The Sun Herald – Sunday 30th April, 2006

Richard E Grant not only made a film of his diaries, he kept a diary during filming. By Barry Didcock

THERE are two things everyone knows about Richard E Grant – he was born and brought up in Swaziland and he starred in Withnail & I, the funniest British film of the 1980s. There’s a third thing they should know – that he is a compulsive diarist with a waspish tongue and a keen eye – and a fourth they will soon learn, namely that the 48-year-old actor recently went behind the camera to turn his tumultuous colonial childhood into an autobiographical film.

The movie, Wah-Wah, is out in June and Grant’s new book, The Wah-Wah Diaries, covering the period of its slow and painful gestation has just been published . The actor will be in Aberdeen next month to talk about it all – and introduce a sneak preview of the film.

We meet in a plush central London hotel on a sunny spring day. Grant arrives wearing white cotton trousers, sleek-looking white trainers and an Indian cotton shirt. It’s warm but not that warm and the effect is a little rock-starry. Tall and nut-brown he would not be an easy man to miss even in a room full of Kidmans and Clooneys. He sits down, sips his cranberry juice and starts to talk. “Not exactly tropical, Aberdeen, is it?” he says. He should know: his wife of nearly 20 years – voice coach Joan Washington – is from the Granite City.

For Grant, writing a diary is a means of keeping his feet on the ground when faced with some of the excesses of his profession. Whether describing two un-named Gosford Park co-stars as rutting stags or recounting a meeting in Paris with Emmanuelle Béart (“She tells me straight off the blocks that she has never heard of me”), his style is self-deprecating and humorous.

“When I got to know Carrie Fisher while I was living in Los Angeles, she said to me, ‘You’re no longer a tourist, you’re now one of the attractions,'” he tells me. “I accept that rationally but emotionally I still feel that I’m on the outside looking in. I think that’s very common to anyone who’s emigrated. So, keeping a diary, for me, means there’s a part of my brain that still thinks I’m going to go back to Swaz one day and open a pineapple stall by the side of the road… The diary is essentially me pinching myself and saying, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.'”

Entries in the Grant diaries are contemporaneous with events rather than worked up afterwards from notes, though he admits that going into the Wah-Wah project he was aware a book might result from it, even if the film itself was never made. On that front he has history, having already published one collection of film diaries, With Nails. This first volume began with the making of Withnail & I and ran up to Prêt-à-Porter in 1995 . Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, Sandra Bernhard, Steve Martin and the producer Joel Silver are among those who feature.

Like The Wah-Wah Diaries, With Nails is sharp and funny. Grant loves nothing more than to prick the bubbles of others’ self-importance – and his pin is mightier than any sword. In a sense, though, this new set of diaries brings the actor full circle because the event which caused him to start writing in the first place is the same one that kicks off his film: a young boy witnessing his mother’s infidelity from the back seat of a car while she thinks he’s asleep.

“I’ve kept diaries since the age of 11 when I became burdened with the secret of my mother’s adultery,” he explains. “It never crossed my mind that anybody would see them because the very nature of a diary is that it is private.”

Back when these events were taking place he was Richard Grant Esterhuysen, son of Hendrik, an Afrikaner who was head of education in the British-administered colony. His mother, Leonie, was South African but of German descent. As his parents underwent a divorce he describes as “pain-filled”, the daily diary became a place for him to find solace and privacy . Eventually, his parents split and his mother left. Today, she lives in South Africa and she and her son are more or less reconciled. She hasn’t read the diaries or seen the film but she read the shooting script and gave it her assent.

“The film was never meant to be a sort of slash-fest character assassination of her,” he says. “It was to try and understand, as far as I was able then, why she did what she did and why things happened the way they did.”

After Grant’s mother left, his father remarried but soon slumped into alcoholism. On one memorable occasion he held a gun to his son’s head and attempted to shoot him for the crime of emptying a precious case of booze down the sink. He died of throat cancer in 1981, and it was at his funeral that Grant last spoke to his younger brother, Stuart. The pair are still estranged and Stuart doesn’t feature in Wah-Wah.

“He went to a boarding school so he wasn’t around for the majority of these events,” says Grant curtly when I ask about his brother. “It was just easier to write one character instead of two.”

For the purposes of the film, Grant concertinas events which unfolded over a decade into a tighter period, the few years running up to Swazi independence in 1968. The point of view is always that of the young Richard (called Ralph in the film) and the focus is the troubled father-son relationship. But the film is also a love letter to Swaziland and to the profession of acting, and an ode to a lost era – the end of Empire.

Similarly, the published diaries work on many levels. Firstly, they describe the process of parlaying the events of Grant’s childhood into a workable film script and then the painful experience of having to relive it all on set in Swaziland with actors (Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson and newcomer Nicholas Hoult) playing the dysfunctional family unit.

Grant couldn’t film in the actual house he grew up in because it is still owned by his stepmother and rented to the head of the UN in Swaziland. Besides, he adds, “my father died there”. Instead he managed (after lengthy negotiations) to secure the home of a family he used to know. But it was still an emotional time.

Secondly, the diaries show Grant away from his pet project, pursuing the day job. Amid knockbacks from Ralph Fiennes, Charlize Theron and Gillian Anderson, among others, for the roles of his parents, he shoots Gosford Park with Robert Altman, has dinner with Michael Jackson and spends a riotous New Year in Cape Town with Bob Geldof and Bono, who entertain fellow diners with an impromptu singalong at midnight. He is also flown to America to film the last ever episode of Frasier.

“The resident dog farted,” he writes of that experience, “then topped it off by doing a prolonged volcanic shit which cleared the studio for a good 15 minutes.” It all adds up to an entertaining read.

Finally, Grant lifts the lid on the circus that is a film unit in full flight and provides an insight into the monstrous egos involved. In this case the villain of the piece is Grant’s French producer, Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, who seems to alienate everyone she meets.

Her appearance in the diaries is usually bookended by expletives or despairing passages listing her shortcomings. I ask Grant if there has been a rapprochement since shooting finished. He snorts. “I will never see her again as long as I breathe. Things ended diabolically. She was completely out of her depth.”

But if you thought dealing with absentee French producers, Swazi bureaucracy and a stubborn horse named Who Dares Wins has put Richard E Grant off the business of directing films, think again. Undeterred by the six years it took him to make Wah-Wah , he’s keen to get back behind the camera and is currently writing a screenplay, set in LA, about the film industry.

“As soon as you’ve got any amount of money and people with grandiose ideas, egos go completely out of control, and that’s a great source of comedy,” he says. His film, he adds, will be a satire about “how movies are actually made and what really goes on with actors, rather than the PR version that you get”.

And rest assured, the diary will keep pace with it all.

Wah-Wah is released on June 2; The Wah-Wah Diaries (Picador, £16.99) is out now.

30 April 2006