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). 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.

Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. 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. Washington, as always, is avid for his news and they share their days, as they’ve done for 38 years.

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. Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.

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. 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 is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name. 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. 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.I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling.

View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. 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). 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. 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.

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

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. A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. But this territory is also, I think, somewhat uncomfortable for the reader, particularly since Grant pads out his narrative with glitzy memories of 2019, when he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me ? 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. 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.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.