The Australian Online – 8th October, 2008

By Rosalie Higson

WHEN he turned 50, actor Richard E. Grant thought he’d pretty much done it all when it came to show business.

But tomorrow night, Grant makes his first stage appearance in Australia and his first performance in a musical as the obsessive, bad-mannered professor in My Fair Lady.

“Singing with an orchestra is one of the great thrills I’ve experienced,” Grant said at the Theatre Royal in Sydney yesterday. “After the age of 40 you’re not quite sure how many big thrills are coming your way, and this is certainly one of them.”

Since Grant’s breakthrough role as the drugged-up young actor in the 1987 comedy Withnail and I, he has acted in dozens of films and plays, written three books including his diary With Nails, and directed a film based on his childhood in Swaziland.

Singing on stage was a challenge — “Are people prepared to pay to see me do this?”– but Grant’s voice coaches promised to tell him if he was going to be professionally embarrassed.

Fortunately, he passed muster yesterday, singing one of the show’s memorable songs, The Rain in Spain.

Grant gives the professor an exhuberant manner, although for sheer volume he is outclassed by soprano Taryn Fiebig as Eliza and John Wood as her outrageous Cockney father in the Opera Australia production.

Director Stuart Maunder said every actor who played Higgins in the musical — such as Rex Harrison — put his stamp on it.

“(At 50) Richard is probably 10 years older than the play suggests and it works beautifully, because the bottom line is it’s a Cinderella story and not actually about romance in the classic sense,” Maunder said.

“It’s much more about a meeting of minds and two souls.”

My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1916 play Pygmalion, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.

The story of the transformation of Cockney flowergirl Eliza Doolittle by the eccentric upper-class Professor Higgins is an evergreen on stages around the world.

“Professor Higgins is one of the best-written roles for a male actor that isn’t Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde or Sheridan,” Grant said.

“I think Lerner and Loewe expanded and exposed the hidden emotional part that is embedded in Pygmalion and brought it out, and all the songs advance the story and embellish and reveal things about the characters.

“It’s probably done more for Shaw than anything else.”