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).

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. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’.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”).

Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years.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. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. 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.

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. 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’. View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. 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. Sometimes, it took the form of practical help: on Sundays, Nigella Lawson would send supper over in a taxi.In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. 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.