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PHOTOGRAPHS: STEVE SCHOFIELD It’s really the love story of my life,’ says actor Richard E Grant of the book he has written about the loss of his wife, Joan Washington, to lung cancer on 2 September 2021 after 38 years together. A Pocketful of Happiness is both a moving and unflinching study of terminal illness and a joyful celebration of an unlikely romance. Grant, now 65, was a wannabe actor newly arrived from Swaziland, Southern Africa, in 1982 – his breakthrough role in Withnail And I still five years in the future – when he met Washington. She was an acclaimed vocal tutor in film and theatre, ten years his senior and married with a son. Marrying in 1986, theirs was a passionate, feisty union that survived long periods apart, many miscarriages and the death, 30 minutes after her birth, of a premature daughter, Tiffany. Their beloved second daughter, Olivia, is now 32. ‘We began a conversation in 1983 and we never stopped talking, or sleeping together in the same bed,’ is how he explains his relationship with Washington. ‘She is the only person I have met that asks as many questions as I do and seemed to have no filter. You feel you have met your soulmate if that happens. To be truly seen by another human being is, I think, the greatest gift that you can be given or give. And if you fancy them physically as well then that’s the bonus.’ Today he’s drawn and sombre, though capable of an occasional muted chuckle. Washington was given 12 to 18 months to live after her initial diagnosis in January last year, but the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she had lesions on the brain and died eight months later. Grant is working through the stages of grief. ‘I haven’t had the anger, though people tell me I will go through it,’ he says. ‘It’s profound loss more than anything. The feeling that your compass has been smashed.’ Last New Year’s Eve Grant posted an Instagram video expressing gratitude that he’d spent almost every day of his wife’s illness by her side and recalling that shortly before her death she’d charged him and Olivia to find ‘a pocketful of happiness’ amid their daily sadness. That post was viewed 262,553 times and got 1,752 comments. The literary agent for his frank and funny earlier books, based on the diaries he’s kept since childhood, suggested he write about it. ‘I immediately said no,’ he says. ‘Then I spoke to my daughter, and she said: “I think it would really help you.”’ I wrote it on the condition that if she vetoed any or all of it I would honour that: and because it’s incredibly no-holds-barred I thought she’d find it unbearable. But she felt it really honoured my wife and her mother.’ The opening chapter describes his first meeting with Washington at The Actors Centre in Central London in 1982, where he begs her to sort out his ‘colonial accent’. He is ‘enormously attracted’, but nothing happens till the following year when she seeks his help on a project that requires a Siswati speaker (the language of Swaziland). She cooks him dinner at her Richmond flat: he stays the night. Grant with his wife Joan. His grief, he says, is ‘like the weather, it changes a lot’. The narrative then fast-forwards to Washington’s 74th birthday on 21 December 2020 when the Aberdonian doctor’s daughter books a check-up, concerned about her recurrent breathlessness. What follows will be horribly familiar to anyone touched by serious illness: the anxiety of waiting for tests, then for results; the paralysing moment of diagnosis. Grant writes especially well of the helplessness men in particular feel when their partner is sick. ‘I’ve had men come up to me in the street and say “thank you for posting what you do on social media”, because I am expressing what they have found difficult to express,’ he says. ‘Obviously I’m in a profession where expressing yourself is the nuts and bolts of the job, which makes it easier than if you work in an accountancy firm.’ The book boomerangs back and forth across the couple’s personal and professional lives together, with a sprinkling of Grant’s still-starstruck insider view of showbiz and shameless name-dropping. But the core of it details the grim reality of incurable illness, the weirdness of medical treatment under lockdown, and the brilliance (or otherwise) of famous friends. One couple, who he won’t name, dropped off the radar immediately. ‘Death defines who your friends are but more specifically what kind of friend they are,’ he remarks drily. Nigella Lawson, meanwhile, ‘cabbed food over every single Sunday’. Dakota Johnson wells up when Grant tells her of the situation at home during his ten-day filming stint on Persuasion, which Washington had insisted he take. Gabriel Byrne, who played Grant’s alcoholic father in the film he directed about his upbringing, Wah-Wah, sits for hours by Washington’s bed in their Cotswold cottage, nattering. Melissa McCarthy, alongside whom Grant was Oscar-nominated for 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, is endlessly supportive by text and in person on a brief visit: ‘A five-star treat,’ Grant calls her. Prince Charles and Camilla send long, solicitious letters and arrange a visit around Washington’s medical appointments. ‘He’s a well-documented fan of accents and The Goon Show, and as my wife was an accent coach he loved her ability to do different voices,’ Grant says. ‘They were both extraordinarily kind, visiting and so on, given how busy he is.’ An ambassador for The Prince’s Trust, Grant recounts in the book a visit to Highgrove where, just before dinner and having been riding a horse on set all day, he discovers his boxer shorts are drenched in blood. In desperation, Washington conceals them on top of a wardrobe. The next day the pants are returned, laundered and pressed by some unfortunate staff member. Washington comes across as feisty, opinionated, wickedly funny – a fierce champion of her husband in his struggling early years and through the rollercoaster of Withnail And I’s cult success, but gently mocking of what she calls the current ‘condimentary phase’ of his career. He’s become Colonel Mustard, she says, ‘Dijon or Colman’s, brought in as a character actor in your twilight years to add some strong or mild flavour to a plot, to sneer, scorn, vituperate or explode’. Grant, a natural enthusiast and endlessly starstruck, recounts his delight at being cast alongside Tom Hiddleston in Loki and Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Washington couldn’t care less. He quotes verbatim the passionate letters they exchanged from 1983 onwards when away from each other for work. ‘As my great idol Barbra Streisand said on directing her first film Yentl: the most personal thing is like a prism to reach the largest number of people,’ he says. ‘Also, my wife’s voice was absolutely present in those letters, so it was the best way to convey that to any reader who didn’t have the luck to have met her.’ He writes about the loss of Tiffany, and his subsequent inability to show any boundaries in his love for Olivia, known from conception as Oilly. (Washington thought she’d resemble Popeye’s Olive Oyl if she inherited Grant’s elongated frame and features.) ‘She is the grown-up in the father-daughter relationship,’ he says, and the book details the way they supported each other through those eight months, especially in persuading Washington to let them tell their friends she is dying. ‘I was great friends with Victoria Wood,’ he explains, ‘and when she was diagnosed with cancer the first time she told me, and I did as much as I could to support her in whatever way I could. And when it came back again she chose to only tell a very small group of people. The shock of hearing the news of her death, rather than knowing that she was so ill… I felt that I had let her down as a friend, that she felt she couldn’t tell me. I rationally understand what she did, but emotionally I found that very tough. I said this to Joan: people want to be able to help you and to share in what you are going through. Also, ever since I had psychoanalysis aged 42, I’ve been convinced that secrets are toxic.’ Grant started his diary at the age of 11, having woken up in the back seat of the family car to see his mother having sex with his father’s best friend in the front. He had to keep quiet about this, and about the fact his father was an alcoholic who once tried to shoot him. (Grant himself has a physical intolerance of alcohol and has only been drunk once, when director Bruce Robinson insisted he should know how the sozzled Withnail felt.) ‘I know so many families where people are crippled by having to hide something, but my feeling is, once something is exposed, what’s the worst that can happen?’ Grant says. ‘These are all common denominators that everybody goes through.’ Washington overcame her innate urge to keep her illness private and was greeted with an outpouring of affection: ‘She said it was like hearing your own funeral oration except that she had the privilege of hearing it from people while she was alive.’ Grant’s father died aged 53, but his mother is still living in what is now Eswatini (as Swaziland was renamed in 2018). ‘She’s 91, a chain smoker, reads five books a week, plays bridge three times a week, drives her car,’ says Grant. ‘She’s indomitable.’ Washington, by contrast, hadn’t smoked for 30 years before she contracted lung cancer. Did her illness feel unfair? ‘No, because her attitude about it was so sanguine and accepting and resolute,’ he says. ‘She at no point said, “Oh, this is terrible, how can this happen to me?” which I thought was remarkable. I don’t think I could be like that.’ When she died, Grant was holding her hand. He and Oilly organised a suitable celebration for her funeral. ‘We decided that she should have a wicker casket so that it didn’t look like that Dracula box everybody gets put away in covered in lilies. We had great music. I wrote a piece, Oilly wrote a piece, and Pat Doyle the composer was the MC: because he’s from Scotland and Joan was Aberdonian. They shared great Celtic humour and he was incredibly irreverent within about four sentences.’ Grant doesn’t have the consolation of belief in an afterlife: ‘No, my father was very adamant about that: much as we would like to believe that there is something afterwards, nobody has come back so you have to grab what you have here and now.’ He hasn’t changed the décor of the Richmond house or the Cotswolds cottage he and Washington furnished together with finds from Kempton Park antiques fair. ‘In fact, I’ve bought more stuff because I know what my wife would have chosen and I find it comforting knowing that I’m surrounded by all the things that we collected together.’ With Paul McGann in Withnail And I He’s still acting, taking the ‘condimentary’ parts, and a lead in a film called The Tutor. ‘I’m astonished to be getting the amount of work I am getting at my age. It’s been a great diversion from dealing with all this, though recording the audio version of the book was brutal, inevitably. If it wasn’t I’d have to be made out of steel.’ Could he ever imagine himself with someone else, I ask? He laughs and says that when she knew she was dying, Washington went through a list of all their single female friends and ‘detonated’ them as possible successors, one by one. ‘I know statistically that men within nine months of the death of their partner are usually coupled up with someone else, but I couldn’t imagine anything further from possibility,’ he says frankly. ‘That’s not to say that I couldn’t go out for dinner tomorrow night and meet someone and go, “Oh my goodness, this person has completely swivelled my brain and heart.” But right now, no.’ Albeit with the support of Oilly and his many friends, Grant is alone with his grief. ‘Like the weather, it changes a lot every hour,’ he says. ‘Something can trigger you completely unexpectedly. You’ll be standing in the supermarket and just have to crumple because something has reminded you. Or you see somebody that you haven’t seen for a while who you then have to console as they’re upset because they have just heard what’s happened to my wife. So I think you don’t get over grief – and I know this from the death of our first child – but you go around it. It’s a daily navigation.’ A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant will be published on 29 September by Simon & Schuster, price £20* RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR 50 of the best celebrity Halloween costumes of all time Shirley Ballas ‘ Strictly gave me back my hope’ Davina McCall discusses how men can help women going through the menopause Popular in Celebrity TV chef Gino D Acampo on Sardinia Sophia Loren and scary salads May 25, 2017 The Evergreen Goddess Exercise guru Diana Moran on looking fit and July 10, 2017 More more Julianne Moore November 13, 2017 Author Jill Mansell on designer notebooks commissioning art and the family January 16, 2018 EMOTIONAL TIES Kelly Hoppen on vodka vintage finds and being a April 4, 2018 ‘ I have no regrets’ Millie Mackintosh on divorce debt and reuniting May 20, 2018 EMOTIONAL TIES TV presenter and tennis player Annabel Croft shares her July 1, 2018 Stella Parton ‘ Dolly and I have always been close’ August 12, 2018 Anna Friel on getting jeered in the street shared parenting with September 23, 2018 Queen of primetime Charlotte Riley on juggling rising stardom with pregnancy October 21, 2018 Popular CategoriesFood2704Life2496Fashion2240Beauty1738Celebrity1261Interiors684 Sign up for YOUMail Thanks for subscribing Please check your email to confirm (If you don't see the email, check the spam box) Fashion Beauty Celebrity Life Food Privacy & Cookies T&C Copyright 2022 - YOU Magazine. 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