Five days after Joan Washington, Richard E Grant’s wife of 35 years, died from lung cancer in September 2021, he got a phone call from a number he didn’t recognise. Grant and his daughter Olivia, then 32, were driving around, dealing with what he describes in his new memoir as “the bureaucracy of death”: filling out government forms, picking up hymn sheets for the funeral – all the banalities that come rushing at you when you’ve just lost the love of your life. Then the number flashed up. Olivia advised him not to answer, as it was probably a cold-caller. But Grant replied that it might be to do with the death certificate.
“Hi, it’s Elton,” said the caller.
“Sorry, you’re on speakerphone as I’m driving and the line is bad. Please say your name again?” replied Grant.
“It’s Elton,” the speaker repeated.
“As in you-know-who!” Grant writes in A Pocketful of Happiness.
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.
In January 2019, the day he found out he had been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in the black comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me?, he posted a video of himself in front of his first flat in London: “I’m absolutely overwhelmed. Thirty-six years ago I rented this bedsit here and I cannot believe I am standing here now with an Oscar nomination. Ha!” he cheered, weeping with excitement. It was a charming change from the usual thespy insistence that the accolades mean nothing, and the video instantly went viral.
“Being uncool made me – very briefly – cool, which was odd, but lovely. I was very struck by something my great idol Barbra Streisand once said, which is that the most personal experience is the one that reaches the most people, because it’s likely they’ve experienced those feelings too, and they’ll connect with that,” Grant, 65, tells me.
We have arranged to meet at a photographer’s studio just a couple of hundred yards from his home in London. It’s a scaldingly hot day, but he is looking fresh and dashing in a slightly lupine way, wearing a patterned shirt that’s unbuttoned just that little bit lower than most Englishmen would go for, and slim black trousers. He also, incidentally, smells delicious – soapy and lemony. At first I assumed this was down to Grant’s innate fragrant qualities, but it turns out he’s wearing his own perfume, called Jack, which he launched in 2014.
Having his own fragrance feels of a piece with Grant’s persona of being a slightly eccentric dandy, one who is just as good at playing a drunken dropout (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) as an aristocrat (Netflix’s Persuasion), and can also do both (Withnail). He is an outsider-insider, someone who looks upper class so gets cast in period dramas such as The Age of Innocence, but – unlike all the Old Etonians and Harrovians dominating today’s British acting scene – doesn’t entirely seem it. He has played the servant (Gosford Park) and the country-house guest (Downton Abbey), and hops with similar ease between charming (Jack and Sarah) and cringeworthy (The Player and – my favourite of his films – LA Story).
I ask if he thinks this is because he grew up in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) before moving to London in his 20s, so although he can charm his way into English society – even going to Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding – he is always standing a little to the side, trying to understand it. He smiles kindly at my armchair analysis: “It’s always a little odd to hear oneself defined by someone else, but that makes perfect sense. Yes, exactly.”
It’s certainly a useful quality to have as a diarist. Grant has been keeping a diary since he was 10, “after waking up on the back seat of a car to witness my mother bonking my father’s best friend on the front seat”, he writes in A Pocketful of Happiness. The 2005 film Wah-Wah, which Grant wrote and directed, was about his dysfunctional childhood in Swaziland. (“Wah wah” was how his stepmother mimicked the stiff-jawed, posh Swaziland accent.) But as a child, he couldn’t tell anyone what he saw, so he confided it to his diary, and he has continued the habit ever since.
“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.
Was there a temptation to not keep a diary during his wife’s illness, so that it wouldn’t seem real?
“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.
Like his previous books, A Pocketful of Happiness is based on his diaries and stuffed with the kind of stories celebrities usually keep to themselves. But whereas the earlier books were about his encounters with other celebrities, Pocketful is about his wife.
“Martin Amis once wrote that the very act of writing is an act of love, and that’s what I feel writing about Joan. The best responses I’ve had to the book so far are people saying they feel like they got to know who Joan is – was,” he corrects himself.
I felt something else: Washington is sick for much of the book, so she inevitably is a slightly shadowy figure. But by the end I felt that I really knew their marriage. “I didn’t want it to be one of those: ‘Oh, she was marvellous and we had a lovely time and everything was so wonderful,’ because that’s not how life is. It’s all the stuff in between,” he says.
Grant is very good on the in-between stuff, such as the joy of comparing stories with your partner after a party – “as delicious as Boxing Day leftovers” – and he writes sparsely but heartbreakingly about their prematurely born daughter, Tiffany, who died soon after her birth, while Grant was making Withnail and I. He and Washington eventually had their “miracle baby”, Olivia, whom they nicknamed Oilly, and the three were a cosily close family. When they would go out to the cinema together, Oilly and Grant would invariably be moved to tears, “while Joan was in the middle saying: ‘What the hell’s wrong with both of you? Pull yourself together!’ She was much less – how to put it? – emotionally raw than us,” he says. Grant and his daughter speak on the phone “at least once a day. As a teenager she identified that she and I have twin brains,” he says smiling.
He details with evocative precision what it was like to care for Washington during her illness. Anyone who has ever looked after a terminally ill person will know exactly what he means when he describes her “lemony irritability” on a bad day, and I especially liked his description of Washington’s moods vacillating “like the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, between Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful and visiting the Doc”.
“Initially, when I decided to write this book, I thought I wouldn’t write anything about the illness part of Joan’s life,” he says. “But then I remembered some advice Bruce [Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and I] gave me about screenwriting. He said: ‘Write about something that has happened today that’s never happened before,’ and nothing had ever been more life-changing for us than Joan’s diagnosis.”
Washington worked in the film business, but behind the camera. She was a dialect coach, helping actors such as Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes perfect accents for their roles. The last chapter of the book is a collection of testimonies from her famous students, describing her as “one of the great unsung heroines of the British entertainment business” (Richard Eyre) and “just the best, hands down” (Liv Tyler). The book skips about in chronology so although it begins with Washington’s diagnosis and ends with her death, we get the full picture of her and Grant’s almost 40-year relationship. They met in 1982 when he moved to London from Africa and asked her to teach him privately “to iron out my colonial accent”. She was, he writes, “boiler-suited, Kicker-booted and sporting a Laurie Anderson spiked haircut, a charismatic and formidable presence”, and he was quickly smitten.
She took a little longer. The first time they went to bed together, she told him: “You’re as skinny as a stick insect!” “A passion killer if ever there was one,” he writes. The passion wasn’t dead for long: one of the more memorable revelations in the book is how happy their sex life was. Even after 20 years of marriage they would slip off to a hotel in the middle of an afternoon for a spot of lovemaking. A lot of couples will be jealous of that, I tell him.
He nods solemnly: “Yes, in terms of sex, Joan and I were both astonished by the number of married people we know who said that for the last 10 years they slept in separate beds or rooms. I understand some people say: ‘Well, he or she snores’ – I get that. But the idea that you don’t share a bed any more – I mean, excuse the pun, but that is the bedrock of a relationship because everything gets sorted there. And if that’s not happening any more, I think it would be like being an amputee. Something’s been cut off.”
Some of this passion was generated by the sparking of their opposite natures. Grant is an enthusiastic oversharer, Washington was more of a sceptical introvert. He loves all the celeb hullaballoo; she thought it silly, despite or possibly because she also worked in the business. Repeatedly, he describes her “pinpricking” his ego, such as when he came home from a wildly successful film premiere and her response was to tell him to fix the dishwasher. Or when he excitedly finds out that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in which he appeared, grossed more than $1bn, and she replies: “While you were very good, Swaz, I confess that I didn’t understand a word of it.” (She called him Swaz in reference to the country of his birth.)
“It was very salutary to be with somebody with that attitude,” he smiles.
Was it not occasionally a bit frustrating?
“Frustrating? I suppose sometimes it was. But at the same time, you know, it was always a bit tongue-in-cheek-y from her,” he says.
In the early days of their relationship, she was the successful one, flying off to coach Mel Gibson on the set of The Bounty, while Grant pined away in London, hopelessly unemployed. But that shifted and Washington, he writes, “had to readjust and accommodate to being my plus-one at premieres and press junkets, which she understandably found uncomfortable”.
“It did change the dynamic of things, in that she was treated as if she were invisible, and she found that extremely annoying and uncomfortable,” he says. As readers of With Nails know, Grant is gloriously acidic about snubs within the celebrity world, and droplets of that acid speckle the pages of Pocketful. He describes how the uber-famous, such as Nicole Kidman, suddenly became his best friend after Can You Ever Forgive Me? is released and there’s Oscar buzz around him. “She swans elegantly towards me, saying: ‘I hope you win every award coming your way, cos you’re heartbreaking and brilliant.’ No denying the sea change from her polite greeting at Telluride [film festival] eight weeks ago, before she’d seen the movie. Feels like being given temporary membership of the elite Fame Club,” he writes.
Has he ever suffered any repercussions for something he’s written or said?
“Oh, well, I didn’t mean it as a criticism exactly – more an observation. You know Elizabeth Taylor’s aphorism: ‘There’s no deodorant like success.’ Oh, I don’t know. Interpret it as you will,” he shrugs.
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.
This seems like the moment to remind him that the Oscars also sparked a massive row between him and me, because this is actually the second time we’ve met. In the run-up to the ceremony, Grant posted regular videos of his gleeful adventures on the Oscars circuit, including his eagerness to meet Streisand, who lives in Los Angeles. Many people found all this adorable. Some did not. In Pocketful, he names and shames – oh dear – the Guardian for running a news piece shortly before the event with the headline: “Richard E Grant’s Oscar glee: ingenue or a crafty campaigner?” It suggested that maybe all this excitement was merely a press campaign from “a wily old pro”. I was covering the Oscars that year and, after Grant lost the best supporting actor award to Mahershala Ali for Green Book, I spotted him, said I was from the Guardian and asked for a quote. He promptly gave it to me with both barrels, raging about an article I didn’t write and telling me everyone on the internet was disgusted with me. I quickly scuttled away.
“That was you?” he says, reeling backwards. “Oh, the deep embarrassment! I called my daughter immediately afterwards and said what I had said to you, and she was absolutely appalled. She said: ‘You fucking idiot!’ Well, this answers your earlier question about whether I’d ever been bitten by something I’d said. Here’s a living, breathing example: hung, drawn and quartered as charged. Huge apologies. God!”
I thought about that encounter a lot as I read A Pocketful of Happiness, because the book clarified it for me. I hadn’t written that Guardian article about Grant, but the truth is, at the time, I shared its scepticism. His giddiness just seemed too over-the-top, too designed to please. But it was really the Streisand drama that piqued my cynicism. Ahead of the Oscars ceremony that year, Grant posted a photo of himself outside Streisand’s home, alongside a copy of the fan letter he’d sent her when he was 14. Streisand tweeted a reply, leading to Grant melting down with excitement on social media. Cue cooing news coverage about his “unique awards campaign”.
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.
Now I think I was as unfair on him as he was on me that night. The Streisand drama is quickly explained when I ask about it: when they spoke that first time he was pretty much an unknown actor in the US, “so I’m sure I didn’t even register on her fame-o-meter of people that she met”, he says. This time, she knew exactly who he was, so would remember the encounter, and that’s what made it so exciting.
But those are just details. What really comes across in Pocketful is just how intensely and determinedly Grant lives with his heart not so much on his sleeve, but out in front, leading him all the way. The man all but throbs with feeling, and there is a kind of compulsion in his oversharing, a reaction – no doubt – from the familial secrets he was forced to keep as a child. When I ask how he thinks Washington – who initially hadn’t even wanted to tell people she was ill – would feel about this book, in which he describes her on her deathbed, he says: “Gosh, I don’t know. But I absolutely 100% believe that secrets are toxic, and I’ve seen so many people turned upside down because of some family secret, and she knew that about me.”
The need to share his and Washington’s code when they were bored at a dinner party (they would stroke their nose), and to then describe his grief at her absence, is the same one that drives him to share his excitement about all the Hollywood hullaballoo. It’s impossible to doubt the authenticity of a man who commissioned a sculpture of Streisand’s face for his garden, which is still there today. And yes, of course he told Streisand about it; she told him – understandably – that he was crazy. He still posts frequent videos on social media, telling people what’s going on in his life, how he’s feeling, and he looks shocked when I ask if he ever feels he’s given away too much of himself. “Never even thought about it,” he says. There is no emotional filter. And the person who used to help him turn the temperature down a little is now gone.
I ask if his friends have started trying to fix him up with eligible women. “Some have, yes. And I find that absolutely bizarre. It’s not something I could even conceive of at this point. It’s still too raw and present, and I am still having an ongoing conversation with my wife in my head,” he says. But it’s not, of course, the same as the real thing.
“What’s tough is no longer having what I call the ‘steering wheel stuff’, the stuff that you talk about at the end of the day, when you call the person you love most in the world and say: ‘Well, I spoke to the person from the Guardian, and oh my God she was the person from the Guardian at the Oscars,’ because I’d want her view on it,” he says.
And what does he think Washington would say?
“Maybe: ‘Oh, I’m sure she’s got over that, but you are a complete idiot and you should have your tongue clamped and tied.’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right.’ Not having those conversations any more. That’s what I miss.”
• A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant is published by Simon & Schuster on 29 September at £20. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
