A Pocketful of Happiness

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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. 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”). Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’. 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. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington.

A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.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.

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. Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say. 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. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time.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. 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. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’.

They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. 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. 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. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor.

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). The most revealing moment in his book comes late on, when Grant spends a night alone in Salisbury, where he has been filming Persuasion with Dakota Johnson. 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. 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.