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.”