Richard E. Grant

Cape Town to a Covent Garden Waiting Job

Grant studied English and drama at the University of Cape Town and co-founded a small company there, the Troupe Theatre Company. In 1982 he moved to London, where he waited tables in Covent Garden while looking for stage work. A role in Tramway Road at the Lyric Hammersmith earned him a nomination as most promising newcomer in 1984. His first screen part came in the television satire Honest, Decent and True, and that role led to the audition that changed his career.

Withnail and I, 1987

Bruce Robinson cast Grant as the unemployed, permanently hungover actor Withnail in Withnail and I, released in 1987. It was his film debut. The Film Society of Lincoln Center calls it a career-making performance. The part carried an irony: one of British film's best-known drunks was played by a man whose body cannot process alcohol.

In 2005 he went back to his own childhood for Wah-Wah, an autobiographical film about a boy growing up in Swaziland, and kept a diary of making it.

The Diaries He Kept

Grant kept a diary on the set of Withnail and I and never stopped. His literary agency lists the books that came out of the habit: With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant (Picador, 1996), the Hollywood novel By Design (1998), and The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film (2006). His later memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, became a Sunday Times bestseller.

The diaries also recorded a hard stretch. At 42 he had a breakdown that lasted about 18 months. He told Rolling Stone that his analyst pointed to a pattern: "Your father was 42 when essentially he lost his career... I was 42 and had a 10-year-old daughter." The period ended with a reconciliation with his estranged mother.

Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Three decades after Withnail, Grant played Jack Hock, the charming and broke friend of the literary forger Lee Israel, opposite Melissa McCarthy in Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). The role won him the New York Film Critics Circle award and nominations for the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild award, and the Independent Spirit award. In January 2019 he was named a nominee for best supporting actor at the 91st Academy Awards, his first Oscar nomination, at the age of 61.

Joan Washington

Grant married Joan Washington in 1986. She came from Aberdeen, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and worked for nearly 40 years as a voice and dialect coach, with credits running from Yentl and The Bounty to The Favourite, where she coached Emma Stone. They had one daughter together, and Washington had a son from an earlier relationship whom Grant raised as his stepson.

Washington died on 2 September 2021, after 35 years of marriage. Grant said he was heartbroken, and The Guardian reported his tribute the next day. No reputable outlet has published an estimate of his wealth, and the figures on celebrity net worth sites cite no inputs, so this article gives none.

Mr Bennet and the Celebrity Traitors Castle

In 2025 the BBC cast Grant as Mr Bennet, opposite Ruth Jones as Mrs Bennet, in The Other Bennet Sister, a ten-part adaptation of Janice Hadlow's novel about Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of Pride and Prejudice.

In autumn 2026 he joined the second series of BBC One's Celebrity Traitors, a cast that also includes Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen, James Acaster, and Joe Lycett. In the first episode, which aired at the start of October, he and Maya Jama were chosen as the first two Traitors. Grant then let slip his role to other contestants, and called it "the biggest mistake I've made in my life." He had promised host Claudia Winkleman he would be "utterly ruthless." Jerry Hall, a fellow contestant, said she had known him for more than 30 years and that "he says and does eccentric things." He survived the episode, and the week's coverage sent readers looking for the rest of his story.

Sources

• Richard E. Grant Barely Survived Childhood. Now He's Thriving As An Actor : NPR
• The Long Version
• Richard E.Grant | RCW Literary Agency
• Withnail & I
• Here Are the 91st Academy Award Nominations
• Richard E. Grant: Best Supporting Actor Nominee Interview
• Richard E Grant says he is heartbroken at death of wife Joan Washington | Richard E Grant | The Guardian
• Ruth Jones, Richard E. Grant, Indira Varma, and Richard Coyle to take on iconic Austen characters in BBC's The Other Bennet Sister
• Celebrity Traitors 2026 confirms star-studded lineup | The Independent
• 'Celebrity Traitors' Star Richard E. Grant Reveals He's a Traitor