How Richard E Grant went from Hollywood traitor to Baftas host
At tonight’s eagerly anticipated Bafta ceremony – the 76th – there will be many things to watch out for. Will either Tár or All Quiet on the Western Front sweep the awards? Which actor is going to turn up in the most outrageous outfit? Will anyone make a suitably provocative and headline-grabbing speech?
Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of the biggest event in the British film calendar is this year’s choice of host, none other than the 65-year-old veteran actor Richard E Grant. He follows Rebel Wilson’s poorly received stint last year, and has presumably been hired as a safe, professional option: it seems unlikely that he will gaze over at the starry audience and, in allusion to his best-known role as the drunken actor Withnail, pronounce them all “scrubbers!”
Grant is one of the acting world’s most enthusiastic users of social media, and his Instagram and Twitter feeds over the past few weeks have been a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes glimpses at his preparing for his hosting role. In one interview, he declared that he was going to be “singing like Billy Crystal, dancing like Fred Astaire, [and be] funnier than Bob Hope”, before musing that “you always hope as an actor that you’re going to be asked to do something that you’ve never done before, and I’ve never been asked to do this before.” (He hosted the Laurence Olivier Awards in 2008, but with all due respect, the Baftas are a considerably bigger deal.)
It is typical of the likeably self-deprecating Grant that his first response upon being hired was to stop himself asking the selecting committee: “Who turned it down before me?”
It remains to be seen what his hosting style will be like, but if he combines his Tigger-ish enthusiasm for life with his usual straight-faced ability to deliver witty one-liners, he’ll be a charming and professional MC, rather than a Gervais-esque insult merchant or Wilson-ian harbinger of chaos. And whatever happens tonight, the appointment represents the latest evolution in Grant’s remarkable career; from Withnail, through decades as a jobbing character actor to his new status as much-beloved household name and even that rarest of things, a national treasure.
He has done it without a single breath of scandal attaching itself to him. In a notoriously unpleasant industry, the worst thing that seems to have occurred is that he was given the dismissive nickname “Richard E Can’t” by a notoriously sharp-tongued dowager actress. It has not stuck.
Not, however, that Grant himself is short of withering put-downs and cutting denigrations of actors alongside whom he has worked. His 1996 film diaries, With Nails, offered closely observed pen-portraits of many of his co-stars, some of whom emerged with greater credit than others. The likes of Kevin Spacey, producer Joel Silver and – alas – Bruce Willis would have taken the actor off their Christmas card lists after reading his clear-sighted denunciations of them. Grant himself has suggested that his Hollywood career suffered because of his indiscretions.
Yet in 2005, he indicated that he didn’t especially mind: “What is there now? Famous people running away from explosions. That’s it. Audiences will queue round the block to see an unimaginably highly-paid film star running away from a fantastically expensive explosion. I despair.”
It remains to be seen whether any of the people whom he insulted in With Nails appear at the Bafta ceremony, although he has clearly mended bridges with at least one filmmaker. JJ Abrams, whom he describes in the book as a man who “talks real fast” and is “young, ruthless and rich”, cast Grant in a villainous role in his 2019 Star Wars sequel The Rise of Skywalker.
Grant’s star has been in the ascendant for the past few years, ever since he was Oscar-nominated for his excellent performance in the comedy-drama Can You Ever Forgive Me. He starred, opposite Melissa McCarthy, as Jack Hock, a flamboyant and drunken gay hustler who helps the failed writer Lee Israel commit fraud by selling forged letters: it was a spiritual sequel of sorts to Withnail, even down to the moment when Hock cheerily declares “Chin chin!”
Although Grant did not win the Oscar or Bafta that year, losing to Mahershala Ali, he was recognised by countless critics’ groups and organisations: it may have been a tacit admission that, after being entirely ignored for his performance as Withnail in 1987, he was long overdue such awards. And his good-natured campaigning for the awards season, much of which revolved around his excitement at meeting his idol Barbra Streisand, was a welcome breath of uncynical and starry-eyed excitement. It seems entirely consistent with Grant’s persona as the eternal fan, still pinching himself in disbelief that he has managed to appear alongside his idols.
When he stands up on stage at the Baftas, he may well reflect that it has been almost exactly 35 years since Withnail and I was first released. It was all but ignored on release, but Grant’s iconic performance put him on casting directors’ radars and he has never been out of work since. The stories about the film’s production have long since passed into industry legend: for instance, it’s now well-known that the teetotal Grant was compelled by the film’s director Bruce Robinson to get stratospherically drunk on one occasion, so he could convincingly play the alcoholic Withnail.
But while many actors wish to move on from their best-known role and thereby avoid typecasting or repetition, Grant is still touchingly proud of his breakthrough part. As told The Irish Times in 2019: “I don’t understand somebody not wanting to discuss the role that gave them their screen identity, or that became the talismanic role of their career. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t thank God for Withnail and I. The irony will never be lost on me that playing an out-of-work actor has helped me get every job I've had since."
He may have had a lifetime since of being asked to quote the film’s most famous lines to passers-by – “Monty, you terrible c---!” or “We want the finest wines available to humanity and we want them here, and we want them now” – but his humility and gratitude for his fortune are a rarity in an industry where both are seldom present.
Grant’s offscreen life has not always been easy, but he has dealt with its ups and downs with remarkable courage and candour. He and his wife, the dialogue coach Joan Washington, had a stillborn daughter shortly before he played Withnail, and Washington – who Grant has consistently described in the most touchingly uxorious of fashions – herself died of lung cancer in September 2021. His diary about their last year of their life together, A Pocketful of Happiness, was published last autumn and deservedly became a bestseller; its title came from an injunction that Washington gave him, to try to find such a thing every single day.
And through his remarkably unaffected Instagram posts, Grant seems to have found contentment in his late middle age, even without his soulmate. Recently, he laughingly declared that “I’ve spent the whole of today doing absolutely nothing at all of any consequence, day-dreaming”, adding: “I remember when I was young, my father said to me ‘You’re never going to get anywhere in life if you day-dream it away, my boy.’ If he could only see how it has all turned out.”
When Grant comes on our screens tonight, his appearance – and deserved success – is a true vindication of the old adage that living well is the best revenge.
The Baftas air tonight from 7pm on BBC One
