The Telegraph – 9th October, 2015

Actor Richard E Grant followed his nose to create his own perfume ‘Jack’ after a life-changing journey through the South of France

Inner drive: with Jack, Richard E Grant’s olfactory dreams have finally become a reality Photo: ©Jake Henderson

By Richard E. Grant.

Climb aboard and travel back with me to 1969 – 12 years old and transitioning from knobbly knees in short pants and cropped hair to a lanky colt with floppy fringe and bell- bottoms. I was still playing with my Dinky toy cars as hormonal storms squalled up my shins, but even in time-warped colonial Swaziland, messing about with toy cars at the age of 12 was uncool. Especially as Neil Armstrong had just put his foot down on the Moon. Everything American was the “future” and the arrival of a Yankee gal a few desks along from me was my “present”. She encapsulated the fast-talking, gum-chewing, movie-accented “dream” and taught me how to French kiss. In return, I saved my pocket money and traded some Dinky toys to buy a bottle of perfume for her birthday; alas, it proved way beyond my means.

Instead, I stole all the rose and gardenia petals from our garden, boiled them up in sugar water and stuffed them into jam jars, then buried them. A couple of weeks underground produced several stink bombs of sludge, but the dream of making my own perfume was secretly planted.

Fast-forward four decades and I was on Mustique driving back from the beach alongside fellow house guest Anya Hindmarch. When we stopped, I missiled my nose into a gardenia bush, prompting her to ask: “Are you going to do something about this?” – “this” being my obsession with smelling everything in sight.

“Do you mean psychiatrically?”

Laughing, she said: “No, I meant have you ever thought about creating your own fragrance?”

“It’s been a life-long dream.”

“Make it a reality”

“But how?”

And with a wave of her Fairy Godmother iPhone, Anya tapped out a list of contacts to approach back in London.

At this point I had to confess that the four per cent I scored in my maths mock O Level in 1973 had kyboshed my business ambitions ever since.

“Passion is everything,” she declared, echoing the cover blurb of a Seventies self-help manual. “You don’t need to be a bean counter to go into business. There are people who can do that for you. What they can’t do is match your passion for perfume.”

Her smiling assurances brooked no doubt. However, the cold reality of actually getting started in business scuppered my resolve – until independent British perfumer Lynn Harris of Miller Harris generously agreed to meet me.

It was like a game of Snakes and Ladders where, with my first throw of the dice, I’d zoomed to the top rung, getting expert advice and being taken seriously.

Former Harrods chief honcho Marigay McKee introduced me to scent supremo Roja Dove, with his own bespoke perfume emporium on the fifth floor. I felt like a country bumpkin flattening my nose to the glass wall of a corporate world, prompting a tiny voice to whisper: “You have no backer, no production company, no distributor, no retailer, no business plan, no hope.”

Roja is a walking, talking perfume lexicon with an encyclopaedic knowledge he is willing to share. What market was I aiming for, “niche or mass, bespoke or Boots?”

He then gave me an hour-long blind testing session. “Possibly because you’ve never smoked nor drunk, you have a very clear, pure nose and are utterly obsessed and possessed,” he said. “Go to Grasse.”

So I exited the motorway at Mougins, then satnavved up the hill towards the factory where Roja had arranged a private tour. Before I even came to a stop, the perfume- saturated air was overwhelming. I could feel an olfactory epiphany approaching.
The factory itself is a combination of Dickensian copper vats and Heath Robinson-ish contraptions, cheek-by-jowl with 21st-century state-of-the-art machinery. Tons of petals are transformed via a Dr Seuss-like hiss-and-steam process into drums of perfume wax.

As my guide described it all in epic techno-detail, my head obediently nodded like a dashboard dog, but all I could think of was that this was precisely what I wanted to be doing with my future – mixing and creating fragrances which made perfect scense.

A year after this life-changing journey, my unisex “signature in scent” Jack was launched exclusively at Liberty in London. It may have been only 38 kilometres from Nice Airport to Grasse, and took a mere 40 minutes on the A8 motorway, but this was a journey I had been on for 44 years, one that began with that Dinky toy car in Swaziland.