A Pocketful of Happiness

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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”).

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. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. 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. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’.

In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. 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. 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. 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. 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.

They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. 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? 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. Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years.I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling. 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. But it’s also possible that he hopes to make the reader understand that it doesn’t matter how many glamorous friends a person has if their true love is dying. he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. 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).

He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted. Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’. 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. 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. 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.Darkness falls on us all eventually, even on those who know Elton John well enough to receive his condolences by phone. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to ‘find a pocketful of happiness in every day’. 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’.

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.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. 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.