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.
There followed a brief standoff. 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. 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. Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. Even Washington could see they’d made the right decision. 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”).
