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 also known for his roles in the feature films Warlock (1989), Henry & June (1990), Hudson Hawk (1991), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), The Serpent's Kiss (1997), The Little Vampire (2000), Gosford Park (2001), Penelope (2006), The Iron Lady (2011), Jackie (2016), The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018), and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He is also known for his roles in television, including Frasier (2004), The Crimson Petal and the White (2011), Dig (2015), Game of Thrones (2016), Hang Ups (2018), A Series of Unfortunate Events (2019), and Suspect (2022).
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 attended St Mark's School, a local government school in Mbabane, which had only recently become racially integrated. When Grant was 10, he witnessed his mother commit adultery in a car 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'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, taking on 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, Bram Stokers Dracula, 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.