Born in Swaziland in 1957, actor Richard E Grant studied at the University of Cape Town before moving to Britain in 1982. He made his film debut in Withnail and I (1987) and has since appeared in numerous films including The Player (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gosford Park (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011). Last week he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance alongside Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, in cinemas from 1 February.
1. Theatre
I saw this twice in London and once on Broadway: it’s an incredibly emotional and visceral theatre experience. Laura Donnelly plays the leading character and it’s the story of her family and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. She and Paddy Considine were extraordinary. Jez Butterworth writes like nobody else and it has an enormous ensemble cast, including animals. A young actor, Tom Glynn-Carney, was electrifying in a dance that he has with Donnelly halfway through. That scene was one of the highlights of the play: it was funny, dynamic and sexually charged.
2. Film
Roma (dir Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
Cuarón’s black-and-white homage to his adolescence in Mexico is one of the most beautifully filmed things I’ve seen since Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It managed to be both intimate and epic. It’s wonderfully acted and deals with the most important things in life: family, birth, death, revolution, violence, love. The main characters observe a political riot from the first floor of a furniture shop: it’s going on in the street below and you know it’s not CGI’d or augmented in any way. I understand why it’s won everything.
3. TV
Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s central performances are riveting: they manage to have the blackest humour and combine violence with enormous humanity. I had no idea Sandra Oh could be as funny as she is in this; I’d only seen her in Sideways. She surprised me. You feel that her character does finally meet her nemesis, this shape-shifting psychopath played so ingeniously by Comer. As a viewer, I felt like I longed to meet Comer’s character, even though she was almost inevitably going to kill you.
4. Book
Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Vol 2, 1960-1969
What I loved about these is that they’re an insight into the day-to-day experience of being the writer Isherwood was during the 60s cultural revolution. Rather than it being told from a rose-tinted old age, you’ve got the immediacy that only a diary can afford. It reads like a who’s who of everybody I’ve read or admired: he has stories about Sally Bowles, and of Tony Richardson, who I knew in old age. Reading about him in his heyday fleshed out my understanding of him – how funny and scabrous he was and why and how he was the way he was.
5. Dance
I went to see this on its 25th anniversary and it was as groundbreaking and revolutionary as when I first saw it. I thought it was astonishing then and wondered whether it could still have the same impact now – and it did. It’s done with an all-male company of cygnets, as broadly populist as if it was a Broadway musical. It deals with the violence of love, and sexuality and obsession in a way that the traditional interpretation of it doesn’t have in the same way. It deservedly got a standing ovation from the audience I saw it with.
6. Music
He was such a seminal influence on my generation. For a kid living in Swaziland wanting to be an actor, when Ziggy Stardust burst on to the scene in the early 70s – somebody who shape-shifted in the way that he did – it was revelatory. A whole bunch of us copied his haircut from the Pin Ups album. Going to the V&A exhibition, David Bowie Is, felt like going to the cathedral of Bowie: to be in that exhibition with people who felt the same way was as near to a religious pilgrimage as anything I have felt and I am saying that as somebody who doesn’t believe in anything.
