TheTelegraph.co.uk – 8th March, 2015

Richard E Grant, who leapt to fame in Withnail and I, takes on the seven deadly sins in a new TV series and confesses some of his own to Jasper Rees.

Richard E Grant revels in his on-screen conquests

By Jasper Rees

Richard E Grant, star of Withnail and I and lately seen behaving badly in Downton Abbey, seems to have been around for ever. Perhaps he really is – as the records seem to state – in the second half of his 50s. He certainly doesn’t look it. His complexion is burnished, his dark bouffe luxuriant, and his long, tall frame whippet-skinny. Allergy to booze and aversion to nicotine will do that. More to the point, nor does he sound like a 56 year-old.

“The great licence of being an actor,” he’s saying with unblushing relish, “is you are able to live out of your fantasy of lust. You may be doing it in front of a crew of a hundred in anoraks but you do get to kiss somebody who is absolutely gorgeous or spend all day in bed with them.”

His ocean-blue peepers widen as, like a gleeful sixth-former, he reels off his conquests from a list of somewhat forgotten films. “Rachel Ward. Maria de Medeiros in Henry & June. Who else? I kissed Cherie Lunghi and Samantha Mathis in a film called Jack & Sarah. Helena Bonham Carter – I had to bonk her in a forest. I approached Elizabeth McGovern in a dressing gown before I got punched. So all of these things are extremely pleasurable.”

He cackles like a hyena. “I’ve probably forgotten somebody and then they’ll go, ‘My God, why didn’t you mention me?'”

Gorillas are proud creatures. Photo: Back2Back

Lust is our topic because Grant is fronting a series about the seven deadly sins. Part think piece and part natural history, it’s a bit of a pantomime horse, featuring Grant on the seven types of human frailty, with lots of biologists expatiating on similar behaviour in the animal kingdom: wrathful elephants, gluttonous vultures, proud gorillas and, obviously, slothful sloths. Look out for self?pleasuring dolphins. “Who knew?” grins Grant, flashing those gigawatt gnashers. “I now think of dolphins in a completely enlightened way.”

But back to human sin. Does his wife – the actors’ accent coach Joan Washington – not succumb to jealousy when his characters seduce other women? “My wife knows that I am loyal by nature and by experience of my parents’ acrimonious divorce. The cost of straying would be so catastrophic. And she absolutely understands the nature of it. She coaches these people before they say [he adopts a vaguely Balkan accent] – ‘Take off your clothes, madam.'”

Actors get to explore immorality inside and out but few are happy to bare all with quite such frankness. Grant advises that the profession’s besetting sin is envy. “The collective noun is a moan of actors.” Pride is not far behind. Actors are avid collectors of bad notices, Grant included.

He can still remember verbatim the Withnail and I reviewers’ fixation with his appearance. “They said ‘lantern-jawed’, ‘undertaker’s face’, ‘tombstone-featured’, ‘bug-eyed’. That’s what they wrote down. I was astonished at the amount of trouble people went to to describe how weird-looking they thought I was. If somebody writes vitriolically about you, that feeds absolutely into the low-self-esteem department.”

The charm of Grant is that, however far he has penetrated celebrity’s inner circle, he has always somehow remained an anthropological outsider. He think it comes from growing up an expat in Swaziland: “That third-eye part of your brain never leaves you.”

As a child he would pore over pictures of movie stars in Plays and Players, Films Illustrated and Photoplay, and now and then he still leafs through bound copies in his study. “I am just astonished that people I had read about I now know or have met.

“And that still seems to me Dick Whittington-like. I still genuinely feel wide-eyed in wonderment, and that doesn’t go away. Being star-struck is in your nature or not. Because talent is sexy and charismatic and very attracting.”

Richard E Grant in ‘Withnail and I’ in 1997. Photo: Alamy

It was Withnail that turned Grant, as Carrie Fisher once told him, from a tourist into an attraction (he is a committed and unabashed name-dropper). Daniel Day-Lewis had turned down the film’s title role of an exotic but profoundly indigent actor. “I know that my entire career and life was changed by that part. That’s a lottery in life that you have no control over whatsoever.”

Grant had the chance to thank Day-Lewis a few years later when he was cast by Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence. “I prostrated myself in his Winnebago and said, ‘Oh Daniel, you know why I’m on the floor.’ And he said, ‘Arise, arise!’ And he was incredibly charming.

“We talked solidly for five hours, and then for the next four months of the filming he never spoke to me. I was literally iced. I asked Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder what I had done and they said, ‘Your character is hated by his character, so he is in the Method.’ On the last day he came out of character and Daniel turned back into Daniel again. You know, he has three Oscars, so it’s worked out very well for him. I couldn’t imagine doing that. I think it would be so isolating.”

Richard E Grant at the gluttony banquet table in his seven deadly sins series. Photo: Discovery Communications

Does he ever wonder what might have happened if Withnail had not turned him from an unknown and unemployed actor into a star sought by Hollywood’s top directors?

“I wouldn’t be sitting here now. I would be a jobbing actor that people may recognise briefly from something or other.”

If Grant no longer occupies quite such lofty heights of celluloid stardom, he can still turn a head in the street. He noticed a distinct upswing in his celebrity after recent appearances as a connoisseur/Lothario in Downton and as a recovering cocaine addict on Lena Dunham’s acclaimed twentysomething comedy Girls.

“The amount that I have ebbs and flows, it seems. People who don’t know you from a bar of soap suddenly go, ‘You’ve been on the telly, haven’t you?'”

On both shows he was also of intense fascination to the cast. “You come in like the new boy going to school and they are so hungry for somebody new because they all know each other so well. So you have a brief honeymoon period where you are of interest.” He could easily have been on television a lot more but he has refused invitations to dance or disappear into the jungle. Was the lure of yet more lashings of fame not at all tempting?

“I think it’s career suicide to do it. Clive James As Seen on TV used to have those game shows from Japan where as a nation, horrified, we would go, ‘We would never do that!’ And now we’ve got newsreaders with cockroaches down their pants eating kangaroos’ testicles.

“I’m just waiting for Bonk Thy Neighbour to come on. Because what else is left? Nothing is sacred on television whatsoever.”

The evidence that Grant is absolutely riveted by human behaviour is there in two volumes of wonderfully indiscreet diaries. They also attest to a lifelong fear of another deadly sin – sloth. His father died cruelly young at 52, and Grant has been busy ever since. “That agitation of thinking I’ve got to wrestle as much out of everything as possible has been an ongoing motor.”

Retirement is hardly imminent, but he has his dotage all lined up, based on advice given to him by John Gielgud. “He said, cultivate younger friends so that you’re not alone if you do reach the great age that he did. “I am intimately close to the Spice Girls and the cast of Girls in the hope that when I’m in my wheelchair they will come and offer me sweet sherbets.”

Richard E Grant’s Seven Deadly Sins begins on the Discovery Channel on Friday March 13 at 9pm