‘Go on, get this over and done with’: Richard E Grant says his father tried to shoot him aged 15

Actor recalled his father threatening ‘to blow my brains out’. Richard E Grant has detailed a harrowing account of when his father tried to shoot him aged 15. In a new interview, the 67-year-old star of Withnail & I recalled the breakdown of his parent's marriage when he was a child, which saw his father granted custody due to Grant’s complicated relationship with his mother, Leonne Esterhuysen.

However, after the divorce, Grant’s father, Henrik Esterhuysen, developed an alcohol addiction where he would drink a bottle of whiskey each night and become “a completely different person”. “He tried to shoot me when I was 15 when I emptied all his Scotch supply down the sink,” Grant recalled. “As 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,’ I said ‘go on, do it, just get this over and done with’”.

Grant said his father pulled the trigger but “because he was drunk it wavered so it went straight past and I fell to the ground and ran away”. Despite the difficulty of living with his father, Grant said that he still would have chosen to live with his father over his mother, who he has said was a “narcissist”.

“Even though he became an alcoholic after my mother left, the person who I knew and loved by day outweighed the monster that he turned into when he downed a bottle of Johnnie Walker.”. Reflecting on his parent’s marriage, Grant remembered falling asleep in the back seat of a car aged 10 only to wake up and see his mother and father’s best friend “having it off” in the front seat.

He recalled: “My mother and my father’s best friend were in the front seat of the car and stopped on the way back from a cricket match. And I was asleep on the back seat and I woke up and the lights weren’t on and I knew I wasn’t home. But there was a rhythmic movement in the car that wasn’t the car engine. I gingerly looked over the front seat and my mum and my dad’s best friend were having it off in the front seat.”.

“I knew that I was seeing something that I shouldn’t – I didn’t really understand what they were doing,” he said. “I just kept completely quiet and pretended to be asleep.”. Asked about how that experience affected him, Grant replied: “You feel guilty, because I thought, you feel that you're complicit in it. That you know something that nobody else should know. I obviously couldn’t tell my dad, couldn’t tell my mother. So, I tried God, got no reply. So, I started keeping a diary, because if I wrote it down, then it did happen.”.

When Grant’s mother died in 2023 aged 93, he reflected on his “incredibly complicated relationship” with her. The pair had been estranged for many years followed by a reconciliation when Grant was an adult. He told McCall that when he saw his mother for the first time after years of no contact, he finally told her about what he had witnessed in the car in 1967, and she asked for his forgiveness.

“That was extraordinary because in that moment of course that’s what you long for as a child, from the person who has not taken responsibility for what they’ve done.”. “Of course, she didn’t know that I had seen this, so it completely shifted everything. Didn't change the fact that she was a narcissist because I think you’re born like that, but it changed everything and we started having an ongoing conversation.”.

Grant’s father died of lung cancer in 1981, aged 51. If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call Childline free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331.