The Telegraph – 22nd May, 2011

Hay Festival 2011

Despite his high moral standards and laceratingly honest diaries, the ‘Withnail and I’ actor still has lots of friends. And he’ll be joining quite a few of them at the Hay Festival 2011

By John Preston

Although there is a springy, energetic quality to Richard E Grant – he bounds up the stone stairs to the room where we are to talk – there is something languid about him too. Something faintly curdled even. His pale blue eyes tend to stare straight through you and in repose his mouth can droop, giving him an expression of appalled disbelief.

“Who is this idiot?” he seems to be thinking. “And why is he asking me all these asinine questions?”

As he says himself, “I am a very judgmental person. Of myself and other people.” He gives a shrug. “I recognise it’s a great fault, but I have no power over that.” His eyes give nothing away. They’re the sort of eyes any number of secrets could hide behind. When he was a child, growing up in Swaziland, Grant became used to hiding secrets – or to hiding one in particular. This experience and the sense of betrayal that went with it may not exactly have turned him into who he is today – nothing is that simple. Nonetheless, they’ve had a huge influence on his relationships and how he sees the world.

Richard E Grant
— Photo: Kate Peters

“There were times when I was a child when I wondered if I was going mad,” he says. “That’s when I started keeping a diary: it was a way of trying to make sense of what was going on. In a way, writing it gave me a sense of reality.”

We’re sitting in an enormous gloomy room in what was once the Sierra Leone embassy. Downstairs is the room that was used as the location for Lionel Logue’s consulting room in The King’s Speech – still looking just as it did in the film. There’s something faintly apt about this.

While Grant never had a stutter, he did once have speech issues of his own. When on April 29 1982, he arrived in England to try to make it as an actor – he reels off the date instantly – he spoke the sort of Noël Coward colonial English Grant called Wah-Wah. Later, this became the title of the 2006 film which he both wrote and directed.

At this year’s Hay Festival, whose title sponsor is The Telegraph, Grant is speaking to Peter Godwin, the writer, about his own childhood in Africa, the subject of Godwin’s new book, The Fear. It immediately struck a chord with Grant. “As soon as I read it, I tried to get in touch with him. It’s a very rare feeling when you read something and you feel you know who that person is. I did get in touch and that’s how we became friends.” Although Godwin grew up in Zimbabwe and Grant in Swaziland, they’re roughly the same age – Grant has just turned 54 – and both witnessed the end of colonialism and the uneasy transition to independence.

Swaziland became independent in 1968, when Grant was 11. This was a big year for him in all sorts of ways. In particular, it was the year when he witnessed his mother having sex in a car with his father’s best friend while he lay in the back pretending to be asleep. This was the moment when he started keeping a secret diary. It was also the moment when he gave up on God. Shortly afterwards, his parents divorced and his father plunged into what he calls “extremely violent alcoholism” – so violent that he tried to shoot Grant after he’d poured away a case of whisky in a doomed attempt to stop his father from drinking.

Nigella Lawson and Richard E Grant
— Photo: Rex Features

Throughout the rest of his childhood and his adolescence Grant kept his dark secret. “I think the first person I told was my wife. I certainly never told any of my teenage friends because that would have given them ammunition. I also think I blamed myself for what had happened. I know from other children who have been through similar things – you blame yourself for seeing something you shouldn’t have seen. If you told anyone else, the floodgates of blame would open. So you censor yourself.”

All this happened a long time ago, of course, and the days when Grant kept everything bottled up are long gone too – he recreated the scene in the car for the opening of Wah-Wah. He doesn’t even have the same name any more. Back then he was Richard Esterhuysen. He changed it to Grant when he became an actor. However, the effects of what he saw and what he kept quiet about clearly haven’t gone away. Scrape a little below the surface and there they are. Grant has been married to Joan Washington, a voice coach, for the past 25 years. Does he attach a greater premium to monogamy as a result of what happened?

“Absolutely,” he says leaning forward in his wing-backed chair. “Because I saw the nuclear damage it did my father and that was the most profound marker of how to live my life. I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

“For instance, I had a 29-year friendship with someone that was betrayed eight years ago by this person when they accidentally copied me into an email that they sent to a mutual friend. I read it and found this poison in the middle [it was to do with what he calls “an annihilation” of his Wah-Wah script]. That ended the friendship and I was absolutely devastated. The trouble is that if you place such loyalty on your friendships, as I do, then it doesn’t really allow for much human error.”

Richard E Grant with his Wife and Daughter
— Photo: Rex Features

It’s affected his moral outlook in other ways too, he thinks. Once his judgmental needle swings into position, it seldom budges. “When I meet a couple, I’m always interested to know if they have been together for a long time, or how loyal they are, because I know that will impact on how much I’m prepared to trust them. If I know someone is really promiscuous, that will certainly temper how close I allow myself to get to that person.”

So he inherently disapproves of them if they are promiscuous?

“Disapprove… hmm. That’s a strong word. But often on location when people are married or with a long-time partner and they’re bonking someone else on the cast and crew, and then you have to pretend it’s not going on when the other person turns up – I hate that. On two occasions, I have absolutely refused to collude with it.” What? He’s actually told the other person? “No, because you can’t play God and that would be so hurtful. But it does change my attitude towards that person. If that’s being old-fashioned, my hand goes up into the sky to accept that.”

Here again, if you were prone to flip journalistic analysis, you might detect a dislike, an abhorrence even, of keeping secrets – his own or anyone else’s. Oddly enough, the one person Grant has been able to forgive is the least likely of all: his mother. “As soon as I knew something about my mother that she didn’t know I knew, that completely warped any possibility of a normal relationship. At least it did until it was confronted and that didn’t happen until I was 42 years old.

We had a very long face-to-face and there was one area which hadn’t been touched upon which was the car-seat stuff. When I brought it up, she said, ‘Please forgive me.’ I think for a parent to say that to a child, even though I was middle-aged by that point, is about the most powerful thing they can do. And of course you forgive them.”

Partly because of his performance in Withnail & I, his breakthrough film, in which he played a bitter out-of-work actor, I’ve always had this image of Grant as a Great Hater, someone who nurses a deep loathing of anyone who has crossed or slighted him. When I put this to him, he gives a shout of incredulous laughter. “A Great Hater? My God… I am very aware there is not much moderation in how I see things or do things. It’s kind of all or nothing with me. If I love someone it’s to the nth degree. And if I dislike them I suppose it’s the same. A Great Hater? That’s hilarious. I’m going to have to work on that.”

Hudson Hawk (1991) Sandra Bernhard, Richard E Grant and James Coburn
— Photo: Alamy

On the day we met, Grant had just returned from spending a weekend with Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, which Grant also starred in. They’ve been close ever since. Indeed, Grant says, they’ve been close pretty much from the moment they met. “As soon I met him I had this strange sense of being plugged into something very familiar, almost as if we already knew one another.”

Like Grant’s father, Robinson was a combustible drunk – he’s given up booze now. “I suppose what Bruce shares with my father is this combination of being enormously vulnerable and vituperative at the same time. That makes for incredible comedy. My relationship with Bruce is very cut-and-thrust jibey, but he makes me laugh more than anyone else. I’ve never really thought about it before, but yes, there is something about the best of my father in him.”

Robinson has recently returned to directing after almost 20 years, with an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp. However, there’s no part for Grant in it. “It’s an American story so it never crossed my mind that I might get a part. But if Bruce made The Gin Diary and it was set in England and I wasn’t in it, then, yes, I’d be asking what had gone wrong.”

Grant’s relationship with Hollywood can’t have been helped by the publication of his engagingly/suicidally frank diaries about his experiences there. Bruce Willis, for one, is unlikely to include him on his Christmas card list after Grant complained about his self-centred behaviour – they were in the megaflop Hudson Hawk together. However, he says he was never aware of doors slamming shut in his face afterwards. “I don’t think I was sufficiently famous or powerful for that to be a problem. It’s true that Joel Silver [producer of Hudson Hawk] or Bruce Willis have never employed me again, but I didn’t expect them to because that whole shoot was absolute chaos.”

For a judgmental, morally rigorous person, Grant seems to have an astonishing number of friends, including fellow Hay headliners Nigella Lawson and Rob Lowe.

“That’s just because of my age,” he says. Is he sure? “Well, it’s true that I’ve never been solitary, although I spend a lot of time alone. I’ve never felt lonely or been shy. I suppose I also feel that you only have one shot in your life, so if you read something you really like, or admire someone’s work, it’s worth letting them know. I do seem to have met a lot of people that way.”

Wah Wah (2005) Richard E Grant and Nicholas Hoult
— Photo: Rex Features

On the list of Grant’s screen credits that I was sent prior to interviewing him, it says: “Lanky British player who has had some success in mainstream Hollywood features.” Accurate enough, I suppose, although it seems a bit grudging. He’s actually been in some excellent films – working with Scorsese, and Coppola – and he’s just finished what must be one of his weirdest-ever jobs, playing Michael Heseltine to Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady. Does he find acting as fulfilling as he did, say, 20 years ago? “Do you find journalism as fulfilling as you did 20 years ago?” he shoots back. “It depends,” I say cautiously.

“Exactly. It depends what you’re doing. When you’re around someone like Meryl Streep then every fibre of excitement you had about being an actor comes hurtling back at you. But it doesn’t happen very often, regrettably. Some people of my age still have the focus and drive they had when they were younger. I know actors who are out there on the streets of Soho ready to rottweiler their way into a casting session at any cost. But with me, I’m much more interested in where I’m going to go on holiday.”

When he was in his forties, Grant went into psychoanalysis. “I remember the therapist saying to me, ‘Although your father is dead and your parents are divorced, in the heart of you, as a child, you want them to be together again and you want them to be alive.’ But that’s what we all have, isn’t it? It’s the Wizard of Oz – click your heels three times and you’ll go home. And home is where you want to be. So, did what happened to me define me? Yes,” he says. “I suppose in a way it did.”

Richard E Grant will be talking to Peter Godwin at Hay on June 3. For tickets and information see the Hay Festival programme.

Richard E Grant with Cate Blanchett 2003
— Photo: Rex Features