... and I had a 22 minute conversation with her
and she didn't know me from a bar of soap.
*Laughs*
Hi, I'm Richard E. Grant, and these are my Film Firsts with BAFTA.
First time I ever saw was the Disney Peter Pan
when I was four years old, and I was absolutely terrified
and spent most of the time under my seat rather than on top of it.
I have seen Peter Pan many times all through my daughter's childhood,
so she wasn't half as terrified of it as I was!
Seeing the Disney cartoon version of it when I was four.
I wanted to fly and when I saw Mary Poppins when I was seven,
I then jumped off our garage with an umbrella and broke my arm.
So this desire to fly I blame on the movies.
First one that I saw that I wasn't allowed to see was A Clockwork Orange.
It had a triple X rating, and I saw it when I was 16
and felt that it was, you know, it had broken all the laws and all the rules.
The first film that I saw that I thought that is speaking directly to me was seeing
Barbra Streisand singing ‘I'm the Greatest Star’ in Funny Girl
in 1969, when I was 12 years old.
I am a lifelong 53 years and counting
Streisand fanatic.
The first time I met Barbra Streisand
was at a party while I was doing Robert Altman's film,
The Player, in 1991, and I had a 22 minute conversation with her
and she didn't know me from a bar of soap.
And then I subsequently met her when I got an Oscar nomination
four years ago and then had a two hour 1 to 1 conversation with her.
She knew exactly who I was.
So my dreams came true.
The first film quote that I remember
Barbra Streisand, first time I ever seen on screen when she
she looks at herself in the mirror and says, “hello, gorgeous”
in an ironic way, I thought it was absolutely classic.
And that's how she accepted her first Oscar
by saying, “hello gorgeous” to the award.
The first film role that I auditioned for
was for the role in Withnail and I in 1986.
And mercifully, Daniel Day-Lewis had turned the film down,
so they were scraping the barrel,
looking around for two months to try and find somebody else.
So I finally fitted the bill.
When I read the script, I thought... I'd been out of work for nine months.
So to play an out of work embittered actor,
it was like reading something that I'd been experiencing.
So it felt like the most perfect fit imaginable at that time.
Have I gone on holiday by mistake?
Yes, Last week I did!
My first school play
was playing the Cat in a panto of Cinderella when I was nine.
Felix the cat!
Belonging to the Evil Stepsisters in the panto version of Cinderella.
I secretly always wanted to be an actor since I was seven years old.
But the idea that I could actually do this as a profession
only came to fruition when I was in an amateur production of
Camelot in Swaziland in 1975, and I thought,
“Well, I'm going to pursue this and try and go to drama school”.
The film that I've watched more than any other is Nashville,
directed by Robert Altman, and I've seen it 27 times
and I saw it those 27 times before video or DVD had come out.
So it meant physically going to the cinema to see it.
I worked with Robert Altman three times on The Player,
Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park.
So the notion that I would ever
as a teenage wannabe actor,
that I would as an adult get to work with him
three times was beyond anything that I could have dared imagine.
I will never forget the first day on Spice World, the movie,
because we were filming somewhere in Guildford
and each of the Spice Girls had huge Winnebagos.
I'd never been given one as big as that in my life.
You could fit two houses into it, and they thrilled the producers
inadvertently by saying that they didn't want to be
isolated in one each, that they all wanted to be together.
So it immediately meant that four Winnebagos were got rid of,
which was an enormous budget saving instantly.
But it was, you know, symptomatic of how how much camaraderie
and how much they wanted to be in each other's company at all times.
The TV series of Loki, the original drawings from the Sixties
comics, had a muscle suit and classic V shape and big belt,
and they gave me
sort of it was this Lycra Kermit type outfit that had no muscles at all.
And I had
I had a great argument of them saying, you know, I should have the muscles.
I've longed to have muscles all my life
and wanted to step into a muscle suit, but they refused.
So they finally
acquiesced and allowed me to have a cape
to cover up the fact that I didn't have any muscles
so I could have some slight shoulder expansion on it.
I think that because I had such a spectacular death
playing classic Loki, there's no chance that they're going to bring me back
and they haven't called yet.
I have known Peter Capaldi for more than three decades
and we were both doing plays in the West End.
And he said, you know, could we spend five days going to Shepperton Studios
during the day and do this short film that I've written called
Franz Kafka, It's A Wonderful Life, which is, you know, it's a great title already, and then won
Best Short Film Oscar in 1994.
So all power to Peter's talent.
And it won a BAFTA as well!
Being asked to host the BAFTAs this year,
I thought that they had
they must have got something wrong or that they had called the wrong person.
But no, I was absolutely thrilled to be asked
because it's a great privilege.
You know, I'm a movie fanatic and buff all my life.
So the idea that,
you know, somebody who grew up in the smallest country
in the southern hemisphere could end up at the Royal Festival Hall
hosting this, is something that I never, ever
thought would happen to me.