There is a too-muchness about him, a Tiggerish-ness born of his desire to please (a trait common in those whose parents divorced when they were children, as his did). 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. 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. He is so… untrammelled, his feelings for everyone and everything so immediate, so absolute and always blasted out undiluted.

I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling. 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.Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to ‘find a pocketful of happiness in every day’. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010.

Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi. It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.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. Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years.

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. he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. 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. 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. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years.

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. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. 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”).