A Pocketful of Happiness

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When Richard E Grant’s wife, Joan Washington, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just before Christmas 2020, she didn’t really want anyone to know. “It won’t cure me!” she said. But Grant and their daughter, Oilly (Olivia), had different ideas. They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. And perhaps, they also pointed out, this worked both ways. Grant remembered how upset he’d been on hearing, out of the blue, of Victoria Wood’s death in 2016. The news had made him feel he’d failed her; that he wasn’t close enough to her to be told her cancer had returned.

While I was grateful that she didn’t think I needed endless coaching, I was also frustrated that after only two sessions I no longer had a legitimate reason to see her again. She was also a few years older than me, married-but-separated, with a young son, and with a string of prestigious productions and a movie to her credit. I went to "An Evening with Richard E Grant", in which Grant talked for over an hour about the book's content, answered audience questions for another hour, and sold and signed copies of the book afterwards. This is a review of his performance of the book. GRANT: When those people cross over from being people that you know as marquee names, as you put it, to being your personal friends, then they just happen to be the people that are turning up. And in the final count, when it comes down to it, you find out who of those marquee name friends are your real friends or not. And 99% of people came through beyond all measure with their compassion and kindness. And it really helped us, my daughter and I, and certainly Joan enormously. And she was - she felt so revived by that. And I'm indebted to those people for their generosity and kindness because they all had to travel a distance to get to where we were living, that cottage in the countryside. He generously agreed, and I called the stentorian-voiced Equity Bunty, who barked, “ What letter, then?” Come on, my inner cynic said. Grant has worked with everyone: Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. Would he really self-combust over a tweet from Streisand? Also, I knew full well he’d met her before: in With Nails, he describes – in some detail – talking with her at a party while he was making The Player in the 1990s. And yet, just minutes after Grant yelled at me at the Oscars, he was then “introduced” to Streisand, and uploaded photos of him looking delirious with happiness next to her. What a phoney, I grumped at the time.

This resulted in experiencing ‘literary whiplash’ - pulled around from an emotional chapter to subsequently being regaled with glossy celebrity tales in the next one, and feeling slightly uncomfortable about how they could be within such close proximity of one another. I ask if he thinks this is because he grew up in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) before moving to London in his 20s, so although he can charm his way into English society – even going to Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding – he is always standing a little to the side, trying to understand it. He smiles kindly at my armchair analysis: “It’s always a little odd to hear oneself defined by someone else, but that makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly.” Would you mind if I stayed the night in your guest bedroom, as I’ve missed the last tube? My fault.” Martin Amis once wrote that the very act of writing is an act of love, and that’s what I feel writing about Joan. The best responses I’ve had to the book so far are people saying they feel like they got to know who Joan is – was,” he corrects himself. Richard E. Grant’s heartbreaking memoir recalls a long, happy marriage – and leaves us shattered for his loss.”

But it’s also possible that he hopes to make the reader understand that it doesn’t matter how many glamorous friends a person has if their true love is dying. Widowed, Grant isn’t particularly articulate. It’s enough for him simply to tell us, over and over, how happy he and Washington were together, that they mated, like swans, for life. Nevertheless, those things that he is able to describe – the sight of her tapestry kit by their bed, the way he still talks to her even though she is no longer in the world – have a universality about them, an ordinariness that resonates. Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone. Thank you. You have very brown, hairy arms, considering it’s the middle of winter. Have you been skiing?” I was wearing a cream cable-knit sweater, and had pulled the sleeves up while eating. Joan voice coached so many people from Kate Blanchett to Dame Julie Waters and so many many others there were literally thousands. A voice coach is someone you’d rarely think of while watching a film yet they are one of the most important to an actor to just ‘get it right’.She had faith that I would succeed at something," Grant says. "Her faith really galvanized and sustained me through incredible months of unemployment or doubt. So I'm lifelong indebted to her for that." I ask if his friends have started trying to fix him up with eligible women. “Some have, yes. And I find that absolutely bizarre. It’s not something I could even conceive of at this point. It’s still too raw and present, and I am still having an ongoing conversation with my wife in my head,” he says. But it’s not, of course, the same as the real thing. Must be jet lag. But let’s face it, Swaz, it’s really boring, and I couldn’t hear a word that young woman was whispering.”