Glorious Richard E Grant has my vote at the Oscars
Richard E Grant is in Hollywood for the Academy Awards, and I hope he wins the best supporting actor prize for his wonderful portrayal of the kindly alcoholic Jack Hock in
Can You Ever Forgive Me? It’s a slow, subtle film about failure – literary, not dramatic – and Grant, whose film debut was his extraordinary Withnail in the marvellous Withnail & I, has since been treated as a semifailure because that role was so luminous.
This is nonsense and unfair. Withnail is one of the greatest comic performances ever put on screen. Many world-famous actors have never done work as close to perfect.
Grant’s not a leading man – he’s too ambivalent for that. But he’s always an arresting presence on the margins, where much of Hollywood’s best work is done. Watch him as a sell-out writer in Robert Altman’s The Player, a film about Hollywood’s acidity.
He writes fabulous memoirs – like Rupert Everett, another curiosity in Hollywood’s addled eyes – and Wah-wah, a film based on his childhood in Swaziland, which he directed, has never left me. His father was apparently a drunk, so that is how he knew Withnail.
I hope that the silly but often sentimental Academy choose to reward his jocular, damp-eyed Jack Hock – a grifter, but a good friend. It’s surely wrong to see Jack as Withnail grown old, for I doubt Withnail ever did grow old. But Grant is not jaded – he was never famous enough for that – and his delight at his nomination is glorious to see.