{"id":258490,"date":"2025-11-12T11:34:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T11:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/258490\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T11:34:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T11:34:10","slug":"i-got-to-know-the-beatles-through-withnail-and-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/258490\/","title":{"rendered":"I got to know The Beatles through Withnail and I"},"content":{"rendered":"

First book I loved<\/p>\n

Reading was huge because growing up in Swaziland [now Eswatini], there was the BBC World Service on the radio, no television and one cinema. Reading was my way out into the world. Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was the first book I loved. I\u2019ve read it every year since. I\u2019m 68 and a half, so that means I\u2019ve been reading it for 61 years. It\u2019s the best unofficial guide to the English class system, and at once surreal, hilarious, personal and completely bonkers. I\u2019ve always been a bookworm and read four books a week.<\/p>\n

First concert I went to <\/p>\n

The only concert that ever happened in Swaziland during the entire time I lived there was when Percy Sledge came to a stadium where the Independence celebrations had been held. It was in 1968, when I was 13. He wore a pink jumpsuit with crisscross laces across his chest and down to his crotch. I queued up at the Holiday Inn, where he was staying, to get his autograph. When I got married in 1986 to Joan Washington [who died in 2021], the first song that we danced to was Sledge\u2019s When a Man Loves a Woman. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Richard E Grant: \u2018Visiting Provence became too painful after Joan died\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

First moment you realised you wanted to be an actor<\/p>\n

I had not been noticed for anything in particular at school, and then, when I was 12, I had a role in a play, and the reaction was so different. It felt like I\u2019d been seen for the first time. When I stupidly voiced that I wanted to become a professional actor when I grew up, it was so derided and scorned that it felt like it had to become a secret thing I followed. My father said I was so talkative, hyperactive and argumentative that I should be a barrister. I said I\u2019m not going to do that, and he said you\u2019re going to spend your life wearing make-up, in tights and narrowly avoiding a buggery. All of which has come true. <\/p>\n

First album I bought <\/p>\n

Sgt Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when I was ten. I\u2019ve listened to it endlessly since. The first film I appeared in, Withnail and I, was produced by George Harrison. Ringo came on set one day, and I\u2019ve since got to know Paul McCartney. I never met John Lennon, but meeting those three was the stuff of dreams for me. <\/p>\n

First actor I admired\"Donald<\/p>\n

Donald Sutherland in Kelly\u2019s Heroes<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

Donald Sutherland, after watching him in Kelly\u2019s Heroes and The Dirty Dozen. He was over six feet tall, very gangly, skinny and with a long tombstone face, and he grew up in a tiny town in Canada. He was my role model for becoming a professional actor. I thought that if he could do it looking like that, then I could, as I\u2019d always been called \u201crib cage\u201d because I was so skinny. You could count the ribs on my chest. <\/p>\n

First film I saw at the cinema <\/p>\n

Peter Pan when I was five. I spent most of the time underneath the seat because I was so petrified of Captain Hook and the crocodile. I showed it to my daughter, and she was terrified too. It\u2019s good to be terrified as a child; it prepares you for the delights of adulthood. <\/p>\n

First time I cried at the cinema<\/p>\n

I cry at everything. When I saw ET in 1983, I was not able to leave the cinema because I was so bereft. I was completely wiped out by it. I saw it again at an anniversary screening a few years ago and it did exactly the same thing. There\u2019s nothing like a good blub in the dark.<\/p>\n

First pop-inspired fashion trend I adopted <\/p>\n

I was a Bowie fanatic growing up. When the Pin Ups album came out with Twiggy on the cover I was 16. I had that mullet haircut that he had. For a whole year at school I was called Bowie. I was thrilled by that.<\/p>\n

First famous person I remember meeting\"Barbra<\/p>\n

Richard E Grant met his idol Barbra Streisand at the Oscars in 2019<\/p>\n

KEVIN WINTER\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Percy Sledge was the first, but the person I met who I\u2019d idolised my whole life was Barbra Streisand. I met her at the Oscars in 2019 and it was everything I had dreamt that it could be. I shamelessly took selfies with her without even asking for permission. A year later I had a two-hour conversation with her at Donna Karan\u2019s house. At the end I told Streisand I had a confession to make: \u201cI\u2019ve commissioned a two-foot-tall sculpture of your face for my garden.\u201d She said I was crazy. She hasn\u2019t seen it, but I\u2019ve sent her photos.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/p>\n

Grant with his Barbra Streisand statue<\/p>\n

RICHARD E GRANT\/INSTAGRAM<\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n

First time I felt overwhelmed by fame <\/p>\n

In the run-up to that Oscars I went with my wife up to the coast of Malibu, and we stopped outside Streisand\u2019s gates, and I posted a photo of myself along with a letter I wrote to her when she was 15. She replied on Twitter, thanking me for the beautiful letter, and I couldn\u2019t believe it. It went viral. When she then came out to present Spike Lee\u2019s award at the Oscars, I stood up like a human erection. Because the thing had gone viral, the camera recorded my reaction. That was a moment when I thought I was famous, if only for being the first guy standing up for Streisand. <\/p>\n

First moment you realised you had made it<\/p>\n

When I got Oscar-nominated for Can You Ever Forgive Me? You\u2019re voted for by your peers, and I felt that people knew who I am in a way that I\u2019d never taken on board before. When I met people who had been legends in their careers and they knew who I was, that absolutely floored me.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg is in cinemas from Nov 14<\/p>\n

What are your formative cultural experiences? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First book I loved Reading was huge because growing up in Swaziland [now Eswatini], there was the BBC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-258490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}