Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone. Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award. 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.

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. A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. 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. 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.Grant emigrated from Swaziland to London in 1982, with dreams of making it as an actor, when he unexpectedly met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.

View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. 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. 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.Told with candour in Richard’s utterly unique style, A Pocketful of Happiness is a powerful, funny and moving celebration of life’s unexpected joys. 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 ? 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. 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.

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 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. 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. 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). he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. 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.

Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years.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. 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’. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted. Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years.