Richard E Grant

Tell me about your mother, Leone.

She is now 91, formidable. Chain smokes, she drives herself, she plays bridge three times a week, she reads five books for a publisher that she does ad hoc work for, so she is a force of nature. And we had a great estrangement for decades. And after I had psychoanalysis when I was 42 after a breakdown, I had this breakthrough with her in that I was guided by this psychoanalyst to try and get her to reveal her narrative of what had happened, to explain why she ended up … in the front seat of the car, that thing that I mentioned earlier. And I got a very, very detailed, lengthy letter written with the voice of a young woman in the colonies, having a child and dealing with a pecking order not allowed to work and all those kind of restrictions. And once I understood that, I then reciprocated by giving her hammer and tongue of what had happened to me at the hands of my subsequently alcoholic father after she had left. So she was as astonished by that as I was by her revelations, convincing me that all secrets in families are toxic. She said three words to me when we finally had a face-to-face after these letters had been exchanged. I went out to visit her. And she leant forward on a table in a restaurant. I had never seen my mother cry before. And she said three magic words, Please forgive me. That instantly removed all these weights and pillars of prejudice and long-standing misunderstanding that we'd had between us. So it was incredible. I now Skype her once a week.

Tell me about your father, Henrik.

Yeah, he was incredibly witty, fast-thinking, dynamic person by day. And the moment that she left him, he hit a Johnny Walker bottle a day. So by nine o'clock at night, it was literally like a switch that he became a completely different character, very morose, very angry and often violent. And then told me on his deathbed at the age of 53 that he had never stopped loving my mother. And I thought he was referring to my stepmother who just walked out of the room. And he said, no, no, your mother. There was this, on the one hand, an incredibly charming... articulate, provocative man by day, and then this absolute monster that would come out at night, which culminated when I was fifteen, when I naively thought that if I emptied all 12 bottles of scotch down the sink, he would somehow stop drinking. And I was on the 11th bottle and felt something very cold on the back of my head, and it was a gun. Ducked, ran into the garden, and then he chased me and flicked on the garden lights, and there were pool lights as well, and found me and then got hold of me and said, You know, I'm going to blow your brains out. And I said, You know, go ahead and do it. Just let's get this over and done with. He missed because he was so drunk, and then I ran away from home for a couple of weeks. But having said that, my memory of him is so much more than remembering that part of him, because I knew that that was something that was entirely brought about by addiction, rather than the man that I absolutely worshipped and loved.

How did you deal with the loss of your daughter Tiffany while making Withnail and I?

The abyss of grief is something that you have to navigate your way through and around and I don't know that you ever get over it and I suppose there's a part of me that doesn't want to get over it because getting over it or people saying, Oh, well time heals everything. I don't agree with that because it's it then implies that you're forgetting about that person or that you're disregarding it whereas these things have such lasting impact on you that I never want to forget.