Oscar-nominated actor Richard E Grant is in Auckland to perform his deeply personal live show An Evening with Richard E Grant.
Grant's performances span the cult classic film Withnail and I to Star Wars, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones and Can You Ever Forgive Me? for which he won a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
He tells Jesse Mulligan that being in the running for an Oscar briefly launched him into superstardom.
Richard E Grant Photo: supplied
“When you get a Golden Globe nomination all the neighbourhood dogs give you a lick and a sniff, BAFTA nomination the entire neighbourhood comes barking at you but with an Oscar nomination, the entire planet seems to be barking at you.
“People I hadn’t heard from in 50 years called up and said ‘we must have lunch...’”
Grant's one-man show is based on his recent memoir A Pocketful of Happiness - named after a phrase spoken by his late wife Joan Washington.
“'A Pocket Full of Happiness' comes from something my wife said to my daughter and I four days before she died, fourteen months ago. She knew we’d be sad, but we should try and find a pocket full of happiness in each day.
“This has been a great mantra by which to navigate the last fourteen months of trying to find the best in things and not just to go down the rabbit hole of grief, that is all too open.”
A Pocketful of Happiness recounts a 38-year relationship that was both private and professional.
Grant says performing a show based on memories of his wife has been therapeutic.
“I'm grateful to be able to talk about it because, what in my experience has happened, is that about six weeks after she had died, people just stopped asking me or stop mentioning her name.
“And then you feel like the person’s either never existed or they've been cancelled.”
Joan was a successful voice actor and coach, Grant says, who worked with actors like Barbara Streisand, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Kevin Costner.
Their first date - in the early 1980s - came about because of Grant’s fluency in the Swazi language.
“I was the only Swazi speaker that she knew because I grew up in what was then called Swaziland in southeast Africa.
“So she said if you come around for dinner, I'll feed you and you put all the dialogue down for the Royal Shakespeare Company of this play on a cassette tape and we'll go from there.
“I didn't go home that night. I missed the last tube and I said you know, could I possibly stay in your spare bedroom?
“And it was snowing, the first time I'd seen snow, it was January 1983. And she opened the door, she was Scottish, opened the door to the spare bedroom and of course, the radiator had not been switched on, so it was arse-paralysingly freezing.
“I then gingerly asked, could I possibly stay wrapped in the duvet and lie lengthwise at the bottom of your bed or head to toe boy scout-style and she said ‘get in here’.”
That was the start of a very happy 38-year marriage, Grant says.
Over a long and distinguished acting career, he has met many giants of the industry but only one - Meryl Streep - left him truly star-struck.
“I played Heseltine, a small part, when she played Margaret Thatcher in the Iron Lady.
“She is so awe-inspiring because she’s had more Oscar nominations than anybody else, the most astonishing career that's unmatched, unequalled.
“She has such an amazing sense of humour. Dressed up in the Margaret Thatcher wig when we're filming at the Houses of Parliament in between the setups she bust out into an Abba medley.
“To see Margaret Thatcher singing ‘Waterloo’ was one of the all-time high points of my career, which tells you what kind of person she is.”
Grant also got a thrill from joining the Star Wars franchise for 2019's Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker.
“I'd seen the first one, I was a drama student, when I was 20 years old in 1977. So, to be in the final one The Rise of Luke Skywalker, it was … I've always wanted to go into outer space because Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, when I was 12 years old, every kid on the planet I think, wanted to be an astronaut.
“So, the combination of being a space addict and then being able to walk onto the sets where they have those octagonal doors, backwards and forwards and see the starscape beyond and you press all the buttons, like being a studio and the lights come on, and the doors open was just absolutely thrilling.”
For Grant's daughter Olivia, his performance as the manager of the Spice Girls in the 1997 film Spice World was a highlight.
“The serious members of British acting were very snooty about my doing this [film]. And I said, Well, you don't have an eight-year-old daughter that's heard that you've been offered [to play] Spice Girls' manager Clifford.
“She levitated … ‘You have to be in this so that I can meet all the Spice Girls’. And they were amazingly generous with her, they were closer in age to her than they were to me as I’d just turned 40.”
The classic 1987 black comedy film Withnail and I - in which Grant played an unemployed actor Withnail - still follows him everywhere he goes.
“I was doing a kid's movie in the Outback in 2000, middle of nowhere, not a single car had gone past and then a 1958 yellow Hillman drove past about midday and somebody leant out at the window and shouted out ‘Scrubbers!’”
An Evening with Richard E Grant is at Auckland's Town Hall Saturday 26 November.--
