A Pocketful of Happiness

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A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour.

I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. His new memoir, written in diary form, is about his terrific 35-year marriage-of-opposites to Joan Washington (he the eternal adolescent, star-struck optimist and gifted actor, she a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense and equally gifted dialect coach) and her painful death from cancer. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington.Sometimes, this took the form of cheering visits: our now King Charles, for instance, arrived at their cottage bearing a bag of mangoes and flowers from Highgrove.

he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. One is Joan Washington, whom we get to know as passionate and commanding, a great teacher, a wonderful mother, a smartass and a woman who understood and loved her husband, deeply. But this territory is also, I think, somewhat uncomfortable for the reader, particularly since Grant pads out his narrative with glitzy memories of 2019, when he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me ? The guy who goes to the Oscars is the same guy who sits alone in a chain restaurant in Salisbury waiting for his béarnaise sauce to arrive. I think he wrote his book too soon, but I also see that he needed to do something, the gap in his life being so unimaginably huge, so very hard to bear.The most revealing moment in his book comes late on, when Grant spends a night alone in Salisbury, where he has been filming Persuasion with Dakota Johnson. They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.

When his beloved wife Joan died in 2021 after almost forty years together, she set him a challenge: to find a pocketful of happiness in every day. When he’s seated next to Camilla, the then Duchess of Cornwall, at dinner, they’re “instant friends”; when he has psychotherapy, his problems are fixed, seemingly within minutes. Since then, he has gone on to star in a wide variety of films, including his Oscar nominated performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book. To have someone always beside you – or even just on the end of the phone – who understands these dizzying shifts and all their attendant lonelinesses, and who loves you wherever in the world you are, is a precious thing indeed.He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted. Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.