"When I got to know Carrie Fisher while I was living in Los Angeles, she said to me, 'You're no longer a tourist, you're now one of the attractions, '" he tells me. "I accept that rationally but emotionally I still feel that I'm on the outside looking in. I think that's very common to anyone who's emigrated.

"I've kept diaries since the age of 11 when I became burdened with the secret of my mother's adultery, " he explains. "It never crossed my mind that anybody would see them because the very nature of a diary is that it is private." Back when these events were taking place he was [RICHARD E GRANT] Esterhuysen, son of Hendrik, an Afrikaner who was head of education in the British-administered colony. His mother, Leonie, was South African but of German descent. As his parents underwent a divorce he describes as "pain-filled", the daily diary became a place for him to find solace and privacy.

"The film was never meant to be a sort of slash-fest character assassination of her, " he says. "It was to try and understand, as far as I was able then, why she did what she did and why things happened the way they did." After Grant's mother left, his father remarried but soon slumped into alcoholism. On one memorable occasion he held a gun to his son's head and attempted to shoot him for the crime of emptying a precious case of booze down the sink. He died of throat cancer in 1981, and it was at his funeral that Grant last spoke to his younger brother, Stuart. The pair are still estranged and Stuart doesn't feature in Wah-Wah.