Tonite: Western Cape Website – Friday 4th November, 2005

By Sheila Johnston

Richard E Grant still talks darkly about a period in 1985 when he was unemployed for a full nine months. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, it sounds disingenuous to say you’re anxious about work, and I’m not here to sing the blues about it,” he says. “But that left a great big mark on me.”

At the moment Grant is hardly under-employed; in fact, it’s rather difficult to avoid him. His are the honeyed tones of the villain in Tim Burton’s animated fairytale Corpse Bride.

He’s just finished Above and Beyond, a gung-ho TV mini-series about flying Hurricane bombers across the North Atlantic in the winter of 1940.

Wah-Wah, his debut as a writer-director, opens early next year. And he’s presently starring in Simon Gray’s comedy Otherwise Engaged, which arrives in the West End next week.

Grant makes what will be his first stage appearance in 12 years, as a complacent publisher whose epic self-absorption is gradually deflated by a stream of intrusivevisits.

Grant was born in Swaziland in 1957, where he lived until 1982, and sometimes refers to himself as Swazi Boy, or, in his more swaggering moments, The Swaz. He’s tall with an elegant, ectomorphic frame, appraising, pale-blue eyes and a deliberate way with words.

These he employed to great effect in his fabulously gossipy film diaries, which were published to acclaim in 1996. His conversation, like them, is speckled with mentions of celebrities without it somehow ever seeming like name-dropping.

One could easily imagine adapting the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon parlour game for Grant, who, over his 30-year career, seems to have met or worked with everyone who’s anyone in showbusiness: his three films with Robert Altman – a director famed for his ensemble casts – are enough in themselves to set up a huge web of connections. Yet he remains indelibly linked in the popular imagination with his first big-screen role, as the brilliantly corrosive, alcoholic wannabe actor in Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy Withnail and I.

Grant’s diaries offered many acerbic observations on his adventures in the screen trade. While he has no plans to write about the theatre, he is equally trenchant about that world.

“There’s a fair amount of sentimental hogwash: that whole sepia-soaked notion of the great days of rep and touring and landladies. And it’s easy to become self-important – actors talk preposterous nonsense about playing King Lear being like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on a nightly basis.

“What I like about film is the industrial element. Bottom line is, you’re there to entertain people, and that aspect of lah-di-dah, going-up-your-own-fundament is missing.”

Grant saw all this from the other side while directing Wah-Wah. It is his openly autobiographical account of a childhood stamped by three factors: Africa, the last hurrah of colonial culture and the end of his parents’ painfully unhappy marriage.

Since actresses of a certain age are always harping on about the dearth of good parts, he had anticipated no trouble casting the key role of his American stepmother.

“No one showed any interest whatsoever.” Emily Watson took the role, but Grant has no hesitation in naming the Rodeo Drive refuseniks: Meg Ryan, Geena Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Wah Wah will be showing at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival which starts next weekend.