A Pocketful of Happiness

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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 ?

I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. 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.All this is carefully described by Grant in his new memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, which takes the form mostly of the diary he wrote in the last year of his wife’s life (Washington, a celebrated voice coach, died in September 2021, two months before their 35th wedding anniversary). It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.

It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name. 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. 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. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor.

Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’. Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. 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. 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.

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. 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. If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over. I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling.A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour.

Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years. 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? 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”). 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).

Grant were writing a review of this moving memoir, there would be many, many fond and admiring adjectives used to describe almost everyone who appears in the pages: witty, forthright, feisty, silky-soft, button-bright, hilarious, loving, generous, heartbreaking, warmhearted, inclusive, brilliant, sparky, amazing, charming, gilded, entertaining. 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. 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.