A Pocketful of Happiness

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They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. Grant moved to the UK to pursue his acting career, and has been a fixture on our screens since his breakout role in Withnail and I in 1987.

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). When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’. One minute, I was feasting on what amounted to high-class gossip; the next, I was being told the most intimate things about a woman I understood to have been fiercely private.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. His new memoir, written in diary form, is about his terrific 35-year marriage-of-opposites to Joan Washington (he the eternal adolescent, star-struck optimist and gifted actor, she a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense and equally gifted dialect coach) and her painful death from cancer. 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”).

I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling. 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. The guy who goes to the Oscars is the same guy who sits alone in a chain restaurant in Salisbury waiting for his béarnaise sauce to arrive. I would have been happy to go on reading about their life and their marriage, and even their shared adoration of their “longed-for, miracle, baby,” Olivia, who seems to be an impressive woman, very supportive of them both, during the fears and misery of Washington’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis and the “tsunami of grief” that Grant describes. I think he wrote his book too soon, but I also see that he needed to do something, the gap in his life being so unimaginably huge, so very hard to bear.Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP View image in fullscreen 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.

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). Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty 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?

he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. Convinced of his own persuasiveness, he once tried, he tells us, to get a part exchange, not on a car, but on a loo seat. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor.