Withnail And I: How a Beatle-funded comedy about alcoholic actors became a cult classic

By Nick Duerden

Two men stride through a quaint Cumbrian village on an overcast Saturday afternoon, long overcoats flapping behind them. Newly and unusually flush with cash, the pair have been gifted money from a relative. Said relative has ordered them to get better equipped for a weekend in the countryside by buying Wellington boots. The men, however, have other ideas. Specifically: pub. Here, they drink themselves drunk until closing time, and then decide belatedly to line their stomachs in a tea room next door.

Only… the quaint village is unused to bohemian types in advanced states of disrepair, and does not take kindly to their presence. They are asked to leave — but the pair prove resistant. They want cake, the taller one bellows, and — in a line that would go on to become immortal in the canon of British cinema — “the finest wines known to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now”.

This was Withnail and I  a small film largely overlooked upon its 1987 cinematic release but now widely considered among the most-loved British motion pictures of all time, and surely the funniest. It would prove an impressive calling card for its two leading men, Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, a film both of them could trade off forever. It wasn’t an instant, era-defining hit, but instead, took time to find its audience, becoming a cult hit before ultimately being bestowed with classic status.

“When it first came out, there was nothing else quite like it, and the distributors really didn’t know what to do with it,” says Murray Close, the film’s on-set photographer whose prints from it still sell regularly to collectors around the world. Close has shot many movies over his illustrious career — The Shining, Jurassic Park, Batman — but, he suggests, “People just want to talk to me about Withnail. It’s always Withnail.”

Richard E Grant and Paul McGann

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Richard E. Grant cheers fans with “isolations quotes” from Withnail and I

The actor, 62, has been uploading clips of himself uttering lines from the cult 1987 film, much to the delight of fans. The British star has named the sketch ‘Withnail and I isolation quotes’.

Richard E Grant has been delighting fans of his most famous role, in cult 1987 film Withnail and I, by quoting famous lines from it on a daily basis to help relieve the boredom of lock-down.

It’s been 33 years since Grant starred as the title character, aspiring actor Withnail, in Bruce Robinson’s hit black comedy, but the love for it remains strong.

Introducing his pick of his favourite lines as the ‘Withnail and I isolation quote for today’, Grant, 62, is seen in the short videos on Twitter uttering lines such as ‘We’re not from London, you know’ and ‘Are you the farmer?’.

Source: Richard E Grant quotes Withnail and I to cheer people up

It’s Withnail and her in Can You Ever Forgive Me? 

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant in Can You Ever Forgive Me?CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Directed by Marielle HellerCertificate 15☆☆☆☆

Melissa McCarthy and Richard e. Grant

LIKE a slimmer version of the great Uncle Monty, Richard E Grant sashays his way into this marvellous film with an unquenchable thirst for substances that make him feel skewwhiff, a vocabulary of gorgeously pronounced swear words (can anyone else give the f-word such depth and richness?), and a tragic backstory that feels so much like Richard Griffiths’ seminal outing in Withnail and I that it feels like Grant is paying homage to his co-star.Throw in a knockout performance by fellow lead Melissa McCarthy, and you could have had this these two characters doing absolutely nothing but sitting in a bar and I’d pay top dollar to watch it.

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‘I’ll show the lot of you!’ Richard E Grant’s Oscar nomination

Richard E Grant has captivated the internet. The actor greeted the news of his nomination for an Academy Award by returning to his first rental when no one had heard of him. There he whooped with childlike delight, and then shared the whole thing in an utterly disarming Instagram post. He also phoned up his co-star and co-nominee Melissa McCarthy, and together they cried. Perhaps now Grant will finally be umbilically linked in the public mind to his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (pictured below), for which he has been nominated as Best Supporting Actor, as well as his career-igniting turn in Withnail and I. Continue reading

May 1986: Withnail demands cake and fine wine – and an enduring cult classic is born

The much-loved Penrith tea room scene from Withnail & I (actually filmed at a chemists’ in Milton Keynes)

Unspecified cake it was, which for this publication is a rarity. “Just bring out the cakes.” “Cake, and fine wine.” The context was all. A couple of wastefully drunk and filthily arrogant unemployed actors bumbling into the Penrith Tea Rooms at closing time. And Richard E Grant’s unimprovably bonkers follow-up, somehow both slurred and royally, commandingly, articulate: “We want the finest wines available to humanity.”

It was 1986 and the filming of Withnail and I. Yet the writer and director Bruce Robinson, for whom this was pretty much autobiographical, was back in 1960s Camden. Railing as ever against an unestablishable establishment: and moving the setting to the Lake District effectively moved the decades. The distaste on the face of the proprietor, the fine character actor Llewellyn Rees, surely echoes the pursed lips of all who had dogged Robinson’s 60s days with twitching curtains and long noses when all he was trying to do was … have some fun.

Robinson is thankfully very much alive, as I found a few years ago. As are of course Grant and Paul McGann, the “I” of the film’s title. Rees died in 1994. But I managed to catch up with photographer Murray Close, who took this still. Did anyone, I ask, have an inkling of what a success, a cult, that film would become, with its timeless celebration of simple friendship and generational differences?

“Not at all. Bruce had to fund the last reel himself. We didn’t have a clue. It was a great script, of course, but everyone was an unknown – though I believe Bill Nighy read for the main part. But slowly, slowly, videos and then DVDs came out, and … yes, in hindsight, it’s a great film, but I just remember it as truly tremendous fun, with a UK crew of a certain age and propensity to laughter.”

Murray’s website has many more extraordinary outtakes. The “Penrith tea-rooms” location was in fact what is now a chemists’ shop in Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes. The last few lines of Robinson’s script, with Grant doing Hamlet by the London Zoo wolves, still enthral. “What a piece of work is a man … [yet] man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither.” [The wolves are unimpressed. Withnail exits into the rain.

Source: May 1986: Withnail demands cake and fine wine – and an enduring cult classic is born