ClassicFM.com – 22nd March 2014,

Richard E Grant told Classic FM about his love for Mozart above all other composers, saying that if he could only hear the music of one composer for the rest of his life, it would be his. Classic FM: A Night At The Movies
Talking backstage at Classic FM’s A Night At The Movies with Sky Movies, the actor took time out to tell us exactly what he thought about Mozart.

“The speed of his mind, his invention and the breadth of his talent is, I think, unmatched.”

Just before he was due to take the stage to host the special concert at Westminster’s, he also told Classic FM about the role that music plays in movies: “I know first-hand how utterly transforming and helpful music is. And equally, if it’s wrong, you know that immediately as well… it adds a three-dimensional quality to a film that you can’t see, but you feel it.”

Grant also extolled the virtues of Nino Rota’s score for The Godfather (his favourite trilogy of all time), and the work that Patrick Doyle did on his own directorial effort, Wah-Wah, from 2005.

Listen to Richard chatting Mozart below:

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.

The Telegraph – 21st March, 2014

In the second interview in the monthly audio interview series presented by The Telegraph, Matthew Stadlen talks to the actor about his obsession with smell, growing up in Swaziland and the importance of keeping a diary. Richard E. Grant also reflects on his allergy to alcohol, the success of his marriage, and his breakdown at the age of 41.

Richard E. Grant (born 5 May 1957) is a Swazi-born British actor, author, director, and perfumer. He has appeared in over 80 films and television programmes, such as Withnail And I, The Scarlet Pinmpernel, Jack & Sarah, L.A. Story, Dracula, Gosford Park, The Iron Lady and Downton Abbey.

In 2005 he directed his first major release, Wah-Wah. He is also launching his own perfume in 2014.

Stadlen is an interviewer, broadcaster and writer. He produced and presented the BBC’s Five Minutes With interview series and the BBC’s documentary series On The Road With.

Length: 34 mins

If you are a Telegraph subscriber, simply go to the website to download 30 Minutes With Richard E. Grant, free.

Otherwise you’ll have to go to Audible.co.uk to download 30 Minutes With Richard E. Grant, for £0.79, and click ‘Add to Basket’. Log in in by using your Amazon details or create an Amazon account. Follow the instructions to download the audio interview.

Click the image below to hear REG talking about the ‘quintessentially British character’ of Lewis Carroll’s Alice for BBC Radio 4’s programme ‘Character Invasion’.

The London Evening Standard – 20th March, 2014

Richard E Grant, the ‘perfumed ponce’ of cult film Withnail & I, is hot property: guest-starring in Girls and about to head forDownton. But somehow he’s found time to launch a unisexfragrance with notes of Camberwell carrot

‘Champagne breath is like a poodle’s arse. it is absolutely rank! And it looks so beautiful and bubbly’: Richard E Grant.

By Alex Clark

‘Oh my God!’ exclaims Richard E Grant, grasping my hand. ‘I just want to lick you! That makes me want to Lick. Your. Wrist. Oh, my God, that’s so good.’ Journalists are sleazy, and probably actors, too, but this encounter, which took place on a bright, sunshiny morning, is entirely innocent; Grant is merely being his irrepressibly exuberant self. After all, he tells me, ‘I have compulsively sniffed everything all my life, and I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t.’ But this is sniffing with a purpose. Grant has spritzed me with Jack, the unisex perfume that he has created from scratch, which will launch at the beginning of April in Liberty and online, and after a decent interval — ‘Let it waft a bit!’ — we’re seeing how the top notes of lime, mandarin and marijuana and the layers of frankincense, vetiver, white musk and tobacco beneath are faring against the unmistakable background of Radox shower gel. Quite well, apparently.

Would he say if they weren’t? Possibly, but in the most endearing way. It’s clear within two minutes of meeting him that Grant, currently guest-starring in Girls and a recent addition to the cast of Downton Abbey, is one of life’s enthusiasts, all twinkly eyes and Tiggerishness. He says he can’t believe he’s 56 and three-quarters, and neither can I. If he were a scent, you’d get hit by a sharp blast of fun, frivolity and flirtiness first and then begin to catch the bass notes of discernment and intelligence. In brief, naughty but nice.

And, it turns out, one of those eccentric, madcap, passion-pursuing, typically British-inventor types. Jack is not a celebrity fragrance. There is no picture of Grant on the bottle, no lucrative contract in the wings. He pooh-poohed his friend Anya Hindmarch’s suggestion that its name should be his initials, REG (too reminiscent of Reg Varney and of panto), although he waxes lyrical about her crucial role in kickstarting the whole enterprise. It all began when they were fellow house-guests on a Caribbean holiday a couple of years ago.

‘She saw me with my head in a gardenia bush, and she said, “Are you going to do something about that?” And I said, “What, do you mean psychiatrically?” She said, “No… I meant have you ever thought of making perfume?”?’ The answer was an emphatic yes. ‘It’s what I’ve always dreamed of doing.’ Grant grew up in Swaziland, the son of a politician, and in 2005 he made the film Wah-Wah about his childhood (starring Nicholas Hoult as his younger self), an experience he describes as ‘hands-down’ the best of his professional life. ‘When I was a kid in Swaziland,’ he tells me, ‘I tried to make perfume out of gardenia and rose petals, in boiled sugar water in jam jars, which I then buried in the garden. And a week later, when I opened them, the osmosis that I’d hoped would transform them into perfume… they turned out to be stink bombs.’

Hindmarch’s intervention might have ended there; back in London, Grant wondered whether it was one of those pipe-dream conversations crushed by the return to reality. But the handbag supremo had other ideas, sending him off to perfumer Lyn Harris of Miller Harris and reassuring him that the ‘bean-counters’ would do the numbers. The trail led to celebrated ‘nose’ Roja Dove, who blind-tested him through ‘a paintbox display of every oil and scent possible’. Dove’s verdict was that Grant, possibly because he’s never drunk or smoked, was in possession of ‘a very sharp nose’.

Numerous other encounters ensued, including a ‘pube-straighteningly clear’ conversation with a no-nonsense industry expert who told him she’d only agreed to help him because ‘you turned up on time, didn’t send an assistant and didn’t want your name or face on the box’, but who changed the game by hooking him up with department store Liberty. The store agreed ‘within five minutes’ to stock the (then nameless) perfume on a year-long exclusive deal and to allow him to sell it via his website. He came out of the meeting and ‘literally jumped up and down. It felt like we were in Dragons’ Den!’

Next stop was Parisian perfumer Aliénor Massenet. ‘What was extraordinary was that having thought that nobody would take me seriously because I was a complete amateur, she did. And she said, “You have enormous passion for this,” so it was wonderful. It was like having access to a door that I’d never had open to me before in my life.’

There were, naturally, setbacks. Once the name had been settled — an homage to Grant’s lifelong love of the Union Jack — there was a legal tussle with a US company (‘I can’t say who’) who thought the name was too similar to one of its products; at the last minute the company withdrew, but fending it off had cost a fair few bob. He has funded the whole shebang himself, prepared to write off a minimum production run of 3,000 bottles in the worst-case scenario, and benefiting from some ‘staggering generosity’.

It is, nonetheless, an unexpected direction for an actor — particularly one so prolific, so apparently committed to maintaining a steady stream of work. Ironically enough, Grant’s career was launched when he starred as an actor who couldn’t even get an audition, let alone a part, in Bruce Robinson’s 1987 film Withnail & I. As so often, however, overnight success looks simpler in hindsight. At the time, ‘they said the title was unpronounceable,’ he recalls now. ‘It had no women in it, no car chases, no Crocodile Dundee, which was the big hit of that year, nobody that anybody had heard of and no plot.’ After four weeks at the Odeon Haymarket, it shuffled off, but video and DVD releases made it a student cult (I should know: I was in its generational sweet spot, and still occasionally shout, ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,’ or call for ‘the finest wines available to humanity’) and, over time, an acknowledged great of British film-making. Grant’s electrically manic, comically menacing performance — in a role turned down by Daniel Day-Lewis — is mesmerising, unforgettable. ‘It gave me my entire career,’ he says simply. ‘I owe everything to it and to Bruce Robinson.’

Ten years later, he appeared in Spice World: The Spice Girls Movie, to please his young daughter Olivia. He got plenty of flak in serious thespian circles: ‘But my playground credibility the two terms after the movie came out was at an all-time high.’ He had a whale of a time: ‘I loved them; they were just hilarious, completely undisciplined and out of control, and because they weren’t actors, and because they were such good friends, there was no hierarchy. Normal rules of film-making didn’t apply to them. It was like a holiday job.’

And it was partly to delight Olivia, now 25, that he joined the cast of Girls as drug addict Jasper, who falls into a dangerous liaison with Jessa (Jemima Kirke) when they’re both in rehab. ‘It was so thrilling to work with all of them, God, absolutely, I just loved it! Lena Dunham, she’s an extraordinary multi-hyphenate talent, a producer, writer, director, actor — and all-round good mensch in the middle of all that. And 27 years old! You just can’t believe that she’s done it.’

One scene has Jasper in conversation with Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). He’s off his head on coke, she’s merely talking at her normal speed. ‘I learned those lines — it was only a page of script — literally day in, day out, for a week beforehand in order to get as fast as I possibly could. And then somebody said, “It’s so fast it’s incomprehensible,” and I said, “Well, at least it’s faster than Zosia.”?’

He’s done four episodes and, because his character wasn’t killed off, he hopes he might be asked back. So, I double-check, it was a totally positive experience? ‘I’m afraid so. I can only blow smoke up that wigwam.’

And now to Downton, a show that many, especially in America, assumed he would have been called up for earlier, given his below-stairs turn in Julian Fellowes’ Gosford Park. He plays art historian Simon Bricker, and it’s already brought one welcome perk: ‘My mother kept banging on and saying, “When are you going to be in Downton Abbey?”, as though that was the only thing. It shows in Africa, where she lives, so I Skyped her a couple of weeks ago and said, “I am now in Downton Abbey,” and she was enormously relieved; she could go and tell her fellow bridge players that her son had finally cracked it.’

Is it fun? ‘It is, yes. And I know other actors in it. But it is slightly the problem of being the new bug going in, because they’ve all been doing it for four years. So you go in as the outsider and hope that you’re not going to be flayed alive.’ That’s unlikely, surely? ‘Well, no, it can happen.’ Has it happened to him? ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ Has he done it to anyone else? ‘No. Cruelty’s something I run away from, rather than towards.’

That rings entirely true, despite his air of merry mischief. Grant’s obvious appetite and relish for the world suggests an underlying generosity. It surfaces when I ask him how the Union Jack iconography he’s drawn to relates to his terribly British persona and, in turn, to his expat upbringing in Swaziland. ‘There was Marxist Mozambique across one border,’ he explains, ‘and fascist apartheid on the other, and for me, the Union Jack and British culture and the British way of life are so emblematic of free speech, freedom of expression and a sense of everybody being welcome underneath the banner of the Commonwealth… I think the creativity and the freedom to be exactly who you are here, unconstrained, are unique in the world. And everywhere I’ve travelled, I’ve been struck, as soon as I’ve come home, that you have that here. I think that you can take it for granted if you always lived here.’

As ever, the subject of scent keeps cropping up. When he arrived here in 1982, he worked as a waiter in Covent Garden, got a bonus ‘for not stealing or being drunk at work’ and spent the money on Penhaligon’s Blenheim. He’s worn that and Christian Dior’s Eau Sauvage all his life, though he showers his wife Joan Washington, a dialect coach who’s recently been working with Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston, with all sorts of different perfumes. At the moment, she’s steadfastly wearing Jack (as are Olivia and all her friends), and her clients have, unprompted, asked her where they can get it, ‘a great encouragement, to get celebrity endorsement without begging for it’.

Before we part, I ask him to share his favourite smells. ‘Leather furniture, car bonnets after they’ve been driving a distance or they’ve been in the sun and the metal is hot, that has a great smell. And there’s no fruit that I can’t put my nose to.’

And his least favourite? ‘Champagne breath is like a poodle’s arse, it is absolutely rank! And it looks so beautiful and bubbly. Milk and cheese is the equivalent to me of running shoes. And the smell of chocolate I find particularly repulsive. But you have no choice in these things. It’s in your DNA.’

Portraits by Ian Derry