It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone. 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. When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to ‘find a pocketful of happiness in every day’. 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”). 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. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years. They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely.It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time.

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. 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. 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 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. 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.View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant with his late wife, Joan Washington, at a party in Richmond, London, in 2010. Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.

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

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.