Richard E Grant has claimed his father tried to shoot him on more than one occasion
The 64-year-old actor has reflected on his childhood in Swaziland - now known as Estwatini - as his alcoholic dad Henrik "pulled the trigger" after the teenager poured away his booze
22 February 2025
He told Davina McCall on the 'Begin Again' podcast: "He tried to shoot me when I was 15 when I emptied all his Scotch supply down the sink.
"I was half way through [pouring] the eleventh bottle, gun at the back of my head, I ducked, went off, ran to the garden - he finally found me, said 'I'm going to blow your brains out.' "
The 'Can You Ever Forgive Me?' star pleaded with his father to "do it" and "get this over and done with".
He recalled: "He pulled the trigger but because he was drunk it wavered, so it went straight past."
Richard also opened up about a separate incident from his tough childhood when he walked in on his mother Leonne and his dad's best friend in an "intimate situation".
He said: "I knew that I was seeing something that I shouldn't - I didn't really understand what they were doing."
Meanwhile, the actor previously shared his father's terrifying reaction after he snuck out aged 15 to watch 'A Clockwork Orange', which had an 18 rating in the UK.
He told the Radio Times magazine: "It had a triple-X rating, and you couldn't see it until you were 18 years old.
"So I snuck in by telling the woman who was at the box office that she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor."
When he got home, his father was drunk and angry at his son, and placed a gun to Richard's head and pulled the trigger, but missed.
Henrik died from lung cancer aged 52 when Richard was 24, and his mother Joan - with whom he was estranged for a long period after he found her cheating on his dad - died aged 93 in 2023.
He said in a video shared to X at the time: "We had an incredibly complicated relationship, and she'll be somebody that was, for me anyway, emotionally withdrawn, and withheld her approbation or approval of anything, so nothing was quite good enough."
And previously he told BBC Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs' that he remembered his father as more than his shortcomings.
He said: "My memory of him is so much more than remembering that part of him, because I knew that that was something that was entirely brought about by addiction rather than the man that I absolutely worshipped and loved."
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