Cinema Magazine – March, 1996

Names – that’s what Goethe already told us about 200 years ago – are “sound and smoke”.  Let’s for instance take T.C. Boyle, E.M. Forster, T.S. Elliot – or J.R. Ewing. Who on earth knows what those initials stand for.………and what about Richard E. Grant?

A British journalist once claimed, the shortcut in his name would stand for “excess”. And indeed: A look at his previous roles shows that this idea isn’t as absurd as it looks on first sight. In “Withnail and I” Richard E. Grant plays a manic alcohol-addict, in “How To Get Ahead in Advertising” a schizo advertising-pro whose life is being controlled by a speaking furuncle and in “Warlock” he travelled through the centuries as a witch-hunter.

Also pretty bizarre are the memories of the now 39 year old of his first cinema-experience. ‘I was about 7 years old and remember that there was an American car in that movie, which drowned in some swamp. That really impressed me.’ So the son of a Minister who was born in Mbabane, Swaziland decided to become an actor. Years later he founded the multi-racial “Troupe Theater Company” with several schoolmates. ‘In South Africa,’ Richard E. Grant remembers, ‘there was just one place where black and white people were able to come together without getting in trouble and to swap ideas: the theater.’

Today the actor who likes to compare his own face to a tombstone, is one of the most successful actors for supporting roles in Hollywood. He filmed with Scorsese (“Age of Innocence”), and Altman (“The Player”), but was most impressed by Francis Ford Coppola. ‘After all he risked marriage and money to shoot “Apocalypse Now”.’   One time, Richard E. Grant had enough of all the excesses: ‘The shooting of “Hudson Hawk” was hell. Each morning the same drama: While everyone else appeared on the set well prepared, Bruce Willis had re-written the script overnight.’

Recently, Grant played a wonderfully snobbish fashion designer in Altman’s “Pret-a-porter”, a lovely ironic gay-satire. Just to say goodbye to extreme characters shortly afterwards, in “Jack & Sarah” he plays a tragic-comical widower, who – despite all troubles – learns to live his life. ‘This role’, Grant is pleased, ‘finally offered me the chance to play someone who’s not a megalomaniac, mentally ill or a drug addict.’

Should there be a totally unspectacular explanation for the shortcut in the end? ‘The E’, he explains with an ironic smile, ‘means nothing. I just didn’t want to get mixed up with the American actor Richard Grant. So I simply made up the initial.

Click here to see the original article (in German).