Hot Air Magazine – 1997

You can always tell a man by his reaction to my cat, or rather by my cat’s reaction to him. Richard E. Grant had agreed to meet me in my Soho apartment before we went to lunch. Seemed convenient, but actually I had contrived it so that the Shiksa test could be done.

Shiksa, my female black and white cat, is sullen and demanding and hates all women. She is, though, a kind of embodiment of the female psyche and men tend to respond to her in that way. She is unsociable and hides, bites, scratches, occasionally spits. Once when a male gynaecologist friend came, she was all over him. She likes men who know women. Most other people, she ignores, or is vile to. As a cat, she sees things that aren’t necessarily obvious.

Richard E. Grant came and it was like she’d been given human catnip. She was curling, purring, intrigued, climbing him, throwing herself at him. I tell him that this must mean he’s extremely sexually driven. “I don’t think that’s so unusual. But yes,” he says, a little proudly, “perhaps.”

He’s wearing this tiny black T-shirt and he’s all triangular in the pectoral department. You don’t imagine him as a sexual beast from the roles he’s best known for – most famously the bedraggled alcoholic in Withnail & I, the sad man in Jack and Sarah, the over-the-top fashion queen in Pret-a-Porter, the kindly Englishman in Portrait of a Lady, and the double decaffeinated cappuccino type in LA Story.

He’s fresh off the set of Spiceworld: The Movie, where he plays the Spice Girls’ manager, who wears a different suit everyday. I doubt his sexual charisma is anything to do with being rubbed up beside all the Girl Power – Spice Girls and Shiksa – I think he’s just innately a beast. It’s very distracting. Despite the fact that he’ll talk about being 40 and old enough to be a Spice Girls’ father.

The interview is a kind of intellectual flirtation. You flirt with the intention of securing the confession. But 20 minutes into our lunch, downstairs at Little Italy, it was all going hopelessly wrong.

He was asking me all of the questions! When somebody asks more questions than you, that kind of curiosity is exciting, irresistible, and you wonder, “Is he flirting with me? Or is he asking me all these questions because he wants to avoid being questioned?” If you think you’re having exciting and intimate badinage it seems rather a let-down suddenly to say, “Tell me, how do you combine this high sexual drive with high fidelity to your wife?”

“The most obvious thing is that my parents were divorced when I was a child,” he says. “It left an indelible impression in that I thought I would either go one way or the other. All my life, I’ve been all or nothing, so I thought, if you’re going to marry someone, it’s got to be right, because I saw the nuclear fallout when it went wrong. I saw what happened to my father. Which is not to say I think marriage is a straitjacket and I’m forcing myself to stay in it. It is good there. I want to be there.”

He met his wife, Joan Washington, a voice coach, 15 years ago, when he’d just arrived in England. He was born and grew up in Swaziland and studied at Cape Town University. He needed help with a Belfast accent and she asked him to make a tape in a black African accent for a play she was working on with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He visited her home. She cooked him dinner. She says at that point she knew.

She had been married before but was estranged from her first husband. They had one child, Tom, now at university. She says that she believes there’s one person in the world who’s meant for you and it was instantaneous. She knew it was him. He proposed to her in the middle of a baggage carousel at Heathrow Airport at 6.30 am.

Does he think fidelity is about sexual monogamy? Or is adultery not the worst betrayal? He is adamant. “I am a terrible liar, I know if I was unfaithful, I would be the first to come out with it. That would be the end of my relationship. She would not tolerate that. I don’t think I would either because I wouldn’t be faithful to someone who had literally been fucked.” All or nothing.

“That’s not to say that I don’t have conflicts in my relationship. I have never met a couple who didn’t have conflicts. Sometimes, the stronger the conflicts the more you strive.”

For many years, he had seemed an unlikely candidate for marriage. He was in his mid-twenties when he met Joan and had never seriously considered marriage with anyone else. His parents’ break-up when Richard was 11 had made him wary of commitment. He’d seen their pain and didn’t want to repeat it. “I felt convinced that if I ever trusted someone with my heart, I would run the risk of having it broken, so I shied away.”

“I think my mother leaving my father affected me deeply. It was obvious he was still in love with her when she left. He was 40 and fell apart. Like all children, I thought my father was strong and had all the answers. I was forced to parent my parents.”

Richard and his younger brother, Stuart, went to live with his father who was the Director of Education. He had been posted to Africa in the 1950s during the last gasp of the British Empire. It was an endless expatriate cocktail party circuit. He reflects that no marriage stood the chance of surviving more than 3 weeks in Mbabane. There was nothing else to do except have affairs, the ideal dress rehearsal for Hollywood.

He had a very strong relationship with his father who perhaps encouraged him most by making discouraging remarks. That gave him the ambition to succeed. His greatest regret is that his father, who died 12 years ago of cancer, never saw him in Withnail & I. When he did Withnail, he knew in his bones life was going to change and he’d be forever associated with this shrunken alcoholic, which is rather ironic because he doesn’t drink, can’t drink, says he hasn’t got the guts for it.

He’s neurotic in an interesting way. His teacher at school told him he was like a fully wound clockwork toy. And he is like that – six questions coming out of his mouth all at once, and all of them going in different directions. He’s deeply insecure, and at the same time displays the confidence of a train going very fast. At school he was 2 per cent in Chemistry and Math and 100 per cent in English and History. He tells me proudly, proud of his extremes.

More questions. He asks how old I am. I don’t want to tell him. He wants to know whether I’ve ever been in therapy. “No,” I lie, because I don’t want to talk about it. Has he? “No. I always assume if you go into therapy it’s because you need something, that you can’t deal with things in some way, that you need someone to help you. I have the sort of inborn optimism that’s probably nauseating.” Does he get depressed? “Of course I do. Jealous, depressed, sad – all things that are perfectly normal to feel. But I think if you can’t function normally, then get help. I haven’t got to that state yet.”

One of the reasons he gives for not being in therapy is his constant diary writing. “I never bottle things up. I write it all down. Keeping a diary is a form of exorcism. Every day, it’s habitual. It may be one line or ten pages.” He’s also a terrific hoarder, a collector of toys and keepsakes, rusting jack-in-the-boxes that have been with him since his childhood. A version of his diary ended up being published. “It horrified my wife because she thought I’d get into a lot of trouble. I suppose she’s used to a more uncensored version of me and thought that I was in a glasshouse and shouldn’t throw stones.”

The diaries, though, aren’t just stream of consciousness unbottling. With Nails, his film diaries (published by Picador), was a bitchy bestseller. The phrases are well crafted. The insights are funny as hell and he himself comes over with a voice that speaks straight to the reader’s own neuroses and foibles.

The completion of his book made a great difference to the way he saw himself. Instead of an actor, someone he’d describe as “a tart for hire,” he became someone in control. As he says to me several times, actors are never in control of themselves. Writes are in control. That’s why he’s writing a novel called By Design, about what he knows best, Hollywood, and writing a screenplay.

In the diaries, he does this extraordinary thing. He’s extremely bitchy and gets away with it. For instance, when he met Demi Moore, “You pronounce it D’mee” she corrected him. Her voice was extraordinarily deep “You sound like a ruptured carburetor,” he said, which made her laugh.

The insecurity that he talks about in his book and in person is vast. He says that the editor of his book couldn’t believe that he could be so riddled with insecurities. “On the outside it looks like you have a successful life. You’ll start sounding disingenuous if you claim that there are mornings when you can’t get out of bed.” But that was the state he was in. The editor said that although it was perfectly acceptable when a young actor in Withnail, after several Hollywood film credits, he should stop talking so much about how his ego could be exalted by a tiny compliment or his world rocked by a disparaging look or comment.

“I have noticed that since the diaries came out, there’s been a kind of positive shift in how people deal with me. I think that some people assume actors are not qualified to have opinions.”

He feels as a writer, he can get control back. And is control important? “I find it very frustrating if you have to deal with people who are blatantly less imaginative, less talented. When you write something, you feel you’ve earned the right. You obviously don’t suffer from that at all. You think you’re good enough.” Good enough? “I mean, does your confidence waver a lot? On a daily basis? Because mine does constantly.”

To add to his crisis of confidence cocktail, he says “I have never been indifferent. Everything I feel is always charged up. I’ve gone off people if they have a movie I like. I know that’s completely adolescent. If I read a book that I felt absolute passion about and some has been indifferent, in a childish way, I think why should I bother?” What he’s talking about is the importance of the minutiae of attraction, and also his low tolerance threshold. “My wife says I’m too judgmental or superficial. She’s seen me meet people and when I turn out not to be interested, my attraction to them is replaced by a complete tombstone disdain.”

I had read that he did not want to have another child after his daughter Olivia, who is now eight, because of his own dire relationship with his brother. And while that turns out to be not exactly true as far as having another child goes, the dire relationship is true. “In fact, I have no relationship with him at all. I never had. I always thought of him as having completely different sensibilities and different political notions. The last time I saw him was at my father’s funeral.” At one point Stuart claimed in a tabloid that Richard was their mother’s favourite and castigated him for turning up at their father’s funeral with orange hair (it was blonde: he was appearing as a Nazi soldier in play).

Rather stingingly, Stuart said that Richard was so feminine, he thought of him more as an estranged sister. This was flabbergasting. “If anything, he had more in common with my mother than I did, because they both love sports. Perhaps he confused the marionettes I bought for my schoolboy shows as me playing with dolls. I don’t think his comments reflect very well on him. I’m not interested in getting my own back. His comments have hardly opened the door for me to say, “Let’s have a drink”. Actually, I wouldn’t even recognize him if I saw him.

The answer to the second part of the question, why he has one child only, is much more traumatic, almost too traumatic to talk about. They did have another child, three years before Olivia. She was called Tiffany and she died within half an hour of being born. It was a terrible experience. Joan went into labour at seven months and the baby’s lungs simply weren’t big enough to allow her to survive. After all the intense activity of preparing for birth, the expectancy, there she was. The hospital counseling service suggested he had a picture taken of her and that he held her to help him grieve. He describes her as “warm but dead. All perfect. Ten toes, ten fingers, eyes, mouth, all broken. No breath.”

He seems to enjoy a very deep relationship with Olivia, giving her lots of attention and stories. In fact, she was the reason for an abrupt end to the lunch. He needed to get back to Surrey to collect her from school. I still felt though, that he had asked me more questions that I had asked him and that’s not the deal in interviews. But I no longer thought that he was trying to hide things. He is actually very warm, and the kind of questions he asked of me revealed as much about himself. They were mostly “Are you insecure too?” He tells me, though, “It seems such an unnatural thing to sit back and talk about yourself. I never do that. Somebody I met that I hadn’t seen since I was six years old said ‘My God! You haven’t changed at all. You still ask as many questions.’ It’s the way I operate. It’s curiosity.” So there you have it. The essence of Richard E. Grant: insatiable curiosity.