The Sunday Mirror – October, 2000

Richard E Grant talks about the traumas of his troubled childhood, which he is about to relive in a movie about his life.

He has been living it up as a swashbuckling 18th century superhero, duelling, seducing courtesans, riding horses at breakneck speed and snatching nobility from the jaws of the guillotine. Hollywood star Richard E Grant is loving every minute of his gung-ho role as The Scarlet Pimpernel, but the personal dangers of doing his own stunts are nothing compared to his next harrowing project.

He is about to confront the demons of his past by making a film based on his own troubled childhood growing up in Swaziland in South Africa. His mother walked out on the family home when he was a child, then his beloved father died young.

“It’s called Wah-Wah, which is what an American woman defined as colonial speak,” says Richard, 43. “It’s a story about a boy’s coming of age at the end of a colonial era in the late 1960s, which is when I grew up. So it’s autobiographical.

“I want to be very truthful so some aspects will be painful probably, but then the best work tends to be the most truthful work and it’s a great way of exorcising any personal demons you might have. I certainly shan’t be shying away from anything.”

Richard’s world was shattered at nine years of age by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. His mother Leonie left to live with a mining engineer, leaving Richard and his younger brother Stuart to be brought up single-handedly by their father Hendrik. The brothers only saw their mother once a month and during the holidays, and Richard missed her keenly.

Later he was devastated when his dad died of lung cancer and a brain tumour at only 51, and felt deeply betrayed when Stuart sold a story to a newspaper describing Richard as “a pansy who played with dolls”. Only now, with a rock solid family of his own, does he feel able to face up to his past and let out his bottled up hurt and anger.

“You either repeat the patterns your parents set for you or you do the complete opposite,” explains Richard. “I probably hold fidelity in far higher esteem than I might have done if my parents had not divorced.

“The film industry is full of unhappy people. It just makes me realise how lucky I am to have someone I am still besotted with.”

That someone is his wife Joan Washington, a voice coach ten years older than him whom he met 16 years ago at the London Actor’s Centre when she asked him for advice on Zulu dialects.

Despite the age gap, the couple fell head over heels in love, and have remained so in an age where distraction and break-up are the norm rather than the exception. Given his own sad past Richard is determined that neither his 11-year-old daughter Olivia nor Tom, Mary’s adult son from a previous relationship, will ever be exposed to such unhappiness.

“No one can ever say that nothing is going to happen in the future, but I can’t see anything happening that would challenge what we’ve got,” he says. “I’ve got a beautiful daughter and I’d hate anything that would affect how she feels. I feel bad enough after Joan and I have a row. But I’ve seen Olivia’s young friends and how they’ve been affected by break up to realise that it’s not a nice thing.”

Even when he’s away working, staying in the best hotels around the world, come the weekend Richard is the first at the airport to fly home to London and his family. And although he enjoys the good things in life that fame and fortune have brought, he says there are also drawbacks.

“It’s difficult when you miss your children’s school plays and open days, that sort or thing. It’s hard to explain to them why you can’t be there,” he says.

“I was away in Prague for five months doing The Scarlet Pimpernel and obviously they came out to see me, but you can’t help missing them.

“They are the most important part of my life, after all. I’ve had to get used to it over the years and I try and make up for it with them in other ways. Luckily, when I’m not working I do get nice gaps between jobs.

“Before Pimpernel I was home for three months. I have a huge number of friends where the fathers leave home at seven in the morning and don’t come back until eight at night. So, relatively speaking, I’m home more than it seems.

“It’s all my daughter has known really, so hopefully she’s got used to it. She also gets to visit places she wouldn’t normally go to and gets things brought home for her.

“She wants to be a dress designer at the moment but that changes every week. I wouldn’t mind if she wanted to become an actress, goodness no. I’d rather she did it when she was older, though.”

Today Richard is famous on both sides of the Atlantic. His string of successes ranges from Withnail & I, Dracula and The Player to Jack And Sarah, How To Get Ahead In Advertising, Portrait Of A Lady and SpiceWorld – The Movie. But he will never forget those early days as a struggling actor.

He went to London at the age of 25 to pursue his dream of acting, but he soon found that the streets were anything but paved with gold. When his big break came in the classic comedy Withnail in 1986, he was penniless, frustrated and down on his luck.

“I was out of work for nine months at one stage. I wondered where the next job was going to come from,” he recalls. “All you want is for someone to give you a break so you can show them what you can do.

“I did everything from decorating to driving people to airports to working in restaurants. It was so frustrating because you weren’t doing what you wanted to do. Luckily that was a long time ago. But you never forget those days because there are a lot of talented actors out there who are in the same position I was in.”

These days he can pick and choose what he does next and he was more than happy to step back into the foppish gear of Sir Percy Blakeney, who doubles as the elusive English spy the Scarlet Pimpernel, for a second series which starts on Wednesday.

This time around the Pimpernel devotes himself to rescuing people from the guillotine after suffering the horror of watching his wife die in childbirth. It’s yet more dashing stuff for Richard who jumped at the chance of being able to do his own stunts.

“I had to leap on lots of horses but luckily they were very well behaved. I got given Johnny Depp’s horse from Sleepy Hollow and he made me look good. But horses are liable to kick you or fart at the wrong moment, so I wasn’t entirely comfortable with them. You also have to be careful not to go flying over their heads when the director says, ‘Cut’, because horses are so well-trained they just tend to stop dead when the scene finishes.

“I like Blakeney. He’s a perfumed ponce with a James Bond alter-ego, a sort of adrenalin-junkie who takes over in the evening. He’s someone who has a routine kind of existence in England and this other life saving people abroad. He’s a kind of split personality, I suppose, not unlike an actor.

“When I’m away working I live a cosseted life where all the everyday responsibilities are taken care of while you are filming. Then you phone home and you realise where your responsibilities and priorities really lie.

“In this new series there are a lot more villains and I also get to wear many different disguises which is nearer to the original books by Baroness Orczy. I get to dress up as a spice pedlar, a baker, a scabby-faced villain and even an old man. For that I had to look about 70 which was probably the hardest. I wore a grey wig, a false nose and lots of make-up. People were walking past without recognising me, so it must have worked.”

One thing Richard enjoys more than anything are the sex scenes.

“It’s fantastic,” he grins. “Having the licence to snog someone really attractive beats a lot of things. Even when things get technical and you’re told to move your left cheek this way or that, you’re still spending all day in bed filming which isn’t a bad way of earning a living. After a while of doing it, it doesn’t become very erotic. It’s like kissing your sister’s hand. But it beats trudging around the countryside in boots and mud.

“I imagine it would be dreadful if you hated the person who had to snog but that hasn’t happened yet. So as long as your breath doesn’t smell things are normally all right.

“I had to snog a bloke once – it was Forrest Whitaker – in a film called Pret-A-Porter. We were both in terrible denial about having to do the scene. In the end we just got on with it. I just told him straight, ‘No tongues please’.”

Unsurprisingly, Richard is very much in demand and has no plans to take things easy in the near future. A host of projects are lined up including co-starring with Max Beesley in The Match, a film about a Scottish football team. He will also play Bob Cratchit in a new TV version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, opposite Patrick Stewart’s Scrooge. And he has spent some time in Germany playing a vampire in an adaptation of the German children’s story Little Vampires.

“Variety is the spice of life,” he says with a disarming smile. “It’s what keeps me going. I’m lucky to be offered a variety of parts and I take the ones that really appeal to me.

“I’m comfortable working on both sides of the Atlantic because I just tend to go where the best, most challenging work is. I miss the money when I’m working in Britain. But there’s more to life than that isn’t there?”