A Pocketful of Happiness

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Basically Richard’s diary entries about his true love of his wife and daughter and all they went through on a daily basis during his wife Joan Washington’s fight with the big C word! It’s such a beautiful love story between two people and even though you only know them through their acting or in Joan ‘s case her voice coaching you actually feel so drawn into the story that you get to ‘know’ them. The world feels beautiful to me at the moment. I’ve never felt quite like this before about anyone. I can’t find the right words to tell you how I feel, because the sensations are new to me. I so love everything about it—just being in the same room with you is wonderful. You’re a very special person—I’ve always thought so, even before I fell in love with you—so open, so generous, so… EVERYTHING. I want you to be happy, to be successful, to feel complete, whatever happens between us. At the moment I want US to happen together. Read “The Good-Morrow” by John Donne—that’s how I feel about you— Large-lettered CANCER RESEARCH CENTRE sign panics Joan. Reach for her hand. Park up, hug her, and whisper love and assurance as best I can. Walk arm in arm into the deserted reception. Eerie. As though everyone has been vacuumed away. The staff are incredibly kind, soft-spoken and gentle, which underlines the gravity of our situation. Form filling then ushered into a small room where a nurse asks her to lie down and injects a saline solution into her arm, followed by a radiation drug that will circulate through her bloodstream, taking an hour to fully absorb, during which she has to lie still and not talk.

It’s as if we’ve made an unspoken pact not to family-fall-apart and go about prepping food for tomorrow. Those old clichés “business as usual” and “the show must go on” apply. 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.Post-Christmas lull and slump. Played Scrabble and the first word Joan puts down is “memorial” and, without missing a beat, quips, “I’m still here, Swaz!” Grant’s nomination for an Oscar sparked an almighty row with Washington, because she told him she didn’t want to go to the ceremony. She always hated all that exhausting hobnobbing, and she’d be the plus-one again. He was devastated, and instead took Oilly, who loves socialising as much as him, so it was, he says, the right decision in the end. Joan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland which shows in her determination to try to keep on going as Scottish are well known for their stubborn look on life and their ‘fight to the end’ on life as a whole. I’ve seen this in family members and friends as we do not like to wear our feelings on our sleeves so to speak and keep a lot hidden from family for fear of worrying them yet we can offload to complete strangers! Newly arrived in London, I was waitering at Tuttons brasserie in Covent Garden, and had just secured an acting agent, who suggested getting accent coaching to help me play Northern Irish, as there were so many dramas being made about the Troubles and “you’re dark-haired and blue-eyed, so you could go up for Irish roles.”

Every gift given and opened, every memory shared, every carol sung and listened to, is supercharged with a poignancy so painful that it’s a titanic struggle not to go under. Richard E. Grant’s heartbreaking memoir recalls a long, happy marriage – and leaves us shattered for his loss.” 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.Grant’s profoundly moving book, part love letter to his beloved wife, part gossipy memoir about his life and times, will resonate with anyone who ever lost a loved one.” Academy Award–nominated actor Richard E. Grant’s memoir about finding happiness in even the darkest of days. A diary-keeper since childhood, the author draws on his candid entries to weave together an absorbing, moving chronicle… Ebullience and grief mark a touching memoir.” Grant jumps from vulnerable journal entries on Joan’s palliative care to recounting his glory days of ‘Withnail and I’, his 2019 Oscar nomination, glitzy party mentions and celebrity name drops. While his wife features in these chapters as a byproduct of their marital entwinement, Grant has made himself the star of the show in these scenes in true thespian style. Thank you Mr. Grant for this gorgeous book, this intimate look into the wonderful life that was your marriage to Joan Washington [and by the end, I was so very sorry that I never had an opportunity to meet such a fantastic person] and the extremely intimate look into her illness and death. Even though I cried serious ugly tears throughout much of this book, I would read it again for the first time in a heartbeat. I would read it again for a second time right now if I was told to. It helped me with my own grief and indeed I think anyone who has dealt with grief in any way imaginable, will get something from this book, even if it is an amazingly cathartic cry.

The right lung is ninety-five percent intact and it’s clear to see that the left lung has a growth all over it, which is why you’re experiencing such shortness of breath. You’re breathing with only one lung.” As soon as I saw any of the other actors, I always had hundreds of questions for them, I was asking, ‘What’s going on? What have you been doing?’ That was a unique experience for me, because normally you’re interacting with other people all the time. I was like somebody who had Coronavirus, I couldn’t be with other people, I just had to be with the camera on my own.” I entered into this book under the notion it would be solely focussed on Grant’s experience of losing his wife. Understandably so, given the memoir’s title is the parting advice upon her death, in addition to Grant’s press tours where he continually touted this as a memoir on Joan’s terminal cancer. Joan’s distinctive “gravy” voice—full of rich, delicious brown notes—has begun to alter, as her breath support has halved, and sounds more like her Scottish mother, sometimes leaping into a higher octave. Her Central School of Speech and Drama–trained standard English accent is sounding more Aberdonian than I’ve ever noticed before.

There was stuff that involved body doubles – now how can I say this without giving it away? I can’t tell you what it is, because it’s a plot spoiler. Anyway, there are doubles of things, put it that way. And that was surreal to do.” Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone A diary makes something that seems unreal feel real. If I write it all down, then it actually happened.’ Photograph: Sophia Spring/The Guardian Joan had been in Tahiti coaching Mel Gibson on The Bounty. We hadn’t even moved in together yet, and my career prospects were provincial to put it politely, compared to the stellar company she was keeping. But she never allowed that to come between us, even though I felt it keenly. I find it very, very helpful, because it makes something that seems unreal feel real. It’s astonishing to me that I, who started out in one of the smallest countries in the southern hemisphere, should have this life, so if I write it all down, then it actually happened,” he says.

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. I knew he had an "interesting" life and was reputed to be an excellent raconteur and writer ( The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film), but he exceeded those expectations. Grant is an actor who found fame in "Withnail and I" and recently won best-supporting actor awards for "Can You Ever Forgive Me?". He was born and raised in Swaziland but has been based in the UK for most of his adult life. I was an out-of-work actor from the southern hemisphere, from nowhere, earning a subsistence wage as a waiter, schlepping home after midnight, listening to “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” on my prized Walkman. Not exactly a “catch” of any kind— and pipe-cleaner thin. Joan on the other hand was already a legend in her field. Such was the success of Richard Eyre’s landmark National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in 1982, and Joan’s accent coaching, that Barbra Streisand enquired, “Who are these American actors I’ve never heard of?” Which resulted in Joan being interviewed to coach Mitteleuropean accents for Streisand’s directorial debut movie, Yentl. As I’ve been a Streisand fanatic for half a century, the details she recalled of their first meeting have been imprinted, like a talisman, on my memory ever since. Image: Richard E Grant and Joan Washington on their wedding day and on their 34th anniversary ( Source) No, I thought that keeping a very accurate record would be the best way to try to understand what was happening,” he says quietly. His voice today is a little huskier and flatter than usual, as if the events of the past year have hollowed the stuffing out of him.It’s a classic Grant anecdote, a mix of the eminently relatable and the unimaginably starry, which he encounters with an endearing everyman kind of astonishment. Of course, given that Grant has been famous for 35 years now, ever since his career-defining debut in Withnail and I, his phone call from Elton John didn’t come entirely out of the blue; he writes in the next paragraph that, in fact, he was quite pally with the singer for a while, before falling out of touch a few years ago “in the warp and weft of showbusiness friendships”. But ever since Grant published his first memoir, With Nails, in 1996, followed by The Wah Wah Dairies: The Making of a Film in 2006 – both about his adventures in moviemaking and written in his wry but wide-eyed tone – he has been making the public feel as if we are experiencing his extraordinary life alongside him, and displays the same excitement about it as we would. I can only begin to imagine the emotional strength it must take to write, publish and promote a book within a year of the death of your life partner. And Richard E Grant’s love and admiration for his wife, Joan Washington, shines though every paragraph. She takes a deep breath and declares, “Promise me that you won’t share any of this with Oilly, until we’ve had confirmation from the medics. Do you promise me?” Oilly brings us breakfast in bed and questions Joan about how long she’s felt breathless and had a cough. It’s a completely honest and open exchange, which enables us to share everything that the doctors and scans have revealed. The parental push-me-pull-you of wanting to protect our grown-up child, by withholding detailed medical information, is subverted by her open-hearted need to know and share everything.