From the Telegraph.co.uk website (UK) – 17th September 2007

Richard E Grant came to Roald Dahl late in life — but the eccentric actor’s grisly childhood and hatred of authority make him just the man to present a television show on the oddball author, finds Cassandra Jardine.

‘Windowless basement room of Covent Garden Hotel. Bonkers wallpaper. Four bottles of mineral water on the table. Grant, 50, wears striped shirt and black pants.’

Richard E Grant: a ‘fantastically dysfunctional’ childhood.

This, says Richard E Grant, is how he would like this article to start: a series of blunt statements establishing the venue and the central character in the manner pioneered by Andy Warhol in his cult magazine Interview.

He would then like me to proceed with questions and answers, reprinted verbatim, without resorting to “amateur psychology”. Unfortunately, that won’t be possible.

For one thing there isn’t space to print them all; for another, you’d learn far too much about me since Grant — who has kept a diary from the age of 11 — keeps turning the tables. He wants to ask the questions and doesn’t so much hope for, as demand, answers.

“Tell me,” he orders several times when I demur. I can see why his friend Steve Grant nicknamed him “Relentless”. He has famously drilling blue eyes and a nervous tic that sometimes gives him a frighteningly sardonic expression. I suspect that both make him look scarier than he really is.

Either way, despite being charmed and entertained, I leave the room panic-stricken about what I’ve said — and what Grant might do with the information.

Now to the “amateur psychology”. Sorry, Richard, but I’ve got the reins now.

Both the look and the questioning arise, I suspect, out of mixed motives; the curiosity of the diarist, a desire to be in control, his manic energy and self-defence born of being deeply hurt by what some have said about him in the past.

But before he starts asking me the kind of questions that would probably result in a walk-out if I were the one to pose them — eg, “were you a virgin when you married?” — we start off in relatively formal, Warhol mode, with me as interrogator.

So, the facts: the occasion for this interview is his appearance as narrator in a TV programme analysing Roald Dahl’s writing. Eight “Revolting Rules” have been identified which underpin his books for children — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG et al.

Grant leads a team of celebrity fans, including comedian Jo Brand, actress Miriam Margolyes and chef Heston Blumenthal, who explain why, 17 years after his death, Dahl gives such enduring delight.

Grant himself wasn’t a Dahl fan as a child because he was born too late for Dahl’s great productive phase in the 1970s and 1980s.

Growing up in Swaziland in the 1960s, Enid Blyton was his passion. He loved her books, even the girls’ school ones. So much so that he set up a Famous Five club at his boarding school in South Africa to act out their adventures.

If this makes it sound as if he had a “lashings of ginger beer” upbringing, that’s misleading. White society in this outpost of Empire, where his father was Minister of Education until independence in 1968, was riddled with adultery and drink.

For the full picture of the “fantastically dysfunctional family” that turned young Richard Grant Esterhuysen (as he was born) into a child who was happiest inhabiting — or trying to get under “others” skins, see his 2005 film autobiography Wah-Wah, which he wrote and directed.

The key points were: witnessing his mother’s adultery with a friend of his father’s when he was thought to be asleep in the car, aged 11; feeling abandoned when his mother bolted with her lover; the scandal and bullying that followed; and his father’s alcoholism and death from lung cancer, aged 51. He hasn’t seen his elder brother since the funeral.

That background should give Grant a good insight into Dahl, whose father died when he was three, leaving his mother to bring up a child who felt set apart by his half-Norwegian parentage, and developed a loathing of petty power-mongers at brutal boarding schools.

Little wonder that when Grant started reading Dahl’s books to his daughter Olivia, now 18, they struck a chord.

“The whole point of him is that he has people do and say things that are politically incorrect,” he says.

“Everything is black and white: his characters are either good or bad, fat or thin, smelly or fragrant. Dahl remained passionate and angry about every figure of authority throughout his writing career. That provided him with his fuel.”

Although Grant also talks scathingly of authority figures, his lip curling into a sneer when he mentions Bush and Blair, he has battled to move on from his alienated and guilt-ridden child’s view of the world.

“When I was 42 I did 18 months of psychoanalysis. That freed me up to write Wah-Wah. It was wonderful to go back to Africa and my childhood as a mentally healthy adult. It allowed me to be compassionate and not just angry.”

Up to a point, I would say, having seen the film. He’s forgiving about his father’s drunken bouts of violence but his mother emerges from the film as a monster of selfishness. We move on to how Grant feels about the first rule of a Dahl book: “Just add chocolate.” His answer: “I don’t eat chocolate.”

Self-indulgence isn’t his thing, despite the common illusion that he is identical to the drunken, druggy actor he played so convincingly in the 1987 career-transforming hit, Withnail and I. In fact, he’s a fitness fanatic who doesn’t drink alcohol, or even hot drinks.

Far from being flaky, he is also a devoted husband (to voice coach Joan Washington) and father to Olivia, who was born after a heart-wrenching run of three miscarriages and a child who died shortly after birth.

Those experiences came just after the instant stardom of Withnail and bear out his view that: “There is no life that is a gilded lily of gorgeousness.”

Olivia is now, to his relief, not going into acting (despite a role in Wah-Wah) but is about to study creative writing at university.

“I’d much rather she wrote than she acted: this profession is very hard on the self-confidence. She has that gift that writers have of hearing the voices of her characters and being happy in their company.”

He’s no slouch as a writer himself. A few years ago, after he published his wickedly perceptive diary, With Nails — about his time in Hollywood, “a bone-crushing” place “where self-deprecation is anathema” — he was asked to write a novel himself.

He didn’t enjoy the process: “Locking myself in a room for five or six months, I was terrified that I wouldn’t get By Design written and that I’d have to pay back the advance. It was very socially isolating and I’m too gregarious for that.”

Instead of testing his precarious equanimity with another novel, last year he brought out The Wah-Wah Diaries, about making the film. Since then he has written another screenplay — which he can’t talk about — and has kept busy doing film roles.

Too old now for juvenile leads, these days he turns down English Hollywood villains who run from explosions.

“Now I play fathers. That’s fine by me — I have the life experience for it.”

In Penelope, an offbeat fairy-tale to be released next year, he plays Christina Ricci’s father. Currently, he’s in Hungary filming the father’s role in a non-balletic version of The Nutcracker, which explains the unlikely spivvy moustache on his face, which means he doesn’t want to be photographed.

“My wife says I look so horrendous that I have to grow fur all over the place,” he says, ruefully stroking his stubbly chin.

Other forthcoming appearances include “a randy old colonel” in a film of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, and a blind writer in Madonna’s writing/directing debut Filth and Wisdom.

Before any of those emerge, he will be on television in December playing Miss Marple’s novel-writing nephew in Nemesis. But what he most wants is to direct again.

“Directing is more exhausting and demanding than acting, and I loved it. The worst part of being an actor is when you are out of work and have to try not to go down the plughole of self-destructive doubt. It’s hard to feel that what you have done is good enough as you are constantly presented with people who are doing or earning more. So, a big yes to directing again.”

That dream may come true: he has been asked to direct an adaptation of an (unnamed) novel set in contemporary England which, like Wah-Wah, takes a child’s viewpoint.

But let’s get back to the Dahl rules. How does he feel about No 2: Adults are scary?

“Yes,” he says emphatically. “They have power and they are much bigger than you.”

No 3: Bad things happen. Well, yes.

No 4: Revenge is Sweet? “Very sweet. Delicious. The French producer of Wah-Wah was to profit only from its release in France — and it was never released there. That kept me laughing into my pillow for months after the thousand ways she’s made my life difficult.”

No 5: Keep a wicked sense of humour. “At all times.”

No 6: Pick perfect pictures. “I am very concerned about cinematography. I know exactly how I want things to look. Does that mean I live in an uncluttered home? No, I like piles of stuff all over the place, but you can probably tell that from my style of acting.”

No 7: Films are fun, but books are better. “That sounds too snobbish to me, but it’s true that in books you can invest your own imagination, coupled with that of the writer; in films, people are what they are.”

No 8: Food is fun. “Mmm, and sex is good. I’ve started eating meat again after 10 years as a vegetarian following mad cow disease and it’s fantastic.”

Would he add any rules gleaned from his own life?

He thinks hard, then says: “Just the truth that what goes around comes around. The idea that eventually you don’t get away with anything. That keeps me frisky in the morning.” Gulp.

Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rulebook is on ITV3 on Sept 22 and 23 as part of The Roald Dahl Weekend.