The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Richard E Grant: ‘I hate restaurants where waiters have a PhD in being up themselves’

Can the actor ever leave the debauched Withnail behind? Here he tries his hardest with tales of fatherhood, carpentry and being Michael Heseltine.

By Mariella Frostrup

Richard E Grant is used to being a slight disappointment. Since 1985 he’s carried the burden of playing the character with whom he’s since become synonymous, Withnail, the reprobate, unemployed actor from writer/director Bruce Robinson’s generation-defining Withnail and I. Deranged, delusional and dangerous to know, Withnail became an anti-hero for the angry youth of Thatcher’s reign. Despite the intervening decades, the impact of his brilliant characterisation is such that you still expect him to come staggering in, bottle of vodka in hand, frock coat flapping and an air of icy malice sending a chill wind round the room.

So it’s a bit of a let-down when the lithe, fresh-faced Grant enters the low-key trattoria off Portobello Road that he’s chosen for our lunch date. He’s anything but the rebel as he winds his way through the sea of white paper tablecloths, apologising that he’s five minutes late in an accent still recognisably from southern Africa despite having lived in the UK for 30 years. His eyes are extraordinary, the palest of blue, and equally unsettling is the freshly dyed mane of red hair. It looks as if an alien object has landed on his head. “Sorry about my hair,” he announces, and explains that he’s about to play Michael Heseltine in the biopic Iron Lady, directed by Mamma Mia!’s Phyllida Lloyd and starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. He’s been researching by watching clips of Hezza on YouTube, reading Thatcher’s autobiography and touring Cabinet offices for instruction on protocol. “I had no idea that you would never refer to somebody in a cabinet meeting by their name,” he says. “You refer to them by the job they do, like ‘Defence’. It’s like shorthand. You would never say. ‘Mariella, when you’re head of showbiz, tourism and fabulousness….'”

I wonder how he can be so in tune with my secret aspirations. The Thatcher era is one with which he feels affinity. Originally from Swaziland, Grant arrived in the UK at a key moment for the Iron Lady: “It was the day ships sailed from Portsmouth to the Falklands, 29th of April 1982, and the story covers the last 30 years since I’ve been in England so it’s riveting to go back through it all.”

I steer him back from this attack of luvviedom to the menu, as he has barely an hour to spare before an audition with Bryan Singer, the director of The Usual Suspects, who is about to make a blockbuster in the UK. That he still has to tout his wares in a line-up comes as a surprise.

“Unless you are an enormous name, you never stop auditioning,” he says. “I auditioned yesterday in a queue of five others. I knew three of them. They say, ‘We want you but with dark hair, shorter, wider, older, younger.’ You have to go along with it, otherwise you may never work again.”

It does seem a humiliating scenario for the 53-year-old father of a grown daughter (at the University of East Anglia, studying creative writing) and you wonder why he continues to put himself through the agony. I ask him which one of all the characters he’s played, many of grotesques, is his personal favourite?

“They’re all so bloody awful. I suppose the movie that I enjoyed most was with Denholm Elliott and Julie Walters called Killing Dad that came out at the Shaftesbury Avenue Odeon in 1989 for four days and was being given away free with copies of Woman’s Own two months later. Working with Julie Walters was so hilarious that I’ll never forget that, but character and all the rest – that bit fades away. I’m sorry, I’m being absolutely hopeless here…”

He pauses for dramatic effect and bends down to sniff the rather sweaty-looking shavings of parmesan on his newly arrived spaghetti arrostiti, exhaling with ecstasy, as though he’s undergone an olfactory orgasm. It’s quite a performance, and makes me wonder what further lengths he’d go to in order to avoid self-examination. I do the polite British thing and change the subject, asking him what he likes about the restaurant.

“I hate fucked-about food,” he says. “Where the table has to be 42 inches away from the other table, the napkin has to be Michelin star; the waiters have a PhD in upthemselvesness.”

So instead we’re here in this neighbourhood joint, where I’m served burrata in an industrial-sized portion and vongole that’s a little bit gritty but otherwise delicious. He comes here every Saturday for lunch, followed by a wander around the antiques market. “I’ve been going to Golborne Road for the past 30 years so they know my mug round there very well.”

What does he buy?, I ask

“Just stuff. I’m a hoarder. I’d be bored in an environment that was one colour with a pot with a perpendicular lily sticking out in one direction. I’d feel like I was in a mental asylum.”

The urge to hoard is shared with his friend, Withnail writer and director Bruce Robinson, who believes it to be a compulsion born of difficult childhoods. Grant documented his own troubled upbringing in his directorial debut, 2005’s Wah-Wah, which explored his father’s alcoholism and his parents’ unravelling marriage, set against the dramatic backdrop of 1968’s independence celebrations in Swaziland.

The film took many by surprise, confirming that, unlike many of his fellow thespians, Grant has other skills to fall back on. These also include DIY. “I’ve put up shelving, built a doll’s house for my daughter,” he says. “I like fixing things.”

Such domesticity is some way from the Hollywood high life satirised in his 1996 diaries With Nails, feted for their acute observations about life behind the scenes. Grant himself lives a quiet life in Richmond with his partner of 27 years, the casting director Joan Washington, with fame for its own sake holding little allure. That said, he’s an I’m a Celebrity addict and didn’t miss one episode of the last series: “I felt bereft when it ended. You could not make up Gillian McKeith, narcissistic gorgon that she is. I challenge anybody to make up somebody like that – no actor could.”

That’s high praise indeed from someone who’s played so many unpleasant narcissists, the latest of which is the nasty Doctor Curlew in the BBC’s adaptation of the Victorian melodrama The Crimson Petal and the White. If neither the fame nor the lifestyle appeal, his career does at least keep him young.

“I once went to a university reunion, and was like a teenage delinquent compared to the majority of people there,” he says. “I think you fast become middle aged in more regular professions.”

I ask if maturity has had a positive impact on the roles he’s offered.

“I’m a veteran now, apparently,” he says with relish. “A young actor came up to me and said, ‘I’ve just been up for an audition and they said they were after a young Richard E Grant.’ That was an awful moment of realisation, but there’s no answer other than just be grateful that they’re asking for any version at all!”

As he gets up to leave I ask what his feelings are for the character he remains synonymous with after all these years.

“The guy Withnail was based on ended up unsuccessful, dying of alcoholism at the age of 49. So it was a grim end for him. But people still say, ‘I loved your film’. I used to ask them which one but now I don’t bother. It’s always ‘that’ film.”

Then he’s gone, whisked into a waiting car, off to show Bryan Singer who else he’s got locked up in there.

The Crimson Petal and the White is on BBC2 from 23 March