Richard E. Grant facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Richard E. Grant
Grant in 2018
Born	Richard Grant Esterhuysen (1957-05-05) 5 May 1957 (age 65) Mbabane, Swaziland
Nationality	Swazi, British
Other names	Richard Grant
Education	University of Cape Town
Occupation	Actor, presenter
Years active	1980–present
Spouse(s)	Joan Washington ​ ​ (m. 1986; died 2021)​
Children	1

Richard E. Grant (born Richard Grant Esterhuysen; 5 May 1957) is a Swazi-English actor and presenter. He made his film debut as Withnail in the comedy Withnail and I (1987). Grant received critical acclaim for his role as Jack Hock in Marielle Heller's drama film Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), winning various awards including the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. He also received Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

Grant is known for portraying supporting roles in the feature films How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), L.A. Story (1990), Hudson Hawk (1991), The Player (1992), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Spice World (1997), Gosford Park (2001), Corpse Bride (2005), The Iron Lady (2011), Logan (2017), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Everybody's Talking About Jamie (2021), and Persuasion (2022).

He's also known for his roles in television including Rev. (2011), Doctor Who (2012-2013), Downton Abbey (2014), Girls (2014), Game of Thrones (2016), and Loki (2021).

Early life

Grant was born as Richard Grant Esterhuysen on 5 May 1957 in Mbabane, Protectorate of Swaziland (now Eswatini). He is the son of Leonne and Henrik Esterhuysen; Henrik was head of education for the British government administration in the British protectorate of Swaziland. He has English, Dutch/Afrikaner, and German ancestry. He has a younger brother, Stuart, an accountant in Johannesburg, from whom he is estranged; Grant has stated that they "never had any relationship".

As a boy, Grant went to primary school at St Mark's, a local government school in Mbabane that only recently had become racially integrated. When Grant was 10, he witnessed his mother commit adultery with his father's best friend, which subsequently led to his parents' divorce. This event inspired Grant to keep a daily diary, which he has continued to do ever since.

Grant attended secondary school at Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa, an independent school near Mbabane. In May 1976 he arrived at the University of Cape Town to study English and drama. He adopted his stage name when he moved to Britain (in 1982) as an adult and registered with Equity.

Career

Grant was a member of the Space Theatre Company in Cape Town before moving to London in 1982. He later stated, "I grew up in Swaziland when it was mired in a 1960s sensibility. The kind of English spoken where I grew up was a period English sound and when I came to England people said, 'how strange'. Charles Sturridge, who directed Brideshead Revisited for TV, said, 'you speak English like someone from the 1950s'."

Grant at the 2007 BAFTA Awards

Grant's first film role was the perpetually inebriated title character in the cult classic Withnail and I (1987). Following this, he started appearing in Hollywood films, in a range of projects from blockbuster studio movies to small independent projects. Since then, Grant has had supporting roles in the films Henry & June, L.A. Story, The Player, The Age of Innocence, The Portrait of a Lady, Spice World, Gosford Park, Bright Young Things, and Penelope.

While filming L.A. Story with Steve Martin, the pair communicated by fax. Martin wrote: "I kept these faxes, which grew to a stack more than 2 inches thick, because they entertained me, and because I thought they were valuable aesthetic chunks from a screeching mind, a stream-of-consciousness faucet spewing sentences – sometimes a mile long – none of it rewritten, and bearing just the right amount of acid and alkaline."

In 1995, Grant starred as the titular character in Peter Capaldi's short film Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life. The film won the 1995 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. In 1996, he portrayed Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night. He released a single and accompanying video "To Be Or Not To Be" with Orpheus in 1997.

Grant has twice portrayed the Doctor from Doctor Who, both outside the main continuity. In the comedy sketch Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, he portrayed a version of the Tenth Doctor, referred to as the Quite Handsome Doctor. He also voiced a version of the Ninth Doctor for the BBC original animated webcast Scream of the Shalka. The latter had intended to be the official Ninth Doctor prior to the revival of the TV series. He made his first official Doctor Who appearance in the 2012 Christmas special, titled "The Snowmen", in which he plays the villain, Walter Simeon. During the episode Simeon is erased from his body and it is taken over by the Great Intelligence, voiced in that episode by Ian McKellen until the takeover. Grant reprised the role in "The Bells of Saint John" and in the Series 7 finale, "The Name of the Doctor".

Grant as The Voice for 2+2+2 at Heavy Entertainment, London.

Grant appeared as "The Voice" in 2+2+2 at American Nights at The King's Head Theatre, from 3 to 29 July 2007, and in 2008 co-starred in the London-based comedy Filth and Wisdom. Grant presented the 2008 Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2008, he made his musical theatre debut with Opera Australia, playing the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, a role he reprised in 2017 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In 2009, Grant played Alain Reille in Yasmina Reza's one-act play God of Carnage at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and subsequently at Cheltenham, Canterbury, Richmond, Brighton, and Milton Keynes.

In 2010 he starred in short film The Man Who Married Himself, which won Best Comedy at LA International Shorts Festival and Rhode Island Film Festival. Later that year, he made an appearance in a music video, when short-lived Bristol band The Chemists hired him to appear in their video for "This City"; the band split the same year. This appearance followed Grant's involvement with the band the previous year, in which he spoke the lyrics to "This City" to background music as part of the intro and outro tracks on their only album, Theories of Dr Lovelock.

Grant at the premiere of Can You Ever Forgive Me? in 2018

In March 2013 Grant starred as intelligence analyst Brian Jones in David Morley's radio drama The Iraq Dossier with Peter Firth, Anton Lesser, David Caves, and Lindsay Duncan. It recounted the story of how British Ministry of Defence Intelligence expert Jones had tried to warn that his government's September Dossier on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction was inaccurate. In 2014, Grant was cast on the HBO series Girls after series creator Lena Dunham saw him in Spice World.

On 9 May 2015 Grant gave a reading at VE Day 70: A Party to Remember in Horse Guards Parade, London. In 2016 he joined the HBO series Game of Thrones in Season 6 as Izembaro.

In July 2018, Lucasfilm announced that Grant would appear in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. That same year, Grant's critically lauded performance as Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) earned him Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. The part also won Grant a New York Film Critics Circle Award and several other critics awards.

In March 2020, Grant joined the cast of the Disney+ / Marvel Cinematic Universe series Loki as Classic Loki, an older variant of Loki. Grant portrays Sir Walter Elliot in Carrie Cracknell's 2022 adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion. The film was released July 15, 2022 on Netflix.

Wah-Wah

Grant wrote and directed the 2005 film Wah-Wah, loosely based on his own childhood experiences. A screenwriter recommended he write a screenplay after reading Grant's memoirs of his Withnail and I experience. The film took him over seven years to complete and starred Nicholas Hoult in the lead role, with Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Julie Walters, and Emily Watson. Grant kept a diary of the experience, later published as a book (The Wah-Wah Diaries). The book received positive reviews from critics, many of whom were impressed by the honesty of the tale, especially in regard to his difficult relationship with the "inexperienced" producer Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

Grant stated in subsequent interviews that she was a "control freak out of control", and he would "never see her again as long as [he] live[s]." In a BBC interview, he again mentioned his "disastrous" relationship with Mention-Schaar. He related that he had received only five emails from her in the last two months of pre-production, and that she rarely turned up on the set at all. She failed to obtain clearance firstly for song rights and secondly to film in Swaziland. For the last infraction, Grant was eventually forced to meet with the King of Eswatini to seek clemency. During an interview with an Australian chat show, he mentioned that Wah-Wah was not released in France, and as a result, his producer did not make money out of it.

Personal life

Grant in 2014

Grant married voice coach Joan Washington in 1986 and had one daughter with her, Olivia, and a stepson, Tom. Washington died on 2 September 2021, after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

Grant is a teetotaller.

Grant is a fan of Barbra Streisand and has done a tour of Streisand's New York, visiting her early home, her high school, and the Village Vanguard, among other places.

Grant is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). He used to wear a watch on each wrist, one given to him by his dying father, permanently set on Swaziland time.

In October 2008, Grant told The Times that he is an atheist. He is an avid supporter of Premier League football club West Ham United. In April 2014, Grant launched his new unisex perfume, JACK, exclusively at Liberty of Regent Street, London. Grant runs the perfume business in collaboration with his daughter.

In September 2022, Grant released a memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, mostly written in the last year of his wife's life. He was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in November 2022; his choice of book was Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, his luxury item a piano, and his chosen record 'When I Fall In Love' by Nat King Cole.

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1987	Withnail and I	Withnail
	Hidden City	Brewster
1989	How to Get Ahead in Advertising	Denis Dimbleby Bagley
	Warlock	Giles Redferne
1990	Mountains of the Moon	Larry Oliphant
	Killing Dad	Ali Berg
	Henry & June	Hugo Guiler
1991	L.A. Story	Roland Mackey
1991	Hudson Hawk	Darwin Mayflower
1992	The Player	Tom Oakley
	Bram Stoker's Dracula	Dr. Jack Seward
1993	The Age of Innocence	Larry Lefferts
	Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life	Franz Kafka	Short film
1994	Prêt-à-Porter	Cort Romney
1995	Jack and Sarah	Jack
1996	The Cold Light of Day	Victor Marek
	The Portrait of a Lady	Lord Warburton
	Twelfth Night: Or What You Will	Sir Andrew Aguecheek
1997	The Serpent's Kiss	James Fitzmaurice
	Keep the Aspidistra Flying	Gordon Comstock
	Food of Love	Alex Salmon
	Spice World	Clifford
1998	St. Ives	Major Farquhar Chevening
1999	The Match	Gorgeous Gus
2000	The Miracle Maker	John the Baptist	Voice
	The Little Vampire	Frederick Sackville-Bagg
2001	Hildegarde	Wolf
	Gosford Park	George
2003	Monsieur N.	Hudson Lowe
	Bright Young Things	Father Rothschild
2004	Tooth	Jarvis Jarvis
	The Story of an African Farm	Bonaparte Blenkins
2005	Wah-Wah	N/A	Writer and director
	Corpse Bride	Lord Barkis Bittern	Voice
	Colour Me Kubrick	Jasper
2006	Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties	Preston	Voice
	Penelope	Franklin Wilhern
2007	Always Crashing in the Same Car	James Booth
2008	Filth and Wisdom	Professor Flynn
	The Garden of Eden	Colonel Philip Boyle
2009	Cuckoo	Professor Julius Greengrass
	Love Hurts	Ben Bingham
2010	Jackboots on Whitehall	Campbell Babbitt	Voice
	1st Night	Adam Drummond
	The Nutcracker in 3D	Father
	The Man Who Married Himself	Oliver
2011	The Last Fashion Show	Federico Marinoni
	Foster	Mr Potts
	Horrid Henry: The Movie	Vic Van Wrinkle
	How to Stop Being a Loser	Ian
	The Iron Lady	Michael Heseltine
2012	Zambezia	Cecil	Voice
	Kath & Kimderella	Alain
2013	About Time	Lawyer in Play	Uncredited cameo
	Khumba	Bradley	Voice
	Dom Hemingway	Dickie Black
2014	Queen and Country	Major Cross
2016	Jackie	William Walton
	Their Finest	Roger Swain
2017	Logan	Zander Rice
	The Hitman's Bodyguard	Mr. Seifert
2018	Can You Ever Forgive Me?	Jack Hock
	The Nutcracker and the Four Realms	Shiver
2019	Palm Beach	Billy
	Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker	Allegiant General Enric Pryde
2020	Robin Robin	Magpie	Voice; Short film
2021	Earwig and the Witch	The Mandrake	English dub
	The Spine of Night	The Guardian	Voice
	Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard	Mr. Seifert
	Everybody's Talking About Jamie	Hugo Battersby/Loco Chanelle
2022	Persuasion	Sir Walter Elliot
0TBA	Wildwood		Filming
0TBA	Saltburn

Television

Video games

Other

Awards and nominations