With Nails

'You'll laugh, you'll cry, especially if you're in the book like I am' - Steve Martin 'An exceptionally vivid and penetrating insight into Hollywood film-making' ObserverThe star-studded, hilarious memoir from Richard E. Grant revealing life behind the camera. When, in the summer of 1986, Richard E. Grant was cast as the lead in Withnail and I, his whole world shifted and he was set firmly on the path to international stardom. With Nails is his outrageous, irreverent and brutally funny account of that time and the years afterwards, of his self-doubt and anxiety on the route to Hollywood, and of all the extraordinary, mad, brilliant people in the film business. From drinking himself incoherent so he could film Withnail and I to a night spent in Paris's red light district with a world-famous couple, to working with Hollywood's biggest actors and directors, Richard E. Grant - always eloquent, always honest - has documented, in his own inimitable style, what it is to become a film star. A rare classic, there is no book quite like it. Now part of the Picador Collection.

Richard E Grant was born and brought up in Mbabane, Swaziland. He came to London in 1982, where he waitered, repped, toured and fringed until getting a role in a television satire about advertising, Honest, Decent and True. This led to his being cast in the seminal movie Withnail And I (1986). He is the author of a book of film diaries With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant (1996) and the novel By Design: A Hollywood Tale (1998). He has written occasional pieces for the Sunday Times, Observer, Vanity Fair and Premiere Magazine. Richard E Grant lives with his family in London.