Who Weekly Magazine – 1997

In 1986, Richard E. Grant was an unemployed actor wracked with doubt about his chosen career and his decision to move from his Swaziland home to London to pursue it. A decade later, “Swazi Boy” still does a good line in self-doubt, but is making back-to-back films with major directors and has best-selling book on his hands – as a result of playing a desperate unemployed actor.

In was 1986’s Withnail and I that put Grant on the path to success – hence the title of his collected film diaries, With Nails. His playing of squalid, drunken, thwarted thespian Withnail (to Paul McGann’s unnamed ‘I’) led to working with Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Martin Scorcese in The Age of Innocence, and Robert Altman in The Player. Throughout it all, Grant, 39, kept a journal, as he has done since age 11.

In early 1994, when he flew to Paris to make his second film for Altman, the “ill-fated Pret-a-Porter,” Grant was commissioned by Britain’s The Observer to write a diary about it. The piece was so well received that he landed a book contract. Grant says the subsequent editing is for brevity, rather than self-censorship, though he opted not to name all names.

“My intention was not to write a slash-fest and write myself out of ever working again. There were people I might have been more vitriolic about, in stuff like Hudson Hawk, because I literally felt I’d gone mad making that terrible movie.”

Still, the passages on the six months he spent making 1991’s overblown Hawk with Bruce Willis do have plenty of waspish humour as he details the melodramas of co-star Sandra Bernhard, the peccadilloes of producer Joel Silver and a brush with prefame Sharon Stone in star mode. But Grant is unsparing of himself, too, and just about his vocational insecurities. He also writes about the 1986 loss of a daughter who lived for less that half-an-hour after being born prematurely. He first heeded an editor’s suggestion to remove this section, and discussed it at length with his wife, Joan, but “by not writing about it, it seems to me in someway dishonest and it’s also not honouring the fact that it happened. So I felt absolutely compelled to put it back in.”

He and Joan now have a 7-year old daughter, Olivia, and their home in London, though Grant is often away working (he is currently in Ireland filming Serpent’s Kiss with Greta Scacchi). But wherever he travels, he comes upon Withnail fans keen to share their appreciation. “It seems to me a bit like Dracula,” he says, “They will not let him die, which is fine by me.” He laughs. “If there were people out there coming up to me and saying ‘I loved you in Hudson Hawk’, that would have me seriously worried.”