Name dropper extraordinaire: Richard E Grant’s daft obsession with celebrities

November 11, 2024November 21, 2024freshlyworded Leave a comment

Without a doubt one of the most ludicrous episodes in Richard E. Grant’s entertaining, sometimes very moving but ultimately disappointing memoir “A Pocketful of Happiness” occurs when the author is having lunch with the legendary actress Sally Field at a brasserie in Philadelphia, in 2019.

His phone pings, and whilst at first he is reluctant to answer it – “I can’t, Sally, it’s rude to look at your phone when eating” – he eventually does on the insistence of his dining companion.

After reading the text message, Grant slaps a $100 bill on the table, tells Sally (whom he invited to lunch) that he has to go (“Will call and explain’). Then he sprints to the nearest Amtrak train station a dozen blocks away to catch a train back to New York. A phone call to Trudie Styler (Sting’s wife) and he’s soon in a helicopter on his way to Donna Karan’s estate in the Hamptons for the screening of a new Julianne Moore movie.

And why all this madness (and rudeness): “…because Barbra Streisand is the guest of honour”.

A little while later, he’s unashamedly attached himself to Streisand and her husband, the actor James Brolin, bringing food to the former diva and chatting to her for 90 minutes straight (apart from a brief interruption from Brooke Shields who declares: “This man [Richard E. Grant] is brilliant.”)

This scene in a nutshell encapsulates three of the great themes in Grant’s life and this memoir: his obsession with singer and actress Barbra Streisand (he has a bust of her in his garden), his endless fascination with celebrities (despite becoming one himself) and his incessant and unrepentant name dropping.

Incredibly, the book is not really about anything of these things. It is an ode to his wife.

It’s title, “A pocketful of happiness” refers to the instructions his wife Joan Washington, a celebrated dialects coach, gave him shortly before she passed away from cancer.

“You’re going to be all right,” Joan told her husband, “Try to find a pocketful of happiness in every single day.” (In this mission he appears to have succeeded judging by the relentless posting of his daily exploits on Instagram, in which Grant is always grinning broadly and his blue eyes twinkling madly).

While the book shift back in time to scenes from Grant’s penniless days waiting tables at Covent Garden and even further back to his childhood in Swaziland, the nine months from Joan’s diagnosis with stage 4 cancer in January 2021 to her death in September of that year is the central arch of the memoir.

In this respect, Grant does a wonderful, but sad job documenting the very sharp decline in Joan’s life as their universe shrinks to their London home and holiday cottage in the countryside, then just to their home and finally to Joan’s bedroom as she succumbs to her illness.

“Lie next to Joan as she sleeps. Listening to every breath she takes. Overwhelmed with longing. Longing that she won’t have to suffer. Longing that none of this is actually happening to us. L o n g i n g….” he writes in an entry from June 2021.

The pain he feels at the prospect of losing his lifelong companion and best friend is evoked tenderly across many of his diary entries, as he ferries Joan to her hospital appointments, has Zoom calls with Joan’s doctors, nurses and carers and keeps wishing it was all a terrible nightmare he would just wake up from.

Sunday, 14 February 2021
Valentine’s Day – could it be our final one after thirty-eight years together? Hard to compute. Impossible to imagine. Not being a unit, pair, partnership, union, marriage. None of which we discuss out loud and, on the evidence of her ebullience today, clearly not something she is dwelling on, or even thinking about.

But the name dropping in this book is on another level and suggests Grant lives in a cocoon of celebrity love and adoration from people notorious for their fickleness and fakery.

I’m not the only one whose taken issue with the appearance of a celebrity on every second page. Guardian’s Rachel Cooke felt similarly uncomfortable about it.

“Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say. Is it unfair to call a man with so many well-known friends a name-dropper? Isn’t he only describing his world? This is a question I’m still unable to answer,” Cooke wrote in her review in 2022.

As a reader, one is left with the strong impression that Grant is still completed intoxicated with fame and celebrity, and that he has never quite gotten over the fact that a gangly lad from Swaziland (now called Eswatini) made it onto the big stage.

During the course of the memoir Rupert Everett, Emma Thompson, Gabriel Byrne, Prince (now King) Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall (now Queen Camilla) all drop by for tea or lunch (His majestys brings mangoes). Grant’s diary entries are also peppered with anecdotes about meetings with Owen Wilson, Nigella Lawson, Tom Hiddleston, Martin Short and on and on.

“Meet Owen Wilson, who speaks in his signature wow voice, all convoluted vowels and ‘hehehe’ charm, like someone dope-dropped in from another planet…Instantly bonded.

All of these celebs – without exception – are delightful, warm, funny and charming and they invariably feel the same way about Grant. It’s all a bit much.

By stark contrast, Grant’s late wife found his obsession with famous people insufferable and avoided celebrity events with as much fervour as her husband rushed to them with open arms. This was no doubt one of the disappointing aspects – for Grant – of an otherwise happy marriage. You can almost here Grant groan aloud when Joan decided not to accompany him to award ceremonies after he received Bafta, Oscar, Golden Globe and numerous other nominations for his role as Jack Hock in the 2018 comedy-drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? alongside Melissa McCarthy (who is also given supreme name-dropping treatment in the memoir).

I have been a huge fan of Richard E. Grant since I saw him in Withnail & I at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa in about 1992. I also had the pleasure of seeing him live onstage at Sydney’s Orpheum Picture Palace in about 2006 where he was in conversation with the film critic Margaret Pomeranz after releasing his autobiographical directorial debut: Wah Wah (which I thought was great).

I also enjoyed his first memoir: “With Nails: the Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant” which as the title suggests is a collection of his diary entries written while making Withnail & I, the cult film that gave him his start in showbiz and subsequent films such as LA Story, The Player and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Yes, there is a lot of name dropping too in this book, but these are film diaries after all!

Why go abroad? Reading Alain De Botton’s ‘The Art of Travel’

September 30, 2018October 1, 2018freshlyworded Leave a comment

the-art-of-travel-alain-de-botton “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,” laments the melodramatic Withnail in the cult film ‘Withnail and I’ as his escape from his filthy London squat for the fresh country air of the English Lake District turns out to be anything but idyllic.

Withnail and his of out-of-work actor chum “I” are enduring what so many have experienced for real on their own travels: when the pictures on the holiday brochure (or in one’s imagination) turns out be nothing like the real experience.

This all too familiar feeling of traveller’s gloom is one of the many aspects of that great human urge to “go on holiday” that the British philosopher and best-selling author Alain De Botton explores in his highly entertaining and insightful book The Art of Travel.

“We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, [but] we hear little of why and how we should go,” muses De Botton in the first chapter called “On anticipation”.

De Botton recalls his own disappointing experience of a tropical island holiday to Barbados where he went with his partner one year, to escape the London winter.

Withnail and I: We’ve gone on holiday by mistake

Prior to traveling he imagined only “a beach with a palm tree against the setting sun”, a “bungalow with views through French doors” and an “azure sky”.

What he didn’t imagine was the “large petrol storage facility” near the airport, the long line of people waiting to have their passports stamped, adverts for rum above the luggage carousel and “a confusion of taxi drivers and tour guides outside the terminal building”.

It’s not just that the holiday ‘looks’ nothing like the brochure. Even when the author does find himself in a place which should be restful and calming – the idyllic sandy beach of his imagination – he struggles to relax, his mind is full of worries about “back home” leading De Botton to the depressing realisation that he has taken ‘himself’, with all its anxieties, fears and frustrations, on holiday with him too.

“…the mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.”

This candidness and almost painful honest is one of the great joys of reading De Botton. He is never afraid to draw on his own bitter experiences, failings and annoying habits to illustrate a key point; in this way, he makes himself a very likeable and sincere narrator.

As with the other books of his I have read (The Consolations of Philosophy The Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life) De Botton draws on the wisdom of the great thinkers of the past – philosophers, artists, writers, painters and poets – to provide answers to the questions he has about the paradoxes, ironies and mysteries of the travel experience. (Surely no other writer has managed to make philosophy so interesting and so practical).

These include the American realist painter Edward Hopper whose evocative scenes of lonely travellers waiting in empty motels rooms, gas stations and automats, De Botton relates to the idea of travel as a journey of reflective introspection. The poetry and power of these melancholic scenes De Botton also says explains why we take pleasure and comfort in ugly highway rest stops, where we find kingship with other fellow travellers amid the harsh lighting and plastic furniture.

I particularly enjoyed De Botton’s description of a lacklustre visit to Madrid, where he could barely muster the strength to get out of bed, despite the great Spanish city with its palaces, museums and art galleries beckoning him from below his hotel room. Only the fear of the hotel maid entering his room for a fourth time and exclaiming “Hola, Perdone!” roused him from his depression.

While one’s first reaction is to be annoyed with De Botton for squandering such a great opportunity to see the sights, who on their own travels has not grown lethargic and bored at the prospect of a visit to yet another ancient ruin, art gallery or museum, which our travel guide tells us we should be enthusiastically visiting and gazing at in wonder.

Here De Botton takes his cues from the great German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt whose curiosity for all the things strange and unusual he discovered and catalogued on his expeditions reminded De Botton that what we find pleasurable or interesting on our travels should not be determined by the latest edition of the Lonely Planet or Rough Guide.

Humboldt did not suffer such intimidation…He could unselfconsciously decide what interested him. He could create his own categories of value…

Curious explorer: Alexander von Humboldt

De Botton’s other guides include Vincent Van Gogh, whose vibrant paintings of bright yellow wheatfields and whirling Cypress trees in Arles reveal the hidden beauty and power in seemingly ordinary places and the poetry of William Wordsworth, which celebrated daffodils, sheep and trees – as an explanation for why we yearn to escape the city for the restorative piers of the countryside.

(It’s just a shame my paperback edition of The Art of Travel reproduced all the artworks and photographs in black and white, though its easy enough, albeit a little disruptive to one’s reading, to look up the full colour version on one’s smartphone or tablet.)

There is of course another message that De Botton is so eager to share: that one does not have to jump on a plane and fly 5000 miles to a remote island to undertake an enlightening journey. Just exploring one’s own neighbourhood with a curious eye and alert mind can reveal wonders, as the author does himself with a meditative walk through his London suburb of Hammersmith.

In fact, one does not even have to leave one’s bedroom to “travel” if one subscribes to the wisdom of French writer Xavier de Maistre whose bizarre book Journey Around My Bedroom, published in 1794 De Botton brings back from obscurity.

While De Botton acknowledges there is clearly something rather silly about de Maistre’s suggestion that rather then go travelling we instead admire the elegance of one’s bedroom furniture, he also recognises a more profound message that “the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps more dependent on the mindset with which we travel then on the destination we travel to”.

It’s one worth remembering the next time we reach for the chunky travel guide wedged in our bookshelf, when the urge to go on holiday hits us again.

(Readers of The Art of Travel, might also enjoy an accompanied documentary Alain De Botton made on the topic, which you can watch for free on YouTube:

“Chin, chin Monty”: remembering “Withnail and I” star Richard Griffiths

March 31, 2013April 1, 2013freshlyworded 4 Comments

“My boys” – Richard Griffiths (left) as “Uncle Monty” with “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann) in “Withnail and I”

“Monty you terrible c-nt. what are you doing prowling round in the middle of the f-cking night?”

So says “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) upon discovering his rotund, gay, impeccably posh “Uncle Monty” (Richard Griffiths) is the prowler he and “I” (Paul McGann) are so terrified of as they huddle in a room in their freezing cottage in the English countryside.

For me and I imagine for many of his fans, Richard Griffiths, the English actor who so sadly passed away this weekend will always be remembered as “Uncle Monty” in the cult 1986 comedy “Withnail and I” directed by Bruce Robinson.

For others, he will be remembered as uncle Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter films or as the eccentric, but groping and doomed school teacher in the Alan Bennett play, The History Boys.

Living in London at the time, I was fortunate to score free tickets to see the very first performance of The History Boys in 2004 and Richard Griffiths in the lead role.

He was wonderful, and there certainly was an Uncle Monty-like dimension to his character, that of a gay man who can’t hold back his proclivities – (though Uncle Monty preferred tweed and tailored suits and would never have been seen in Hector’s riding-gear leathers.)

The obituaries have been generous and glowing.

Apart from having a short temper, Griffiths is described as lovable, generous, warm and down to earth and someone , who, with out the assistance of good looks or privilege (he grew up in a coal mining town in North Yorkshire and both his parents were deaf) forged a highly successful career as an English character actor who in the words of Guardian writer Lyn Gardner brought “sheer delicacy”to his roles.

All pay tribute to his greatest comic creation, that of Uncle Monty, and so they should.

Upon learning of his death, I pulled out my copy of “With Nails” the film diaries of his “Withnail and I” co-star Richard E. Grant and read what he wrote upon meeting Richard Griffiths for the first time.

Not surprisingly, Griffiths sounds a lot like Uncle Monty; perhaps he was getting into character:

Grant writes:

“Richard Griffiths arrives in the evening, roasted and in agony from too much sun in Tuscany, which doesn’t stop him enjoying five courses, cigs, vino and tales of Thespia. His larger than life avuncularity comes as a great relief for we have been so wound up rehearsing that it was beginning to feel as if we were the only characters in this lark.”

While it would be unfair to say Griffiths had all the best lines in the movie, he certainly got some of the most memorable ones and fans of the movie will no doubt be able to recite many of them verbatim:

Lines like (while discussing the growing of vegetables):

“I happen to think the cauliflower more beautiful than the rose”

…which then turns into a hilarious phallic joke when Monty professes his love of a certain root vegetable:

“There is you’ll agree a certain je ne ses quoi oh so very special about a firm young carrot.”

My favourite line is probably, this tender-hearted utterance, when explaining why he can never touch uncooked meat:

“As a youth, I used to weep in butcher shops.”

Griffiths played Uncle Monty with sheer brilliance, portraying him as an eccentric, lonesome gay man with Thespian aspirations to “tread the boards” and fond of delivering soliloquys about his boyhood “friend” Wrigglesworth,with whom he would ride off into the countryside and when night fell,”find some old barn and fall asleep with the sweet perfume of hay on our lips” and “the sounds of nature sighing by our side”.

While “Withnail and I” is a comedy, it is very much a melancholic comedy, with Griffiths as the love-sore, randy and lonesome Uncle Monty, who will “never play the Dane (Hamlet)”.

For those who have not seen it, it’s the story about two out of work actors – “Withnail” (Richard E. Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann) living in London at the end of the 1960s who go on holiday “by mistake” courtesy of Uncle Monty’s cottage in the countryside to escape the misery and cold of their Camden Town flat.

The holiday quickly unravels, filled with misadventure, randy bulls, English tea rooms, copious amounts of alcohol, and a procession of bizarre characters (some even more eccentric than Uncle Monty).

Neither “Withnail” nor “I” expect Uncle Monty to pay them a visit and pursue the horror-filled “I” with a buggery-induced belligerence that culminates in those hilarious, lines delivered by Griffiths (and quoted in almost every obituary I have read of him):