When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’. When she felt utterly terrible, it was wonderfully distracting to have Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson eating ice-cream on her bed; to listen to Rupert Everett talk of his latest starring role (“I’ve just finished playing a gay stroke victim so might as well go straight to the Oscars now, darling, as I’m a shoo-in”). 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 ?

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. 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. He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted. 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. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010.A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. 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. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. 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?

Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years.

Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say.

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. 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 in the end, Washington allowed her family to break the news and the three of them found themselves in the embrace of a highly sustaining – and sustained – outpouring of love and affection. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington.I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time.

Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.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. he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. Perhaps this is the kind of behaviour his friend Bruce Robinson had in mind when he described Grant as “in fact, mad” (Robinson wrote and directed Withnail and I, the film that made Grant famous). Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years.