Sydney Morning Herald – September 20, 2008

Joyce Morgan

QUESTIONS. Questions. Richard E. Grant fires them off constantly. At everyone. At the 40-year-old Fijian who drives us to Sydney Airport. At the Somali assistant at the check-in counter. At Lionel, our lunch waiter, whose parents blame each other for landing him with an old-fashioned name. And at Claudia, who cleans up, and has just made her first trip back to Uruguay after 18 years.

Within minutes, he has got their names, ages and life stories. I’ve never encountered such insistent curiosity. If most stars crave anonymity and keep fleeting encounters with the public to a minimum, Grant isn’t one of them.

What he has kept to a minimum is his baggage. A plastic Surf Culture shopping bag containing undies, socks, toothbrush and the script of My Fair Lady is all he has for his overnight trip to Brisbane, where he is to see the musical and meet its cast. Grant is about to step into the role of the witty, arrogant linguist, Professor Henry Higgins, when the production comes to Sydney next month.

Grant has not appeared in a musical before. The last time the African-born actor sang in public was a few bars of the Swazi national anthem on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope a couple of years ago. Denton, of course, would know all about Grant’s insistent questioning. For who could forget how Grant turned the interview tables and quizzed the host about his sex life and marriage wobbles. Gulp. No, it wasn’t planned. Yes, he had googled Denton beforehand.

“It’s disconcerting if you go to speak to someone and you know nothing about them. It seems to me rude,” Grant says. “Otherwise there’s no conversation, it’s one-way. And I am pretty curious.”

No kidding. Whether Grant’s endless questions are about control, natural inquisitiveness or simply the devil making him do it is one for the shrinks. But more of them later.

His appearance on Denton is what landed Grant the role. Among those watching was the musical’s director, Stuart Maunder. Here was his ideal Henry Higgins. Indeed, so many people have since told Grant that he’s a perfect match for Higgins that the actor has started puzzling about the subtext of such comments.

“I kept being told by friends of mine, which I found reassuring in the beginning, ‘Oh, you’re perfect casting.’ But the more I heard this I thought, ‘What, an arrogant, misogynist, bullying pain in the arse?’ I have begun to slightly wonder if I am all these awful things incarnate.”

In person Grant is devilishly charming, thoughtful and perceptive. But there’s that intense, edgy aura that is apparent on film, a feeling you never get with those other urbane movie Grants, Hugh and Cary.

At 51, Grant is tanned after a holiday in France, which accentuates those penetrating blue eyes, and lean in black jeans, sneakers and T-shirt topped with an ice-blue jacket. He sounds incredibly posh and terribly British. It is only when I later play back the tape of our interview that his African accent sounds apparent.

The teetotal Grant remains best known for the drunken wastrel Withnail in his first film, Withnail And I, in 1987. But he has appeared in about 60 films since then, including Madonna’s Filth And Wisdom, Gosford Park and Pret-a-Porter.

Grant has immersed himself in the character of the politically incorrect Higgins, who transforms the cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle – played by Taryn Fiebig in Opera Australia’s production – into an English lady by changing the way she speaks. And against his will, the aloof, disdainful Higgins falls for her. Well, maybe. For any romance between them is at best hinted at. The musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, is a meeting of minds, not bodily parts. And the world of My Fair Lady is a far cry from today’s raunch culture where, as we talk, emailed advertisements for enlargements, enhancements and nips and tucks of a most intimate sort keep pinging onto the screen of Grant’s mobile phone.

“How on earth do you stop this stuff?” he asks.

And he reads out the text of the latest improbable promise of a boost in size and testosterone in a voice that is more amused and exasperated than Richard E. Grant talking dirty.

“Do you think they get together?” he asks.

We’re back in Henry Higgins land. Grant has revisited Shaw’s 1916 play and looked at Leslie Howard’s 1938 film, Pygmalion, and 1964’s My Fair Lady, the film of the musical with Rex Harrison. He has discussed the role with Emma Thompson, who is writing the script for the remake starring Keira Knightley.

“[Thompson] said, ‘Do you think they fall in love?’ I said absolutely – otherwise, it would be a different beast,” Grant says. “For the majority of this story Higgins feels he is in control and the puppet master Svengali.”

Higgins as puppet master. It could describe Grant. Puppets were his first creative outlet when he gave puppet shows to friends and family as a child in pre-independence Swaziland, where he was born and lived until he moved to London in 1982.

“There’s something about how, without being seen, you bring something to life,” he says. “I could also do a sort of send-up show of my parents’ friends, imitate them and dress the puppets up like them and do their voices. You get away with it with a puppet whereas you could never have said that to their faces. People are very flattered by being represented in a cartoonish form.”

He still collects puppets “obsessively”. He took some of his collection back to Swaziland to use in his 2005 movie Wah-Wah, which he wrote and directed. It was based on his dysfunctional African childhood amid a dying colonial era awash with snobbery, booze and adultery. His was a childhood in which he inadvertently witnessed his mother bonk his father’s best friend. A childhood where, after his mother ran off with her lover, Grant’s father descended into alcoholism and drunken rages, including one in which he took after his son with a gun and almost killed him. Puppets must have seemed far preferable – and controllable.

Writing the film script was painful at times but he describes making the film as a pleasure, despite huge obstacles. He chronicled these in his hilarious and acerbic book, The Wah-Wah Diaries. For as well as acting, directing and scriptwriting, Grant has also penned two books.

“You can’t recreate your past but I essentially was able to do so from the vantage point of being middle-aged and I was the puppet master of the whole thing rather than being a very confused adolescent,” he says.

The experience was cathartic. He has exorcised those ghosts.”The need or compulsion to tell that story has now been assuaged,” he says. “Some tectonic-plate shift happens in your brain and you think, ‘I’ve now done that, it’s not bugging me any more.’

“People feel able to tell you stuff about their own if they’ve had similar backgrounds … I think that’s all a good, positive thing. That’s the nature of any kind of art form. If you can identify with it and it touches or means something that is so personal to the person who made it and then it reaches other people, how you can ask for a higher or better response than that?”

The seeds of the future performer, director and writer were sown with those early puppet shows. And that touches on a pet theory he keeps testing. Grant refers to a conclusion reached by sound recordist Walter Murch that a person’s chance of happiness increased if their adult career reflected what they most loved doing between nine and 11 years old.

He tells me how his actor friend Steve Martin did – and still does – magic tricks. How director Steven Spielberg had a Super 8 movie camera as a boy. Then he demands to know my early hobbies. I confess to, erm, writing plays for my own puppets. I can’t believe I’ve just told him this.

“And now you’re a writer,” he exclaims. “The number of people this [theory] applies to is amazing.”

He’s on a roll. More questions. He wants to know what I’d do if I wasn’t a writer. But I want my interview back. I want to know what he would do if he wasn’t a writer-director-actor. Journalism, he suggests. In fact, he has done some. He worked with the BBC to help expose a scam to sell a bogus AIDS cure two years ago. But then he springs a real surprise. Grant would like to be a shrink.

“How people operate, why they do what they do is so much part and parcel of the nature of the kind of work you are involved with in being an actor. Doing it much more seriously, as opposed to playing a part, is something I’ve certainly toyed with,” he says.

His friend, sharp-tongued comedian Ruby Wax, has just embarked on that path and it has got him thinking. He first considered such a path even before he underwent 18 months of analysis a decade ago.

“I thought it would be the most wonderful job. You would sit and hopefully help people on the one hand but also the insights into other people’s lives and how they operate at a depth and get paid to do that,” he says. “But my problem would be to just shut up and try not to say, ‘You should try this or try that,’ or try and rescue somebody all the time.”

Grant was 42 when he suddenly found he was unable to drag himself out of bed in the mornings. He had never considered himself depressed before. Steve Martin recommended a London shrink. The result was life-changing.

“He made simple connections that to me were revelatory. I was 42, my father was 42 when he was cuckolded and lost his job essentially. His career had been cut off mid-way. He lost his marriage. He had a 10-year-old son. I was 42 and had a 10-year-old daughter.”

As a result he reconciled with his long-estranged mother, felt freed to write his script and was no longer consumed by anger.

“When you go through that process, it’s like having a dozen pillars of your past and you’re standing there like Samson, you’re chained up to all this stuff. Through analysis and understanding why people have done what they’ve done, you’re released from all that … The past and your interpretation of it is much more fluid than I had thought it was. I held on to things, how I was wronged and that was this … I suppose it was just a relief not to have to hold on to that stuff.”

Grant is approaching the age at which his father, a former head of education in Swaziland, died (at just 52). And, yes, it will be a milestone for him. Just as it was when Grant got beyond 13 years of marriage (to dialect coach Joan Washington), the duration of his father’s two marriages.

“I thought, ‘I’ve broken that role model of his life,’ ” he says. “If I reach 52, you feel if you live to the age they were – and hopefully beyond – that somehow you are redressing the injustice of them having died so young.”

Ahead of him, he hopes, is the chance to write and direct another film. He is penning the script of a comedy drama about the making of a disaster movie based on his experience of working on the 1991 Bruce Willis mega-turkey Hudson Hawk. A turkey ripe for new basting, as Grants puts it. But now his focus is on his first musical role and it’s one he says fills him with terror.

“There’s the adrenalin rush of real fear of taking on a part like this in a musical. It means you have to prove yourself all over again. Hopefully that’s a good thing. You want to pull it off but it’s a challenge. Can I do this?”

Has he got what it takes? he ponders. By George, I think he’s got it.

My Fair Lady opens at the Theatre Royal on October 9.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/19/1221331187811.html

In related coverage found at The Sydney Morning Hearld website address above there is also a 3:38 minute video entitled I Blame Andrew Denton! of Richard discussing his role in The My Fair Lady stage production.