DailyMail.co.uk – 21st March 2014,

Richard E Grant didn’t speak to his mother for years after he caught her having an affair. Now he’s to star in Downton, and she couldn’t be happier.

By Chrissy Iley

At first glance Richard E Grant appears to be licking the racing green leather walls of the lift in the Ivy Club. He’s actually sniffing it. His olfactory powers have been on turbo drive since he spent the last year creating his new unisex perfume Jack which launches next month.

It’s a strange move for the actor best known for Withnail And I but he’s glowing from that experience, and the anticipation of his first days joining the cast as an upstairs character in Downton Abbey.

There’s also a part in Sky Atlantic’s juicily dysfunctional twentysomething comedy drama series Girls, and he voices a narcissistic ostrich in next month’s animated Khumba: A Zebra’s Tale.

He’s looking splendid: tall, lithe, sweeping hair and a large Union ‘Jack’ scarf. He wears the grin of a person who can’t believe his good fortune. The cat who discovered his cream was full-fat.

Richard E Grant is about to make his Downton
Abbey debut so we caught up with him.

We meet the day before he’s to go on set for his Downton debut. ‘Four episodes,’ he says, looking as though he’s savouring the prospect. Is he Lady Mary’s lover? ‘I’m an upstairs character and they’ve told me I can’t say what I am for fear of my knees being removed. I was in the film Gosford Park, also written by Julian Fellowes, 12 years ago. In that I was a footman. Now Julian’s promoted me to upstairs.’

I ask if the part was especially written with Richard in mind. ‘You would have to ask him,’ he says. I think he wants to tell me but he can’t. It just came out of the blue? ‘Yes,’ he says. He must have been hoping that Fellowes would write him a part in Downton.

‘It’s the thing my mother, who’s 84, has asked me about on a monthly basis since it started. “When are you going on Downton? Why are you not in Downton and when will you be in it?” She always thought it was about time. All her friends have seen it. She lives in Africa so it’s gone global. I spoke to her last week and told her she can tell her fellow bridge players it has come to pass. But you know, until it’s actually edited and comes out you’re always slightly wary because you don’t know if your part will be cut.

‘I’m always excited by a new job. That’s never gone away and I think the day it does is the day you have to hang up your tights and put away your make-up. I’m a Downton fan. I’ve watched it all the way.’

Richard in Doctor Who as Dr Simeon spent the last year creating
his new unisex perfume Jack which launches next month.

He’s tweeted that his character’s name is Simon Bricker, and I try to make him tell me more about his part. ‘I can’t tell you any more. I have three scripts at the moment. The fourth one hasn’t been written yet.’ So he already knows what’s happening to everybody this series, not just his character.

‘Yes I do and I can’t tell you, but it’s going to be good. It’s a bit like being the new boy at school. They’ve all been working on this for four years and then people from outside come in…’ He pulls a nervous face.

Later he tweets that he plays the part of an art historian invited to Downton as a guest of the Granthams and that his character is set to cause ructions. ‘He definitely will shake things up. It’s going to be fun. When I stepped onto the set at Highclere [Castle which doubles as the Abbey] I thought, “Yes, I’m home” – I’m upstairs naturally.’

He has a huge new following from his TV series Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets, where he travelled the world revealing the scandalous deaths, murders, robberies and sexual shenanigans that have taken place in the world’s most luxurious hotels. It hasn’t stopped being repeated since it launched on Sky Atlantic last year and the second one is due this summer.

‘I loved the hotel series,’ he says. ‘The second series covers Hong Kong, Tokyo, Miami, New Orleans, Venice and Berlin. It did feel very risky at the beginning going literally into unscripted territory, where I had to meet people and interview them. My favourite was former madam Heidi Fleiss, when I had to interview her in Las Vegas about sex scandals in hotels. She lives with 40 macaws and was extraordinary. I love interviewing people. Being a nosey parker and being paid for it, brilliant.’

He says he copes with all the flying around the world and ensuing jet lag because ‘I’m like a cat, I can sleep anywhere. Sitting upright in a chair.’ I suggest he’s more of a cheetah. He raises an eyebrow. ‘I’ll go for anything that’s fast. Nobody really changes their spots, do they? Your essential nature I think is unchangeable.’

I wonder if Richard E Grant today is the same as Richard as a child, and if what happened to him at the age of ten traumatised him to the point of changing him completely. That’s when he woke from a doze in the back of the family car to see his mother having sex with one of his father’s friends in the front seat.

Richard E Grant on the front row at the Jasper
Conran AW14 show at London Fashion Week.

Subsequently he watched his father slip into alcoholic despair, and then was brutalised by him. ‘It was traumatic, but I think if you’re optimistic by nature that’s something you don’t have any control over. So I never thought I was going to go under. I think it’s enormously lucky to have that in your life.’

Smell has always been the unlocker of memories, a key to him. How did the smell of Jack come about? ‘I was in the Caribbean two years ago and the handbag designer Anya Hindmarch saw me with my head in a gardenia bush and said, “What are you going to do about that?” And I said, “Do you mean psychiatrically?” And she said, “No, have you thought of making a perfume?” And I said, “It’s been my dream.” She gave me a list of numbers of people to go and see. Roja Dove, the perfumier, told me I have a very sharp sense of smell, possibly because I’ve never drunk or smoked.’

American filmmaker Lena Dunham, actor Richard E. Grant and
musician (sic) Allison Williams attend an after party in London.

He insists his intolerance for alcohol was not because he had to suffer abuse from a father who became consumed by it when his wife left him. ‘But because like Lady Gaga says, I was Born This Way. When I was 18 I went to a doctor and found out I have no enzymes that deal with alcohol. It’s like pouring poison down my throat. I’ve tried it and been violently ill for 24 hours, so it’s not worth it.’

He gets out a tiny bottle of Jack, which smells exotic, quirky, peppery, but oozing comfort, sexuality and elegance. Mesmerising and curious; a little like Grant himself. He says he’s ‘obsessively smelt everything all my life. Put my nose down like a missile to everything in sight. But it’s a big gamble.

There are 1,100 perfumes released every year so this is like an old guy releasing a record and hoping people are going to buy it. Having never done anything businessy in my life, I think this has been the steepest learning curve for a man in his late 50s as it’s possible to get.’

Given that he’s only 56, I wonder why he exaggerates his age. ‘I suppose you notice it so much because I’ve now lived four years longer than my father did, so every year feels like a bonus to me.’ A pause, a sigh. ‘He drank himself to death with unrequited love for my mother.’ His father, Henrik Esterhuysen, was Minister of Education in Swaziland. When he was drunk he would tell his son he was ugly and untalented. At one point he fired bullets that narrowly missed Richard’s head.

‘He wasn’t himself when he was drunk. I’ve come to terms with all that now. You forgive as you get older.’

He seems fiercely independent and a bit of a loner. I imagined him as an only child. In fact he has a brother from whom he’s estranged. ‘I think I’m an only child in the sense that my brother [Stuart] went to a different school and we had separate friends and I felt like I was an only child. I haven’t had any contact with him for years. I last saw him at my father’s funeral. I don’t know what he does, where he lives or anything about him.’ You’d think he might be curious.

‘Absolutely zero interest. If you feel someone harbours resentment towards you or ill will you don’t gravitate towards them. Leave sleeping animosity lying.’ You’d think his mother might have tried to get them to patch things up. ‘No. I think she understood. More than anything a parent knows if two children don’t get on.’

About 15 years ago when he was thinking about making his film Wah-Wah, inspired by events from his childhood, he went through a period of depression. He went to a therapist who asked him how he would feel if his mother died and urged him to get in touch. He’d had very little contact with her after she’d left, so he sent her a fax asking if she could explain what happened on that fateful day in the car.

She wrote an 18-page letter about what it was like to be a woman in a colonial set-up with a strict hierarchy. She had no idea his father had become an alcoholic mourning her loss. It’s easy to see why Richard fled to London to drama school.

About 15 years ago when he was thinking about making his film
Wah-Wah, inspired by events from his childhood, he went through
a period of depression (pictured in History of Safari).

He met his wife, voice coach Joan Washington, at one of her classes in 1982. They were married in 1986, the year before he was to star in one of the greatest cult films ever, Withnail And I. His performance as Withnail remains one of the most cleverly observed recreations of a drunk ever to hit celluloid. He went on to win acclaim in How To Get Ahead In Advertising, The Player, Gosford Park and as Michael Heseltine in The Iron Lady.

I wonder if he’s ever had any voice lessons from his wife. ‘Yes. For my first TV job called Sweet Sixteen in 1983 playing a Gloucestershire yokel, and later I needed a southern American accent for Suddenly, Last Summer with Natasha Richardson. All I can say is don’t do it. It’s like getting a driving lesson from anyone you’re close to. They’re not going to be as patient as they could be with somebody else.’

I wonder how the marriage has achieved such longevity. ‘Well, we started talking to each other in 1983 and that conversation hasn’t stopped. It’s a 30-year conversation.’ The life of an actor is by its nature high then dry. ‘Yes, we’ve carried on despite all of that. Her work is consistent, and her job dovetails with mine. She understands how actors operate, which is a good thing.’

He is not glib when he says all of this. He and Joan have a 25-year-old daughter, Olivia, whom they dote on –she only lives a mile from them and Richard talks to her every day – but there have certainly been some bad times. When they first married she suffered miscarriages and their first daughter Tiffany was born prematurely and died after half an hour of life.

They rarely speak about the tragedy, but Joan has said in the past, ‘It was terrible. It brought us very close together. I wanted to go straight back to work and not really face up to it. Richard sorted out all the funeral arrangements. And he taught me to get the emotion out, because I’m someone who tends to bottle things up.’

Now Richard says, ‘That was 27 years ago. It feels like a long time ago but I still think about it because the road to where we live goes past the cemetery in which our first daughter is buried. I pass it every day so you can’t not think about it. I think you don’t get over something, you go round it.

You accept it because that’s the nature of how you live otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get through a day.’ Was it one of those things that if it didn’t break your relationship, it made it stronger? ‘Exactly. It does, you know, children and whatever happens to them. It’s a thing I’ve seen so often in a partnership that causes discord and it shouldn’t.’

Today Richard E Grant couldn’t look happier. His skin glows. His eyes seem to have a constant sparkle. And besides, he eats Christmas pudding every month. ‘And then I have a slice of the leftovers fried for breakfast the next day.’ How is it that he isn’t 25 stone? ‘I’ve been running around chasing my tail all my life. I think that’s it.’

Jack launches exclusively at Liberty on 2 April and online at www.jack perfume.co.uk. Khumba: A Zebra’s Tale is out on 11 April.