MARvellous and ABsoLUTEly act as full stops. But the faint clip of his accent was formed in Swaziland, where he was born in 1957. Grant attended Africa’s first multi-racial school, acting in plays with Nelson Mandela’s daughters. After a degree in English at Cape Town University he formed the multi-racial Troupe Theatre Company, but in 1982 packed his bags for England, “full of blind hope and ambition.” Peppercorn salaries and bouts of unemployment followed, until in 1986 he auditioned for the part Daniel Day-Lewis had just turned down in Withnail & I. Grant’s debut was uniformly acclaimed. Since then, when directors need a dissipated English eccentric, his face always comes to mind.

Grant undoubtedly has all the dandified elegance of a Wildean character, a challenge he views “With a mixture of huge excitement and adrenaline terror.” He is aware of the difficulties in moving from screen to stage: “If you get slated, you have to keep appearing every night. With a film by the time it’s out you’re on to the next thing. And with Wilde, you’re up against it. All those legendary performances……” But he has the support of Dame Maggie Smith, who plays Lady Bracknell and who, since they met last year while filming Suddenly Last Summer for BBC2, has been “A first-class ticket of encouragement.”

Irreproachably nice he may be, but he is also very funny. Anecdotes are non-stop and self-deprecating. On his chest size: “When Nicholas [Hytner] told me I might have to remove some clothes on stage. I almost had a seizure. I said, ‘CHRIST, Nicholas, but have you seen my torso?’ I started contemplating chest implants.” On his legs: “The thought of revealing my sparrow legs to an audience every night……” On his method acting: “Bruce said to me during the rehearsals of Withnail, ‘You can’t play an alcoholic unless you’ve been there.’ So one night we sat up and he made me get drunk. CHRIST it was AWful. Bruce and Paul couldn’t stop laughing.”

After Algy Moncrieff, Grant will appear, not surprisingly, as two more degenerates: in Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence, playing “An upper-class New York cad”, and in Suddenly Last Summer as Natasha Richardson’s ghastly avaricious brother in a seersucker suit’. But despite all the bounders, Grant cherishes the role of the tragic hero. “It’s a cliché, but I’d love to play Hamlet. You’ve got to do it before you’re 40, though. The idea of a man over 40 having problems with his mother moves into the area of the grotesque.”

GQ Magazine – August 1991

Anne Billson meets the actor who put the E in Excess and got ahead in Hollywood.

A drama professor once told Richard E Grant he would never make it in the movies because he had a face like a tombstone. Since proving the drama professor wrong, Grant has also been referred to as lantern-jawed, sepulchral and hollow-cheeked, while the Hollywood Reporter once described him as “a handsome wet rat”.

“Wet rat,” echoes Grant, who is hearing this one for the first time and appears to be overlooking the “handsome” reference, “that’s very endearing. Thank you, Hollywood Reporter.”

But Grant’s face is something more enduring and bankable than merely handsome – it is striking and memorable, and he has screen presence in spades. He also has off screen presence in spades, as well as a rather wonderful way with words. The Government’s donation to the British film industry of a couple of million pounds, to be spread over the next four years, is, as he says, “about as helpful as sticking a clove of garlic up a dead donkey’s arsehole and telling it to canter.”

Born in 1957, he grew up in Swaziland on a diet of movies, and always wanted to be a film star. “I assiduously followed Donald Sutherland’s career, because he’d grown up in a small town in Canada, was over six foot tall, had a very long face and didn’t look like Robert Redford. And his career has been so varied and peculiar that I thought if he could do it, so could I.”

He studied English and Drama at university in South Africa before co-founding the multi-racial Troupe Theatre Company. He arrived in London in 1982 and after a couple of years in fringe and rep, Plays and Players magazine nominated him “most promising newcomer.” Then there was Withnail And I, since which he’s never looked back. Grant appreciates the irony of a performance as an out-of-work actor leading to so much work.

So far, his career has been more peculiar than varied. He can play the straight roles with the best of them, and did so in Henry and June and LA Story, in which he played guys who lose their girls to the other guys. “I get kicked in the bollocks,” he says of LA Story, “so Victoria Tennant can go off with her real-life husband Steve martin. It’s a cypher character, but I’m such a huge fan of Steve Martin that I would have played a parking attendant with one line if he’d offered that.” There’s nothing wrong with cypher characters, they’re the meat and potatoes of an actor’s life, but Grant is too interesting to be consigned to such roles, as a glance at one of his more over-the-top performances will confirm. The E in his name is an Equity-pleasing initial which stands for nothing but you could almost say it stands for Excess.

His latest film, Hudson Hawk, is an example of excess in all departments. The film was produced by Joel Silver, a past master at turning out violent action-adventure (48 hours, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard), but not exactly well-known for his parsimony. Director Michael Lehman, has been praised for the small, quirky cultish teenpic Heathers, but is a relative greenhouse in a big-budget ballpark full of oversized players. Thirteenth-hour replacements of the leading lady (Andie MacDowell for Maruschka Detmaers) and director of photography (Dante Spinotti for Jost Vacano) sparked rumours of trouble. The $40 million budget was, shall we say, exceeded, and the film’s quirky, cultish qualities have been buried beneath a welter of special effects and frenzied mugging. Being a sucker for excess, I loved it, but the New York critics apparently decided en masse that Willis deserved to be taken down a peg. Hudson Hawk has already been dubbed Hudson the duck.

Lehman decided he wanted Grant to reprise the sort of arrogant slimeball he had played in How To Get Ahead In Advertising. “The fact they cast Sandra Bernhard as my wife gave me a clear indication of the territory we were in,” says Grant. Bernhard is best known on this side of the pond for her manic supporting performances in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and has the biggest mouth since Martha Raye. “Working with Sandra,” says Grant, “is like being imbibed by Godzilla’s vulva – fantastical and grotesque by turns, and always funny. She’s very sharp, and we became great friends.”

She and Grant play Minerva and Darwin Mayflower, crazed megalomaniacs who force funky car burglar Willis into helping them recover the pieces of Leonardo Da Vinci’s legendary (so legendary you’ve never heard of it) gold-manufacturing machine. It is to Grant and Bernhard’s credit that they emerge from the mayhem with flying honours.

Dressed in Cerruti 1881 finery, Darwin is the type of character who stands on tables waving his arms and ranting about world domination. “People said, ‘What’s the character basis of what you’ve done?'” says Grant. “‘Are there any people who are like this?’ Well, Joel (Silver) is like this. you see Joel speaking on eh telephone to someone he doesn’t like, and it’s a huge megablast.” Grant and Bernhard dreamt up another source of inspiration in the idea of Donald and Ivana on mescaline. “Vanity Fair always has these profiles about Prince von Struppelwasser eating diamonds for breakfast, fucking his dog, feeling up the butler, and sticking his fingers up the Oldsmobile exhaust pipe,” says Grant. “I don’t think you can go too far in inventing – not even inventing – just trying to do what these exceptionally rich and privileged people get up to.” With Mayflower, Grant joins Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman and Steven Berkoff with one of those larger-than-life villainous roles in which Hollywood likes to cast British actors.

The first of his full-scale ranting roles was, of course, that of the dissolute, drug-guzzling Withnail in Withnail and I: a trio of great character studies (Grant, Paul McGann and Richard Griffiths) and an amusing portrayal of the incompetence of the English male, going begging in a film which seems to be adored by everyone except me.

For a film actor in a defunct British industry, the alternative to Hollywood migration is staying here and doing theatre or TV, maybe appearing on screen in the occasional deadbeat farce such as Killing Dad (adapted from Ann Quin’s novel Berg), a waste of a fine cast and an equally fine haircut – the deconstructed-Aubrey Beardsley-look which Grant maintains you would spot on a lot of “geeky guys” if you were to stand on Waterloo Station for a while. “I fought to have this hairstyle,” he says. It’s the best thing about the film.

Much more fun to watch was the American schlock-horror potboiler Warlock, in which he plays a witch finder pursing malevolent hex casting Julian Sands from seventeenth-century Boston to present-day Los Angeles. It’s the sort of film in which the hero wears what might pass for a dead sheep in a bad light, and says “Let us tarry not” instead of “Let’s go.” Cultists, however, will be alerted to its sterling qualities by the presence of Mary Woronov in a cameo role as a medium who has her eyeballs ripped out. “I did the part because I knew that the chances of me ever being offered a sort of macho heroic part were so slim,” says Grant, who appears skeptical when I say how much I enjoyed it. “I was astonished that they offered it to me in the first place.”

Though his ranting roles have, to date, been the most fun to play and to watch, they have their downsides. “My wife finds it very hard when I’m playing these,” says Grant, who is married to dialect coach Joan Washington.

“The How To Get Ahead In Advertising part of her nuts. You try not to take it home, but if you’re doing that fourteen hours a day, obviously by the time you get home it’s difficult to just sit down and say, ‘Right, I’ll have a cup of tea.'”

US Magazine – 1991

Richard E. Grant is not an actor for the squeamish. His portrayal of an unemployed alcoholic actor in the black comedy Withnail & I was almost too painful to watch, but too funny not to. Ditto his ad exec whose stress manifests itself in a live boil on his neck in How To Get Ahead in Advertising. Conquering another complex comic character in Steve Martin’s zany L.A. Story, Grant plays a closet homosexual who tries to remarry his estranged wife. “The role conforms to the cliché that all Englishmen are homosexuals,” says Grant, 33. “He’s somebody who hasn’t a clue with what’s going on in a country he really doesn’t understand, so he’s desperate to hang on to what’s familiar.” Martin, who wrote the script, had Grant in mind for the role even before the project was a sure thing. “I love his previous work,” says Martin. “I thought he was so eccentric and we really wanted that for the part. It’s so much easier to hire someone who can act eccentric rather than have to write it.”

To Grant, who was born in Swaziland and now lives in London, filming in L.A. was a lesson in foreign relations. “My jaw just dropped at the sights and at some of the people I met,” he says. “The geeks are galore.” Even so, if given a green card, Grant wouldn’t mind moving his wife, dialect coach Joan Washington, and their 2-year-old, Olivia, across the ocean. “Needless to say, the film industry in England is almost nonexistent,” Grant explains. “Hopefully, I’ll get more employment from your countrymen. But they’re keeping us out – so as not to add too much competition.” Grant laughs, then adds graciously, “You guys are stocked to Mars with brilliant actors.” The actor’s next British invasion takes place in Hudson Hawk, co-starring Bruce Willis. “I play Donald Trump on mescaline, basically,” he says. “I’m married to Sandra Bernhard, who’s doing an Ivana. We are completely insane, sexual sadists.” How insane? Replies Grant, gleefully, “We kill for fun.”