With a career spanning nearly four decades – and a major acting revival in recent years – Richard E Grant knows a thing or two about working in the entertainment industry. But the Withnail and I star has now spoken out for people lower down the production chain on set, as he’s called out a male A-list actor for his ‘appalling’ behaviour on set towards his daughter with late wife Joan Washington, who died in 2021.
Today, Richard's daughter Olivia Grant might work as a casting director, but she started out at the bottom of the TV food chain. Olivia spent two years working as a runner (an early career role assisting the production) on TV and film shoots, Richard shared in a recent interview where he called the role the ‘most underrated job on a film set’. ‘[They] are paid the least amount of money, they’re the youngest, they get there at five in the morning and they’re the last to leave. And if anything goes wrong, they get sh*t on from a dizzy height,’ he told Sky News.
Richard, 67, then revealed that Olivia, now 35, had been treated very badly by an actor well known in the UK during her time working. Visibly angry, he recalled, ‘My daughter was a runner for two years and was appallingly treated by some very well-known household names in England, who changed their tune when they found out who her father was, which made it worse. It made me damn those people even more.’ Asked if he’d ever confronted these celebrities in question, Richard replied, ‘I’ve met one person, yeah, and I’d never speak to him again.’
So, who which celebrity was it who treated Richard E Grant's daughter 'appallingly'?
While Richard mentions that his daughter was treated badly by a number of celebrities this side of the pond, he alludes to one in particular who he met and ‘never spoke to again’. According to her IMDB, Olivia worked as a runner on three films (although she could have worked on more): 2014’s The Riot Club and The Theory of Everything, and 2016’s Florence Foster Jenkins. Could one of those film’s stars be the actor in question? Or was it a totally different project? I guess we’ll never know…