Withnail and Me

I’ve long had an affection for the actor Richard E. Grant, ever since his breakout role in Withnail and I, and despite the rash of clunkers he’s made since then (Hudson Hawk comes painfully to mind). Yet, regardless of the movie he’s in, good or bad, he usually makes it better.

To use a sports metaphor that Grant would likely abhor, he’s rather like Shane Battier, a long-retired basketball player, who was on a variety of teams throughout his 15-year NBA career, but never rose to star status. Battier never garnered the accolades of players like Kobe or LeBron—he didn’t have a great outside shot (or inside one for that matter)—and was dismissed by many. But he was consistent, dogged, and whenever he played, his team did better.

OK, maybe the metaphor is a bit strained, but my point is that Richard E. Grant is a fine, solid, funny, workmanlike actor. And whenever he’s in a film, he makes it better.

Yet, as much as I’ve enjoyed his acting, I now believe his real star turn comes as a writer. I recently discovered Grant’s 1996 memoir, With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant, and was knocked out by this witty, charming, thoroughly neurotic chronicle of his early film experience, from Withnail and I in 1987 to Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter in 1994. 

There is a fine tradition of actors publishing accounts of their adventures in the screen trade—David Niven’s highly entertaining memoirs, for example—and there is no question that With Nails is up there with the best. Why? Because, like Niven, Grant is a superb writer. Hilarious, bitchy, vivid, and entertaining, I simultaneously laughed out loud (which I almost never do anymore) and was enthralled by his turn of phrase. This is a rare skill in any writer, let alone someone who self-identifies as an “actor.”

Grant’s writing seems a more natural expression of him as an artist. He has a fiercely funny intellect, with a winning, self-deprecating humor. He readily points out the foibles of others, but is also more than willing to lay bare his own eccentricities. Suspicious of his growing fame and thoroughly star-struck in the presence of cinematic royalty, Grant makes the perfect, easily accessible guide through Hollywood. Like the time he suddenly found himself in the presence of his childhood idol Barbra Streisand at a party in Los Angeles:

“Petite, in a black hat and antique black lace dress with boots, she offers a hand and I ‘platz’. What comes out of my mouth is a garbled, high speed ‘Alan Corduner from Yentl, Joan my wife, since I was twelve years old so pleased I can hardly believe this please forgive me but this is twenty years in the dreaming, oh my God,’ which she rightly cuts short with ‘Are you stoned?’ Then a slightly slower less garbled apology and attempted explanation that ‘No, I am allergic to alcohol’ fa-la-fa and to forgive the intrusion please and verbals. Clearly used to the odd nutter breaking through her barrier, she says calmly, ‘I know you from a movie.’ I don’t care a jot that she’s probably lying...”

And if his breathless writing delivers a vivid picture of himself, his genuine gift reveals itself as an observer of others. Grant had this to say when Tom Waits—the hipster musician-cum-actor—arrived for the first rehearsal of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula:

“Mistah Waits arrives straight out of a record cover in a ’64 open-topped Cadillac, with fins, with a funnel of dust trailing down the dirt road. The gravel voice gets out some howdy-doodys and his clothes and hair are crumple-sculpted to him. Doesn’t seem to have a straight bone in his bearing and kills me off with his cool by growling out a compliment for Withnail. Out the side of his mouth. Like we might be spied on by the bailiffs. Him, rolling tobacco and reefer. Winona and I screeching like the demented fans we are ‘We’ve got all your recordings, Tom!!’ To which he just heh-hehs.”

That’s some crackerjack writing there. Gritty, poetic, it sounds as though it might have been lifted from a Waits song itself. That was Grant’s point, of course, and he manages to paint exactly the picture I would expect if I ever met the man. (I, too, have all your recordings, Tom!!)

Ultimately, Richard E. Grant comes off as a guy we’d love to share a cocktail with at a party: wild, insecure, spit-take funny, with exactly the right comment whispered out the side of his mouth at exactly the right moment. At the beginning of his career, he was able to wander anonymously through Hollywood gatherings like the sardonic sociologist he sounds like in his book. But after awhile, his growing fame pushed him into the in-crowd. Carrie Fisher (who became a lifelong friend, and was his humoristic and spiritual twin) reminded him of this when he himself arrived: “You’re no longer a tourist, you’re one of the attractions.”

That insider status has been a boon, both to Grant and to us. He has never failed to find work as an actor—he played a blustering, self-absorbed playwright and actor in season 6 of Game of Thrones, a part he chewed with particular relish. He portrayed the hilariously antic drinking buddy of Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which earned him a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar nom.

Literarily, Grant has published two books since With Nails. The first is By Design: A Hollywood Novel, his first (and only, so far) foray into fiction. It was long out of print, but I happened to uncover a UK copy on Amazon and devoured it with the same relish as With Nails. The Times called By Design “An electrifying act ... there are moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity ... The jokes alone are worth the price of admission” and I couldn’t say it any better than that.

Grant returned to the autobiographical form with his second book, The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film. It’s a chronicle of his debut as director and writer of the favorably reviewed 2005 film Wah-Wah, starring Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson. It’s a semi-autobiographical tale of Grant’s childhood growing up in Swaziland (now known as Eswatini) in southern Africa, at the tail end of the British Empire in the 1960s. Both the book and the film crackle with Grant’s famed tart-tongued, deliciously neurotic humor and observations.

It is the joy of the world that Grant felt the need to catalogue the nuttiness of the film business. It is more so that some perceptive publisher thought others might take pleasure in it, too. And this slight detour from his acting career seemed to sit perfectly well with Grant. In one of many faxes (yes, faxes) he sent to the writer, actor, comedian Steve Martin, with whom Grant forged a friendship during the filming of Martin’s LA Story, he wrote:

“I cannot tell you how pleasurable it was to go into various publishing houses and have a board room of adults blow smokey praise up where it counts, and for once not to be some director’s or producer’s name on a long list. It is the first time in my dozen years of doing this showbizness ‘thung’ that I have felt some rat’s fart worth of control. That the writing is something in my hand that I can thwatt down on a desk and say take it or leave it fuckers, rather than that mimsy-maybe yo-yo of the casting circus.”

He expresses this idea a little more pointedly at the end of With Nails, when he attempts to sum up his previous decade of filmmaking in what appears to be a painfully extracted epilogue:

“Writing this epilogue is as peculiar as writing your own epitaph before actually being boxed up and buried. I had hoped for some wisdom at the cramped end of my thirties, but feel my hand moving inexorably towards my forehead in a gesture of ‘nay, nay’. What I do know is this. No matter how intense, important, life-alteringly-fabulous or fiasco-laden a ‘flick’ is, it finally is just that — a ‘flick’, of the fast-forward button or fade out. This year’s ‘MUST SEE’ is destined to shuffle itself on to the overstocked video shelf six months after its release.”

For me, the only flick of the fast-forward button I may do during one of Grant’s flicks is to get to the scenes he’s in. Still, he’s right, of course. Filmmaking isn’t brain surgery. It doesn’t feed the homeless or cure cancer. And frankly, it’s Grant’s self-effacing acknowledgment of the immateriality of the form that makes our journey behind the scenes with him so delightful. Reading his chronicle, we lick our lips in anticipation as he peels back the insubstantial layers of glitz and glamor that is Hollywood, grabs juicy fistfulls of the meaty pulp of ego and self-absorption, tosses in heaps of his own tasty commentary, throws it all into a blender on high, and pours out a frothy frappé of a story of life in the limelight. Delicious!

OK, unlike Grant, the witty, well-turned metaphor is not one of my strengths. I’ll leave those to him and simply encourage you to grab With Nails and By Design and Wah Wah and see for yourself. 

You won’t find a better, funnier guide through the twisted tinsel of that business they call show.