The Irish Times – 26th September, 1998

Richard E. Grant has proved with his writing that he is as skilled onpaper as on screen. He talks to Penelope Dening

With Nails, Richard E. Grant’s wonderfully irreverent diaries of Hollywood and other film madness, showed that the man who fixed himself forever in the film firmament of comedy with that seminal take on luvviedom, Withnail And I, is also a fine comic writer, as skilled at timing a laugh on paper as on camera.

Although Grant never intended With Nails to be a “sludgefest” like Julia Philips’s dissection of Hollywood’s underbelly, You’ll Never Work In This Town Again (“and she didn’t”), Tinseltown wasspared the full wasp-meets python treatment due to the shackles oflibel. Even so, his wife of 15 years, the voice-coach Joan Washington was terrified there would be a backlash. Not so, it seems. “The most potentially scurrilous chapter was the making of the ill-fated Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis,” says Grant.

“I’ve just been working in Scotland making a film called The Match and Tom Sizemore, who’s in Saving Private Ryan, said to me, ‘Oh I’m a great friend of Bruce and he says to send his best.’

Now, whether he has read it or even knows about it, I don’t know. But I think these things do tend to get back to people, so if he had been offended the last thing he would have done would be to send his regards via somebody else.” Fiction, however, presented no such problems. No surprise, then, that his publishers thought a novel might be worth a punt, and By Design is the very creditable result in which the worst excesses of massed Hollywood egos are chronicled by Grant’s enigmatic narrator, interior designer Vyvian, whose services extend as far as his clients’ bank balances will allow. (“Blood type D for discretion.”)

“I wanted somebody who would have constant and incredibly intimate access, and this was confirmed by all the interviews I did with the real thing in Los Angeles last year. These decorators all said we don’t know why a movie or a story hasn’t been written about us before because within two seconds on the recommendation of somebody else, we have the run of the house.

You’re taken on complete trust and you find out whether people are sleeping together, you see everything, their beds, their toilet paper, you hear the fantasies of what they want, their jealousies, their desperate one-upmanship.” Not that Grant has ever employed a decorator himself. “The notion of buying someone else’s taste is complete anathema to me. But I’ve been into these movie stars’ houses where you know they haven’t bought these things, and you know that they haven’t read these books because some of them can’t string four sentences together with any kind of literacy. Yet they’ve got leather-bound first editions of Dickens and stuff like that. And all that stuff is great feed.”

By Design was written in under four months. With The Scarlet Pimpernel set to start shooting in Prague last March, he says, there was no choice. “I knew I couldn’t possibly write at the same time as playing that part and being in a foreign country, so I just put my nose to it and wrote the thing. But you are very isolated and you get sort of institutionalised, in this room alone all the time nine to seven every day, and real life seems very loud and busy.” In comparison With Nails had been a doddle. “For me a diary is just part of the day’s activities. I’ve been writing them since I was 11. It’s a sort of meditation on the day as it were – something that I love to do and it’s completely habitual, as is letter writing and emailing. And that is entirely due to the geography of where I grew up.”

Richard E. Grant was born Richard Esterhuysen in a small town in Swaziland, a tiny country that nudges up to the eastern edge of South Africa and which in the 1960s was still part of the British Empire. His father was the local director of education (the E. stands for his original surname of Esterhuysen), his mother worked as a secretary until she ran off with another man when Richard was 11.

Always passionate about theatre (starting with puppet shows as a kid) Grant studied drama at university in Cape Town before coming to England in the early 1980s, by which time letter-writing to family and friends had become the norm. Landing the role of the eponymous Withnail in 1985 was the break that every actor dreams of, and his waspish yet endearing portrayal of the neurotic, alcohol-fuelled thesp who’s never going to make it ensured that – unlike his character – he did.

Although Richard E. Grant has featured on the credits of a dozen or more high-profile feature films since – working with Coppola, Altman and Scorsese to name but three – Withnail remains attached to Grant like a Siamese twin, loved but irritating as hell. Because the handsome man, with a touch of the undertaker in dead-pan black, still looks uncannily like Withnail – younger if anything, and certainly healthier. Watery blue eyes bulge slightly as he smiles like a small boy caught scrumping apples, replaced at a blink by a falcon glint when we indulge a mutual loathing of a mutual acquaintance.

Non-smoker and non-drinker, gossip is Richard E. Grant’s drug of choice. He asks as many questions as he answers (How old are you? What’s your real name?) arms flail and fingers stab the air as he derides actors who say they found fame by default, shouting “THEY LIE. THEY LIE.” He is consistently and wittily entertaining with no trace of the I’m-a-star-and-don’t-you-forget it aloofness favoured by other, less talented film-folk than he.

His current mentor is Steve Martin who he met working on LA Story nine years ago. “He’s an actor and a writer and he’s got a book about to come out in America, so you have an absolutely empathetic, sympathetic ear, knowing that somebody’s going through the exact same thing that you’re going through. And we get on fantastically well.” They don’t speak on the phone, but email each other three or four times a week.

“If you telephone somebody – particularly if they’re in another time zone – you either get an answer machine, which drives me nuts, or they’re about to go out, or you just haven’t got them at the right time. Whereas with a letter you can collect your thoughts and anecdotes and you also get into somebody’s mind which you never do any other way. It’s very intimate.” One of the joys of the research staying chez Martin in LA (“two weeks of honeymoon”) was being given the run of Roddy McDowell’s “astonishing” archive of diaries and other memorabilia of old-time Hollywood legends, not to be published within 50 years of McDowell’s death.

“I was intrigued by what these old stars do with their time. I know what retired English actors do – most of them don’t have a lot of money – but people who have been legends in their own life time in America, most of them know exactly what’s going on and would love to work. As it is they’re just sad figures wheeled out for tributes and funerals.” The need to work is the one common denominator that unites all actors, Grant contends. “No matter how good or bad or what strata of the profession that they’re in, everybody wants to work.” And whether you get work or not “is not about talent, it’s not about how good you are. It’s about these other factors in the ether that you have no control over whatsoever.”

Yet Grant has a high regard for today’s big hitters. “I wouldn’t dare be patronising by saying that the majority of American actors are overpaid dumb idiots. They are not by any chalk. What I’ve been riveted by is that the public persona of somebody is so set by the kind of roles that box office circumstances or looks have narrowed them down into playing.”

As for Richard E. Grant’s new public persona of author, he finds it “all very ego-massaging”. “I always thought that people come to see a film I was in because they liked the script, the director, the producer, the subject matter, the other actors in it. Whereas with a reading you unequivocably have to say that these people have come to see you. By the same token if they don’t turn up, then it’s also very clear that they don’t want to see you.” But they must come in droves, I say.

He smiles that Withnail smile. “If it sounds as if I don’t expect it, it’s because I don’t. And that’s my point. Film making is entirely collaborative, it absolutely and entirely depends on the script. So when you’ve written a script or a book yourself, you can’t blame anybody else.”

Richard E. Grant will give a reading from his new book at Waterstones, Dawson Street, Dublin, today at 7.30 p.m. Tickets £2 from the shop.