Arts & Music
Mild colonial boy
by Matt Nippert
Drug abuse, intrigue, gossip and infidelity: actor and diarist Richard E Grant thinks that 1960s Swaziland was the ideal warm-up for Hollywood
As a dandy actor-alcoholic, he delivered the immortal exclamation, “We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here, and we want them now!” But in truth Richard E Grant, star of the much-loved cult film Withnail & I, can’t touch the stuff.
Lacking an enzyme to process alcohol, he says that he’s always found drinking similar to eating bad shellfish. “You get a rash up your neck, your face gets very hot, and then you’re on your hands and knees over the khazi for about 10 or 12 hours.”
Not that Grant, playing the drunkard Withnail in various states of hangover and intoxication, was uninformed in his acting. Director Bruce Robinson insisted his cast go method and his instructions to Grant and co-star Paul McGann (playing “I” aka Peter Marwood) were brutally simple: “I want you to get absolutely, leglessly drunk. You need to have a chemical memory of what it’s like.”
Chronic allergies be damned: struggling actor Grant wasn’t willing to let his first film chance slip through his teetotal fingers. “I was paranoid I might be fired – which is a real possibility. Woody Allen fires somebody from every movie he’s ever made.”
Bottles were opened out of duty and the resulting experience sounds more savage than even the rampant binges later shown on screen. Grant explains his commitment to his craft: “If you drink the stuff down, and then you vomit, and then you keep drinking, you go though the alcohol pain barrier and out the other side.”
The manic film is best typified by a scene in which Withnail, desperate for booze, downs a can of lighter fluid:
Withnail: “Got any more?”
Peter: “No. I have nothing.”
Withnail: “Liar. What’s in your toolbox?”
Peter: “Nothing.”
Withnail: “Liar. You’ve got antifreeze.”
Peter: “You bloody fool. You should never mix your drinks!”
Once the film was wrapped and multiple hangovers had subsided, critical praise for Withnail & I poured in. Now widely regarded as a classic, the 1987 flick propelled Grant into dozens of films (50 and counting), for directors including Robert Altman (Gosford Park), Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence) and Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula).
But the rest of those involved have had mixed fortunes. McGann has been a fixture on UK television and Richard Griffiths, who played Monty the homosexual uncle, has had dozens of roles from the Harry Potter films to The History Boys.
Robinson, by contrast, has been without a film credit for almost a decade. In the interim, karma came knocking: the man who made Grant drunk until he was sick has himself been told to quit the bottle. “Four years ago, he was given the ‘If you don’t, you will be dead’ ultimatum,” says Grant.
Robinson, however, has apparently been sober and busy these last few years, reports Grant. “He is three-quarters of the way through a 1200-page book on Jack the Ripper. And he has adapted and will direct Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary for Johnny Depp.”
Robinson begins production in Puerto Rico at the end of the year. “If he can stop drinking.”
Even though the enzymes kept him off the bottle, alcohol has always loomed large in Grant’s psyche, by virtue of his father’s lust for liquor. Now a published author, with two diaries and a novel (By Design) to his name, he says he began penning his thoughts at the age of nine.
“I started writing when I witnessed my mum bonking my father’s best friend in a motor car.” Unable to confide with friends or family, he says, “I felt like if I wrote it down I couldn’t say that I invented it or I’d gone mad.” Soon after this incident, Grant’s mother filed for divorce.
(As a consequence of these early experiences his own marriage has lasted for more than two decades, and at the end of this interview he freely dishes out relationship advice: “Don’t let her go! Don’t let her go!”)
That bonking forms the first scene in Grant’s directorial debut, Wah-Wah. The film re-creates Grant’s childhood in Swaziland during the dying days of the British Empire. At first glance, Wah-Wah seems a sincere but melodramatic take on life in the colonies summed up by Grant as “drug and substance abuse, intrigue, gossip and bonking in all directions”.
But on reflection, it is closer to documentary. His father really was an inveterate alcoholic, and one who didn’t take kindly to interventions. Grant’s subsequent book, The Wah Wah Diaries, describes the experience that serves as the movie’s fulcrum: “My father’s drunken attempt to blow my brains out when I emptied a case of his whisky.”
The weirdness of 1960s Swaziland (including Grant performing in the musical Camelot for the visit of Princess Margaret alongside local actors wearing whiteface), is described as being actually good preparation for where he ended up next: Hollywood.
“Sure, it’s a more glamorous cast list, and a huge amount more money,” Grant says of the culture of the Los Angeles A-list. “But essentially the bottom line is people knowing about everybody else’s business too much.”
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