An acting career takes off

Budapest Times

25-05-2025

It's only once the book is opened that 'With Nails' turns out to have a fuller title, 'With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant', so potential readers might not be wise to expect reminiscences of the usual variety, the old 'I was born in such-and-such a place on such-and-such a date, and Dad worked as a such-and-such and Mum was a such-and-such…'
Immediately after this title page comes the publisher's information, and it reveals that the book was actually first published in 1996, a bit of a long time ago when you consider that Grant has made some 60 films since then. After all, next the Contents page lists chapters on only nine films: ' Withnail and I', 'Warlock', 'Henry and June', 'LA Story', 'Hudson Hawk', 'The Player', 'Dracula', 'The Age of Innocence' and 'Prêt-à-Porter', all from 1987 to 1994.
There one other chapter titled 'More LA Stories' in which will be found further anecdotes of the Hollywood experience, pretty much a long round of parties, lunches and encounters with the colony's movers and shakers, the rich and famous, not to forget actual auditions, read-throughs and acting. Also, intriguingly, there is an 'Epilogue'. Something post-1996?
No, this latter is just a shortish note on the parallel between getting the nod that you've passed the audition and being signed to convert your private diary into a public screed. Also now, though, comes an unannounced 'Post Script', and it contains a clue that it dates not from 2025 but from 2015. It would seem that the 'Film Diaries' also had a new life then.
The 'Post Script'mentions the film 'Gosford Park', which was released in 2001, and gives the fact that Grant has been in London for 33 years, which we can work out would be 2015 because the book opens proceedings in 1985, which Grant says is three years after he emigrated from colonial Swaziland to England.
Again, we can deduce that his arrival would have been as a 28-year-old, because if we look up his life elsewhere we find that his full name is Richard Grant Esterhuysen and he was born on May 5, 1957 in the Protectorate of Swaziland. Now that's fascinating. Why Swaziland? Many famous British people turn out to have been born in India, Burma, Malaya and other colonial outposts, the offspring of administrators sent out from the home country. But Swaziland? It's a logical question when he is seemingly a through-and-through Englishman.
In the shortest of biographical notes the publisher simply informs us that 'Richard E. Grant was born and brought up in Mbabane, Swaziland', no date or anything, plus listing a few of his films and a couple of books he wrote, and that he lives in London with his family. It isn't until deep in the book that Grant, who often refers to himself self-deprecatingly as 'Swazi Boy' – such as in how did Swazi Bboy' get to be with all these film stars – opens up a little.
His father had been Minister of Education during the British colonial jurisdiction of Swaziland until Independence in 1968, after which he was made an honorary adviser. The country was called the 'Switzerland of Africa', having relative economic stability, a single-tribe population and single-language status. The Grants lived in a hilltop house overlooking the Ezulweni Valley, meaning Valley of Heaven, with a panoramic view for 60 kilometres. Swaziland is now named the Kingdom of Eswatini and it is three-quarters surrounded by South Africa.
In the chapter on 'The Player', Grant is at a party chockablock with 'names' and he spies Barbra Streisand. Getting introduced, he tells her that as a 14-year-old on a visit from Swaziland to Europe and England with his father – Home Leave as it was colonially called – they saw her 'Funny Girl', and the young Grant was thunderstruck, instantly falling in love.
Back home he wrote to her 'care of Columbia Records' saying: 'I have followed your career avidly. We have all your records. I am fourteen years old. I read in the paper that you were feeling very tired and pressurised by your fame and failed romance with Mr Ryan O'Neal. I would like to offer you a two-week holiday, or longer, at our house, which is very beautiful with a pool and magnificent view of the Ezulweni Valley.
'Here you can rest. No one will trouble you and I assure you you will not be mobbed in the street as your films only show in our one cinema for three days, so not that many people will know who you are… ' etcetera. Days, weeks, months, years he waited but no reply. Now, in a party festooned with the likes of Al Pacino, Whoopi Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum, Diane Lane, Christopher Lambert, Julia Roberts, Jason Patric, Sandra Bernhard, Joel Silver, Annie Ross, Glenne Headly, Timothy Dalton, Robert Downey Jnr., Winona Ryder and more, here she is.
He can barely speak in awe and she asks, 'Are you stoned?' He manages to tell her he is allergic to alcohol, whereupon she says, 'I know you from a movie'. This turns out to be 'Henry and June'. He confesses to the fan letter, which of course she never received, and she says she doesn't remember being exhausted then, 'must just be the usual press stuff'.
He manages 22 minutes with 'Babs' – he timed it – but knows he is just another geeky gusher. While she is an idol with a significant place in his life and experience, he of course can have none in hers. He asks if he can kiss her hand in farewell, to which she says OK and laughs, saving her from Grant's further frothings.
Grant writes how he arrived in England only to be 'marooned, becalmed, beached and increasingly bleached of self-confidence' as he embarked on his chosen career path. Unfortunately he found himself 'among the 95 per cent, forty-thousand-odd unemployed members of Equity' (the actors'trade union).
He may be exaggerating to make his point. Nonetheless, the possibility of a role in a BBC production arises. But it would be as Dr. Frankenstein's creature. And there's an audition for the panto 'Robin Hood and the Babes in the Wood'. Humiliation. Who the hell do you think you are, he asks himself? Brando? Olivier? Go back to Swaziland. Fortunately he has a loving wife for support. He changes his agent.
And then the Big Break. Handmade Films, formed by ex-Beatle George Harrison and his business partner Denis O'Brien in 1978 to finance the controversial Monty Python film 'Life of Brian', is going to make something called 'Withnail and I', about two out-of-work actors in squalid circumstances in London, and Grant lands the part of Withnail.
This black, anarchic and eccentric film is surely one of the most hilarious ever made, beloved of anyone with a twisted sense of humour, including your correspondent. Grant doesn't need to do anything, to say anything; you only need to look at him to laugh. While Streisand said she recalled him in 'Henry and June', most other people he meets loved 'Withnail and I'.
It made his career. Hollywood to Grant is 'a Suburban Babylon', 'the land of liposuction', 'the State of the Barbie'. He eats cold Chinese food with Madonna, has an odd shopping trip with Sharon Stone, works for pivotal directors Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. He talks parenting with Tom Waits. He notes the short statures of screen macho men Stallone and Schwarzenegger, the madness that was ' Hudson Hawk'…
Richard E. Grant sees himself as a grounded man minus therapist, futurist, assistant, nutritionist, manager, lawyer and publicist, whom he labels fleece merchants. Still, there's piles of pampering – luxury hotels, first-class air travel, limos, per diems. Oh God, it's all so stratospheric. No wonder he had such a dreadful time filming in lowly Budapest in 1990. Poor chap, he hated absolutely everything – the airport staff, grey high-rises, dirty factories, potholes, sludgy Danube, queues, hotel, food, thermal bath, studio. Sorry about that, sir.