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TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. For my guest, actor Richard E. Grant, the story that defines his life has not been his rise to fame or his prolific film and television career. It's not his writing, directing or interviewing or even his long list of famous friends. It's his marriage of 35 years to Joan Washington, an acclaimed dialect coach whom he met during his early years as a struggling actor. Joan died in 2021 at the age of 74 from lung cancer. The last eight months of her life, Joan and Richard spent every minute of every day together, Richard documenting their time through journaling. He's written a book about their lives together called "A Pocketful Of Happiness."
Richard E. Grant rose to fame after starring in the 1987 cult classic "Withnail And I." Since then, he's gone on to star in dozens of television shows and films, including "The Iron Lady" and "Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker." In 2005, he wrote and directed a comedy-drama film loosely based on his childhood growing up in what was then Swaziland in Southern Africa. In 2018, he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" "A Pocketful Of Happiness" is a collection of Grant's diaries during his last days with Joan, interwoven with stories about the life they built together. Richard E. Grant, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
RICHARD E GRANT: Thank you very much. Thank you, Tonya.
MOSLEY: It's been two years since Joan passed away from lung cancer, and I'm just wondering, how do you measure the time since she's been gone?
GRANT: Difficult to kind of quantify that because it feels like a navigation round or through the abyss of grief that - you don't ever get over it, I don't think, but you have to find a way around it. And she very generously said to my daughter and I four days before she died, to try and find a pocketful of happiness in each day, acknowledging that, yes, of course we would be sad that she was no longer around, but she said I charge you both to do that. And at the time, we were so overwhelmed by the tsunami of grief that hit us that it didn't really register. And then we realized that on a daily basis to - rather than thinking, oh, you're going to win the lottery or a Nobel Prize or, you know, do something extraordinary, to be more mindful of your everyday experience and focus on and celebrate something that is joyful or happy making. And, of course, built into this simple phrase is, again, license to feel joy or happiness rather than think, oh, my goodness, you know, I should feel guilty because I'm having a good day today.
MOSLEY: You know what I also love about this idea of a pocket full of happiness is that it also - it not just acknowledges that you can have a little bit of joy, but it also acknowledges the grief. You know, it's kind of like saying, it's going to suck. You're going to go through it.
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And you don't have to pretend that it's all good. You just have to find a little...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Bit of sunshine, you know?
GRANT: Yeah. As long as you have hope, I think that you can deal with almost anything. And I - that was the most challenging part of Joan's illness is that she said to us - I think once this new miracle drug that she had been prescribed, she felt that it had stopped working and it, theoretically, was supposed to give her much more time, and she was of the tiny percent that it didn't - is that when she said, I know that how I feel now, I'm not going to feel any better in a week's time. And, you know, I know from having COVID or having flu or the cold, you think - you always know that there's a possibility that you're going to get better, but, you know, you don't have that option.
MOSLEY: Was that hard to accept? - 'cause, you know, I mean, I think culturally, we just want to sit in this, but no, have hope it's going to get better even...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...In an illness like that. And it seems that she - once she realized that she was not going to get better and she wasn't feeling better, she was charging to you to accept that.
GRANT: Yeah, she was so determined that she said, promise me one thing, Swaz, which was her nickname for me because of where I grew up. She said, do not let me die in a hospital or a hospice. I want to be with you in our house, you know, holding each other's hands. And, you know, of course, you hope that you're going to be able to fulfill that. But the reality is, you have no idea. But as it turned out, that is exactly what happened. And she was so exhausted by the disease, you know, as it progresses and accelerates that she was in a state of such exhaustion that she said to us, my daughter and I, yeah, probably about eight or 10 days before she died, she said, I'm asking your permission to let me go. And that is such a powerful thing because on the one hand, it's such a contradiction, Tonya, because you want the person to live as long as possible, but at the same time, if they are saying, I am exhausted by this, I long to end this, it's a push-me-pull-you of wanting what they want and also selfishly wanting what you want. But, you know, that's just the nature of it.
MOSLEY: This book is your third memoir-type book. It's so profoundly intimate because, as I mentioned, it's mostly a collection of your diary entries during Joan's illness, and it's interwoven with stories about your lives together. And there's also some exciting Hollywood stories, which we'll get to later. But the book is basically a love letter to Joan, who was, as you write, a fiercely private person. Did that give you pause about how forthcoming you'd be in this book?
GRANT: That's a very valid and a great question because I had published film diaries called "With Nails" in 1997, which chronicled, you know, the A-to-Z of never having been in a movie and then ending up working in Los Angeles with Coppola, Altman, Jane Campion, Scorsese, you know, the greats, people that I absolutely hero-worshipped. So that is a kind of rags-to-riches story, but it doesn't involve the level of personal detail that "A Pocketful Of Happiness" does. And when I - because I've kept a diary ever since I was 10 years old, having inadvertently witnessed my mother in flagrante with my father's best friend on the front seat of the car, you know, late at night that I wasn't supposed to witness. So not having anybody to tell, I instinctively started keeping a diary and have done ever since as a way of trying to understand the world. And, you know, considering the people that I've met and where I've worked, it has been the one way of somehow making the unreality of that feel real.
So in terms of this diary, I had absolutely no intention of publishing this whatsoever. And I was on a Caribbean beach on New Year's Day at the beginning of last year and posted a thing, walking - a video saying that, you know, I felt like a turtle that had lost its shell and that, you know, the loss of my wife felt like my compass had been broken. And it had such an extraordinary social media response that it then elicited various publishers in London calling my literary agent and saying, would you publish a memoir? And I was very emphatic about that. I said, absolutely not. Unequivocally not. And my daughter very smartly said to me, I think that it would help you process the grief that you're going through, which is so intense. And she said, why not interweave how you met each other and, you know, weaving through your Oscar stories and how you first met and your combined careers. How about doing that?
So I said, well, I will do that on the proviso - because I didn't want to threaten my - or jeopardize my relationship with my daughter whatsoever. She's the only child I have - we have. I said, I will write the whole thing out. And once you have read it, you have the veto power to say one paragraph can be published, the entire lot or half or none of it. And she very generously read it and said, this is exactly how it is. And it feels like a real record of your - as you said earlier, it's a love letter to her mother, my wife.
MOSLEY: You mentioned your mother. She passed away this month at the age of 96. It's been a hard few years for you, Richard. My sincerest condolences...
GRANT: Thank you.
MOSLEY: ...On the loss of your mother. As you also mentioned, you had this traumatic experience when you were 10 years old, seeing - witnessing your mother having an affair. You all had a complicated relationship. And I can't help but think about how in many ways the grounding for this book comes from you learning to do what you did all of your life as a kid to cope, and that's to write, to express your pain as a mechanism for healing. A few weeks after Joan died, you actually went to stay with your mother for a few weeks, and it kind of revealed something to you important to you. It made you see the way you're choosing to live your life in love in contrast to the way that you were raised.
GRANT: You know, I think that it's probably generational as much as anything. But my mother was very untactile and emotionally withheld, or certainly towards me, and obviously complicated by the fact that she then found out that I had witnessed this - her...
MOSLEY: She didn't know in the moment?
GRANT: ...Infidelity. She didn't. She didn't know at the time. She found out - I told her 30 years later.
MOSLEY: Wow.
GRANT: But it had led to a sort of enormous amount of estrangement when I was growing up. And I think that staying with her, you know, four weeks after Joan had died, having not seen her for four years because of COVID and everything else - it so underlined how important Joan and I placed fidelity and trust, complete trust, as the bedrock of our relationship, probably way more than anybody else getting married for the first time might have done, I think because her first husband was an inveterate philanderer and was unfaithful throughout their marriage...
MOSLEY: Joan's husband.
GRANT: ...And because I had witnessed - yeah.
MOSLEY: Yes.
GRANT: Yeah, and because I had witnessed this thing with my mother and then had to parent my father, essentially, through my teenage years because he descended into very violent alcoholism after my mother had left him - that I felt the weight of that - what that infidelity had wrought upon his psyche. And therefore, it subsequently affected me. So I thought firstly that I would never get married, never have a child. But then, of course, what I didn't recognize - what John Lennon quipped, you know, a few days before he was murdered, that life is what happens in between making your plans. And at the age of 26, I met Joan Washington, fell in love, and then we had a child. So...
MOSLEY: Yes.
GRANT: ...All of that was turned on its head. But we - you know, we were so hellbent on being faithful to one another lest we repeat what had happened in her first marriage or in my parents' marriage.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us...
GRANT: OK.
MOSLEY: ...My guest today is award-winning actor Richard E. Grant. He's written a book about his life with his wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, called "A Pocketful Of Happiness." Washington was an acclaimed voice coach who helped actors perfect their dialect for films, television and theater. She died in 2021 from lung cancer. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE MOUNTAIN GOATS SONG, "PEACOCKS")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And let's get back to my conversation with actor Richard E. Grant. He's written a memoir titled "A Pocketful Of Happiness" about the life he created with his late wife of 35 years, Joan Washington. In 2005, Grant wrote and directed a comedy-drama film loosely based on his childhood growing up in what was then Swaziland in South Africa. In 2018, he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in the black comedy "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"
You and Joan met in 1982. You were a young, struggling actor. You were looking for...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...A voice coach. And you actually didn't - you say you didn't think you would get married, but you actually also didn't think you'd ever really fall in love.
GRANT: Yeah. I thought that - you know, because I'd seen the damage that so-called love had wrought upon my parents, I thought, well, the best way to protect myself is never have a child and certainly never get married. And then, you know, of course, you do fall in love. And when I did, you lose all - you know, you - it's in the phrase - falling. You know, you have no control over that. And you hope that love is then the safety net that stops you hitting the ground.
MOSLEY: Joan was quite a bit older than you. Was there ever any drama around...
GRANT: Ten years older.
MOSLEY: Yeah, 10 years older - any drama around that age difference?
GRANT: The drama was that the difference in our social and career status was - couldn't have be more extreme. I was an out-of-work actor who was a waiter, you know, a server in a restaurant in Covent Garden in London, and she was, you know, at the top of her profession as a dialect coach working for all the major theatre companies in London and working on movies as well. And so when I first got my - an acting job of which I was properly paid in London with television actors, names that had kind of passed their sell-by date - while I was doing that, thinking, oh, my goodness, I've got this big break, she was coaching Daniel Day-Lewis and Mel Gibson and Liam Neeson and everybody on the remake of "The Bounty" in Hawaii and Tahiti.
So that - you know, it was a measure of how much she obviously put faith in me that I was going to at some point make it and crack through. But, you know, it's an extraordinary thing if somebody loves you enough to believe that you are going to succeed and not be a sort of professional embarrassment for your entire life. Anyway, I made up for it when I finally got - you know, I got a movie break in 1986. And that changed my life.
MOSLEY: Yes. But, I mean, what a love affair the two of you had. She actually wrote you a letter in early 1983, so that was pretty early in your relationship. I think the two of you were apart from each other, working.
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Can I have you just read a little excerpt from it?
GRANT: Do you want me to give you the intro of...
MOSLEY: Please.
GRANT: In early 1983, when Joan was coaching on three different productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the National Theatre in London, I was doing a lunch-hour play in a pub theater on a profit-share basis, which meant zero pay. She wrote me a letter declaring that (reading) the world feels beautiful to me at the moment. I've never felt quite like this before about anyone. I can't find the right words to tell you how I feel because the sensations are new to me. I so love everything about it. Just being in the same room with you is wonderful. You're a very special person. I've always thought so, even before I fell in love with you - so open, so generous, so everything. I want you to be happy, to be successful, to feel complete, whatever happens between us. At the moment, I want us to happen together. Read "The Good-Morrow" by John Donne. That's how I feel about you.
MOSLEY: Wow. I mean, I'm just thinking...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...About how this new generation will never know that feeling of anticipation for a letter like this, a handwritten letter arriving in your mailbox and the tactile feeling of it. I mean, you had the letter still in order to be able to put it in the book.
GRANT: Yeah. Well, Tonya, how that came about is because I'm an obsessive eater of Christmas puddings, which are like a very dense, rich fruitcake that is a tradition that people eat on Christmas Day in England that I know doesn't exist in America. Anyway, I eat one of these once a month and collect them in the January sales, and I found a cake tin that I was sure had a piece of rogue cake left in it while I was writing the memoir. And I opened the tin and found a stash of letters...
MOSLEY: Oh, my God.
GRANT: ...And aerograms that Joan had written to me and that we'd written to each other. And it felt like, because they weren't in my diaries, it was a way of getting her voice absolutely authentically word for word as she wrote them to me into the book. And so I did that.
MOSLEY: As Joan wrote in that letter, she said you were unlike anyone she'd ever met. And I've actually read that about you...
GRANT: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: ...From lots of different people who have that same description - I mean, of course, your openness and honesty, your dedication to the truth and the way that you live but also your quirks. You like to smell everything. You did this on your first...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Official date when she cooked for you.
GRANT: Yeah. But, Tonya, I tell you, I don't understand that everybody doesn't smell everything. You know, animals do, and we're animals. So it astonishes me that every single person does not touch everything in sight and smell everything in sight.
MOSLEY: And when we're talking about smelling...
GRANT: I've come to realize...
MOSLEY: ...Like, you have a meal...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Like, Joan cooked you a meal that first date. You took the plate.
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And you put it to your nose. That's how...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Do you think you have a more developed sense of smell than the rest of us?
GRANT: I don't know. It's impossible to judge. But I've never smoked or - and I'm allergic to alcohol. So maybe my sense of taste and smell is heightened. But, you know, it's difficult to - I don't know how you measure that. But she did worry and say, is there something wrong with my food that you put your nose into the plate? And I said, no, no, no. This is just, like, the overture of the meal. It's - the first hit that you get is, you know, to smell it all over.
MOSLEY: Right. It's the first part of it. Yeah.
GRANT: (Laughter) Yeah.
MOSLEY: As you mentioned, Joan was a legend for helping actors not just perfect their national dialects but also regional and local lilts. She helped Penelope Cruz to sound Greek and lots of different people. It's so impressive what she did, and I'm always so fascinated especially by British actors who can perfect regional accents from the United States. Did she ever help you at home with your scripts when you were going through - after that first initial meeting where she worked with you?
GRANT: Oh, yeah. But she was, as a - I think the equivalent would be if you try and teach the person that you love most in the world or somebody in your family to give them driving lessons, your patience with them is probably far less...
MOSLEY: So true.
GRANT: ...Than if it's somebody who you've never met before.
MOSLEY: Yes, yes.
GRANT: So my point being is that she said, for goodness sake, stick to the work. Stop flirting with me. Stick to the point. Don't mess around - you know, all that stuff. So the last thing that she coached me on was - I had to play a working-class, blue-collar, aging drag queen in a movie version of a West End musical called "Everybody's Talking About Jamie," in which I played a drag queen from Sheffield in the north of England with a northern accent. And she said, you have got to get this right. Otherwise, you're going to be a professional embarrassment to me. It'll reflect very badly on me if you...
MOSLEY: Yes.
GRANT: ...Haven't got this accent right. So I was pretty terrified doing that with her. But she was very, very strict indeed. But I suppose she had to be.
MOSLEY: Yes. Let's take a short break. My guest today is award-winning actor Richard E. Grant. He's written a book about his life and his wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, called "A Pocketful Of Happiness." Washington was an acclaimed voice coach who helped actors perfect their dialect for films, television and theater. She died in 2021 from lung cancer. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL EVANS TRIO'S "HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN?")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Let's get back to my conversation with Richard E. Grant. He's written a memoir titled "A Pocketful Of Happiness," about the life he created with his late wife of 35 years, Joan Washington.
Richard, you and Joan had these endearing names for each other. She called you Swazi, as you mentioned earlier to us.
GRANT: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: Do you have a nickname for your daughter, your - Olivia?
GRANT: We call her Oily because we knew that we were having a daughter prior to her birth. And Joan said to me when we were driving around Scotland - she said, you know, with your length of torso, and you're almost two meters tall, I think that with your length of face, the chances are our child is going to look like Olive Oyl from, you know, "Popeye."
MOSLEY: (Laughter) Yeah.
GRANT: So we started calling her Oily before she was born. And, indeed, she was like a little spider monkey. It was so long, her torso was so long, so she fitted the bill. But we've called her Oily ever since, and she knows that. And, you know, it's referred to in the book as well.
MOSLEY: Your friend list reads like a call sheet for A-list actors and dignitaries.
GRANT: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: Sir Elton John, King Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. You even recount an interview you did with our former president, Donald Trump, back in 2013 for this series that you were doing. But the story of your friendship with Barbra Streisand is sweet and funny to me because it shows that even celebrities can be fanatics, too. And you and Joan actually bonded over Barbra during those first few months of dating.
GRANT: Well, I think that if she had found out that I was so obsessed with Streisand at this point, she might have run for the hills because she'd been - the first movie that she'd coached on as dialect coach was Streisand's directorial debut, "Yentl," in 1981...
MOSLEY: "Yentl." Yes, yes.
GRANT: ...Before I'd come to England. So - but I had written a fan letter to Barbra Streisand when I was 14 years old in 1971, '72 and - because I had read that she had had marital - romance problems with Ryan O'Neal. And she was sick and tired of the press. And, of course, I was reading this in the press. So I wrote her this letter, you know, with great integrity and devotion, saying, you know, I've been a lifelong fan of yours at the age of - and, please, come to Swaziland. We have a lovely house and a pool. And nobody will bother you here. You know, we've plenty of - one-horse town with...
MOSLEY: (Laughter) You invited her to, like, get over her heartbreak at your place.
GRANT: Yeah, with one cinema. You can come and stay as long as you like. I'm, you know, hoping for a hasty reply. Well, of course, that never happened. So during the Oscar - the run up to the Oscars in 2019, early 2019, Joan and I had a day off from all my press duties and went up to Malibu for lunch. And I said, we're just going to drive a little bit beyond here. And she said, we don't know anybody here. And I said, yeah, just indulge me. We went down this cul-de-sac and turned around at the end and stopped the car, got out. And she said, what are you doing? And I said, you know, just give me five minutes. She said, is that Barbra Streisand's gates?
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
GRANT: And I said, yes, it is. She said, Swazi, you're going to be arrested. The Oscars are in 10 days' time. Get a grip, you know?
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
GRANT: You do not want to be deported from America or arrested. Get back in the car. I said, give me two minutes. So I went, pressed the buzzer. What should I expect, darling, that Barbra Streisand is going to come out and say, oh, you must come in, I got your fan letter? No, of course not. The security guy comes. And he says, what are you doing here? What are you delivering?
And I said, no, no. You know, I wrote Barbra Streisand a fan letter when I was, you know, 14 years old, a hundred years ago. I'd been nominated for an Oscar. And I said, may I have permission to take a selfie outside her gates? And he said, yeah, sure. It's a public highway, you know, polite to ask. So I did. I then posted a picture of myself on Twitter and Instagram standing in front of her gates and a copy of the fan mail that I - fan letter I'd written to her, you know, way back when. And the next day, Oily called me up from London. I could hear her friends laughing in the background.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
GRANT: And she said, Dad, have you looked at your Twitter feed today? And I said, no, I haven't. I said, what's so funny? And she said, have a look. Barbra Streisand has replied to your tweet that you sent yesterday. And I said, don't mess with me. I am - this is too cruel. You can't mess with my psyche. This is - it means far too much. Do not do this. It's - you know, it's too painful. And she said, Dad, get a grip. Have a look, she has replied. And, indeed, she had. And, oh, my goodness. When I read that, the email that she had replied to me, I burst into tears. I could not believe that the person that I had, you know, heroine worshipped for decades had actually replied to me.
So then I met her at the Oscars and then subsequently at Donna Karan's house a year and a half later. And I had this, you know, almost two-hour one-to-one conversation with her, which was everything that I could possibly have imagined. And I did say to her at the end of it, I have a confession to make. She said, what's that? I said, I have commissioned a statue of your head for my yard, the garden in London. And she looked at me and she said, you are crazy. And I said, yes, I know that. And then she said, no, you are crazy. And I said, I stand guilty as charged. Anyway, it's in my garden. The...
MOSLEY: I've been trying to envision this statue.
GRANT: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: This - it's like a...
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Please describe it.
GRANT: It's two foot tall. It's two foot tall. It's of her. It's from her neck up to the top of her head. And it's angled so that you see it from - favoring her left profile...
MOSLEY: What is it made out of?
GRANT: ...Which is how she likes to get shot. It's made out of a dense silicon and fiberglass that a sculptor I commissioned to make it - so that it'll be weatherproof.
MOSLEY: And did you say it's from her left side because that's her good side? She likes to take photos from that side.
GRANT: Yeah. Obviously, you can walk around it, and you can see every side. But it's positioned so that - there's a mirror behind it as well so that you can...
(LAUGHTER)
GRANT: You can see both sides, but it favors her left profile.
MOSLEY: Oh, my gosh.
GRANT: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: Sounds like you keep everything because you still had the letters. You still had copies of things that you wrote.
GRANT: Oh, yeah. I'm a hoarder, Tonya. I'm a hoarder. My house is maximalist from floor to ceiling. And both Joan and I and our daughter as well have inherited this absolute obsession with collecting stuff.
MOSLEY: Let's take a quick break. Our guest today...
GRANT: OK (laughter).
MOSLEY: ...Is award-winning actor Richard E. Grant. He's written a memoir about his 35-year marriage to his late wife, Joan Washington, titled "A Pocketful Of Happiness." Shortly before Joan died, she told Richard and their daughter to find a pocketful of happiness in each day. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAIA WILMER AND RAPHAEL LEHNEN'S "MIGRATIONS")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is award-winning actor Richard E Grant. He's written a book titled "A Pocketful Of Happiness," which is a love letter to his late wife, Joan Washington.
Richard, you were nominated for several awards, including an Oscar for your supporting role in the black comedy "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" And you write about the sweet moment when you got the call, the moment that you and Joan shared, which was utter disbelief, as you describe it.
GRANT: It's - you know, it's - the idea that growing up in the smallest country in Southern - in the Southern Hemisphere, which was then called Swaziland, now called Eswatini, that I did literally had one movie house and didn't have television until after I had left in 1980. So the idea that, A, you could possibly become - you know, you could make it as an actor, let alone have a career in the movies was so fantastical that I suppose, again, keeping a diary was a way of trying to sort of bottle that, of making what is - seems so unreal real.
But, you know, Joan was incredibly supportive and thrilled for me that I got it. But she really floored me because on the night before I was due to fly with her to go to the Oscar ceremony in February 2019, she said, Swaz, I've got something to tell you. And I said, what's that? And she said, I'm not coming to the Oscars. I'm like, what do you mean you're not coming? She said, no. So I'm five-foot-three. I haven't had, you know, 15 years of plastic surgery. I am going to be dwarfed by the Amazon height of all the women in Jimmy Choo heels all trying to speak to you. And she said it's just a nightmare for me because it's like being invisible. She went, take Oily. She loves all that. She'll be six foot in her heels, and she'll enjoy it. And she said, you'll see the wisdom of my decision subsequently.
And I was absolutely furious. And, of course, when I got there, I realized that she was right because everything that she predicted would happen. And, of course, she didn't see me literally prostrating myself in front of Barbra Streisand at the Governors Ball afterwards...
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
GRANT: ...Which Oily then said, this is exactly why Mum shouldn't have been here. And she was thrilled.
MOSLEY: Yes.
GRANT: That's a very long reply to your short question.
MOSLEY: No. Oh - no, it's not - I mean it was - it's what happened. And it is - I saw the beautiful pictures of you and your daughter on that night. But I mentioned earlier how Joan was so private and you're so public. Was that a delicate dance, your extroversion as a famous actor and her desire to be private?
GRANT: I think that she never sought - she said the very nature of her work is to be - that it's invisible. That if you're noticing an actor's accent, then it's - she hasn't succeeded in self-effacing her work out of the picture, as it were. So I think that it was the attraction of opposites that - the fact that I was so - have been so open about everything that she isn't. She also - she came from a very secure family background, whereas mine wasn't. So my obsession with the toxicity of secrets and families didn't apply to hers in the same way. So she understood where I was coming from. But she said, oh, for goodness sake. I think if she had known that I was publishing this book, she said, oh, for goodness sake, Swaz. Who will want to know about, you know, what happened to us? And, you know, it's - what I've loved about it is that it's kept me able to talk about her and our life together. So it feels like it keeps her alive longer in some odd way, if that makes sense.
MOSLEY: Oh, it does. Did she...
GRANT: But you're right. It is a contradiction, being that she was so private and I'm, you know, very open-book about everything.
MOSLEY: Did she have that same sensibility of awe, though, and wonder? - I mean, because you're a fanatic about so many people, you know, including Barbra.
GRANT: No, she was - she is the most un-starstruck person imaginable, which was perfect for her job because I think if she'd gone into every job being as sort of wide-eyed and tongue-tied as I get with people that I hugely admire, she wouldn't have been able to do her job properly. So she treated - and I think this is why the former Prince Charles, now King Charles, liked and got on with her so well is because she treated prince or pauper with exactly the same attitude. She wasn't impressed by anything, she said. The person has got to impress me with their kindness and their humanity, not their title or their status.
MOSLEY: You know, something I'm curious about, as someone who writes a journal every day - so do you carve out time in your day every day? Is it in the morning? Is it at night? Do you skip days?
GRANT: I do it at the end of the day. When do you do yours?
MOSLEY: It depends. Sometimes I do it in the morning, and sometimes I do it at night. But I've been keeping a journal since I was 10, too. Yeah.
GRANT: Wow.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
GRANT: Are you published?
MOSLEY: No, no. They're just stacks and stacks of journals that I keep.
GRANT: Tonya, Tonya, Tonya. Come on.
MOSLEY: And I think, like, maybe...
GRANT: Come on.
MOSLEY: Maybe my kids will want them when they're, you know, old. I also have journals that I write to them.
GRANT: Oh, I bet they do.
MOSLEY: Yeah, that - like, just letters to them.
GRANT: Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
GRANT: Yeah.
MOSLEY: But I'm fascinated to know, was there ever a time, maybe when you were young in Swaziland, where you envisioned these journals being a record for your thoughts in books being published as you are now?
GRANT: Never, never even - not for a nanosecond did that cross my mind because I thought that, you know, my chances of actually becoming a professional actor was so scoffed at and remote an impossibility that - no, it didn't. It was like just fantasy. It was like being - every 12-year-old in 1969, when I was growing up, wanted to go to the moon because Neil Armstrong had set foot on it in, you know, July that year. So...
MOSLEY: But Armstrong - right.
GRANT: ...Saying you wanted to be an actor...
MOSLEY: Who fulfilled that in your mind's imagination, though, for acting? - because there had to be some folks that you were looking up to to even see that as a possibility.
GRANT: Oh, I fixated on Donald Sutherland because he grew up in a tiny town in Canada. He was over six foot tall, had a very long face and didn't look like Robert Redford. And I thought, oh, well, if Donald Sutherland can make it as an actor, maybe there's a chance that there's room for another long-faced person. So, yeah, he kept me going. And then that kept me going for, you know, until I was 12 years old. And then I saw "Funny Girl" with another person that I'd never seen before who had a very long face and a long nose. And I thought, oh, this is Barbra Streisand here. And when she was singing "I'm The Greatest Star," I thought, oh, well, she's not singing this to anybody else but me. And so Donald was shifted out, and Barbra then became the person that I thought, well, you know, talent and beauty and all those things. And her extraordinary everything is - was something to, you know, be galvanized by.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. My guest today is award-winning actor Richard E. Grant. He's written a book about his life and his wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, called "A Pocketful Of Happiness." Washington was an acclaimed voice coach who helped actors perfect their dialect for films, television and theater. She died in 2021 from lung cancer. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESSICA WILLIAMS' "THE CHILD WITHIN")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Let's get back to my conversation with Richard E. Grant. He's written a memoir titled "A Pocketful Of Happiness" about the life he created with his late wife of 35 years, Joan Washington.
You know, I was thinking and reading the book. And you give, in detail, those days when you were caring for Joan in her last days when she was very sick. And there's this complicated dance that often happens when a person is caring for another. Sometimes there's resentment for the actual caretaker. Sometimes there's resentment from the caretaker for the person suffering. And sometimes that can cloud a relationship, you know, especially towards the end because there's so much wrapped up in all of that. How did you navigate those tough times? - because you bore the brunt of Joan's realization that she was losing her freedom and that her life was ending.
GRANT: So she didn't have anybody else to lash out at, if you like. And so when she got very exhausted or very frustrated, I was the person who obviously bore the brunt of that. But exhaustion is the thing that really undoes you. And the - there was a palliative care - a company called Longfield that was a few miles away from the cottage where we were living in the countryside at this point because she was too fragile to come back and be in London. And they said to us two weeks before Joan died, we will have two palliative nurses come in for 10 minutes, you know, at breakfast, lunch and at dinner just to change the bed, give you 10 minutes of being on your own. And in the final 10 days of her life, they said, don't feel guilty about this, but we're going to have a palliative nurse that will come at 10:30 at night and go through the night with your wife until 6 o'clock in the morning, which will allow you and your daughter time to sleep and catch up because otherwise, you're going to be - you'll be incapable. You'll be wrecked.
And it was an absolute godsend to have that. And I am indebted to these palliative carers beyond measure. And I'm raising money as - in every possible way that I can to support them because it's all voluntary, not state-subsidized. So that really helped. And I think that, again, when, you know, talking about the car driving - car lesson analogy earlier, if you're trying to teach somebody in your own family, Joan was much more mindful of being impatient with palliative carers who came in for these short spurts than she would have been if I had suggested, you know, shall we change the sheets, or, shall we move you around or whatever?
MOSLEY: You write in great detail about Joan's last moments. You were there at her bedside, as you mentioned. You told her it was OK to let go.
GRANT: Yeah, because she had asked me. She said, Swaz, you know, please let me go. Don't make me hang on. And I said, yes, absolutely, you must. And I sat on, you know, the final afternoon on Thursday, the 2 of September 2021. And I was talking to her the whole time, and she was drifting in and out of sleep and consciousness, just stroking her hand, talking to her. And at 7 p.m. that evening, I noticed that her - I thought that her hand was cooling in mine. And I thought, what do I do? Do I let go and call Oily, who was sitting out in the garden with her friends or - I dare not let go.
And I thought that her - physically, her hand was getting cooler in mine. And her breathing got very, very shallow all of a sudden, and there was longer gaps between each intake of breath. And then at 7:30, she inhaled, and then I counted, and then it turned out to be her last breath. So I was so grateful that it was so peaceful and calm, and I felt so privileged that I was there holding her hand and talking to her right up until she, you know, was no more.
MOSLEY: About that moment, you write, (reading) it's the sheer aloneness of being alone. Wherever you go, whoever and however many people you meet and play with, you return alone.
Is that a feeling that ever subsides, or is it something that you want to feel?
GRANT: Both. You are overwhelmed by that isolation in the first months that follow. And then you get used to it. And I think because we'd been together for almost four decades, I was so habituated to what her response to anything would be - like if she said to me, so, right, you know, when I'm finished talking to you today, she'll say, well, how old is Tonya? What was her accent? What was the quality of her voice? You know, she'd want to know all those details. And so I will not walk out of the studio and go, well, Joan, Tonya sounded like this and this and this. But it is an ongoing silent conversation I have with her. So - and once I'd rumbled that thought, she may not be physically here or be able to answer, but I can fill in what and I know what her response would be, and that I found enormously comforting and helpful so that I don't feel that she has - that she's gone and lost forever, although, of course, physically she is...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
GRANT: ...If that makes sense.
MOSLEY: I was so moved by, of course, this entire book, but I was so moved by the tributes...
GRANT: Thank you.
MOSLEY: ...To Joan from your friends and colleagues at the end of the book. It's not just the names because, of course, you have a lot of famous friends. The both of you did. It's that - it's what they wrote about her. And after reading...
GRANT: I know. It's extraordinary.
MOSLEY: I know. After reading about your relationship, I actually had a good cry reading about what a remarkable person Joan was. And that's got to be so gratifying for you to see what others saw and felt that you knew to be true about your wife.
GRANT: Yeah, that was amazing because going back to what you'd asked me earlier about her resistance about telling people that she was terminally ill, that she was so determined not to be pitied or to be defined by that, and we counterargued, Oily and I, in saying that, you know, think of all the times we've been to memorials or funerals of friends and said, if only the person in the box could hear whatever we was saying about them. And I said, by telling people that you have, you know, months to live, it gives them the opportunity to express what they feel towards you. And she was so adamant that we shouldn't do that. And we overrode her on that because we said we weren't prepared to lie and have the burden of having to keep this thing as a secret and have to pretend that she was fine when she wasn't.
And the generosity and outpouring of love that was expressed in flowers and messages and visits and everything imaginable was so beyond what she could have anticipated, that it buoyed up her spirits enormously and sort of hovercrafted (ph) her along. She had the grace to say - a day after we had told our 30 people closest to us, she said, I realize how valuable this is and that telling people is really helpful. And again, when all these people that she had worked with wrote their kind of eulogies to her, she got to read all of them before she died. And she was frankly astonished that she was held in such high esteem by people because - I don't know whether it's an English thing or just a reticence, and people think, well, you know...
MOSLEY: They withhold it. Yeah.
GRANT: ...They can't really say what they really feel. Yeah, they withhold. So I'm very grateful for that. And that's the postscript of the memoir, of all the things that other people said about her, not just her husband...
MOSLEY: Yes.
GRANT: ...Blowing her trumpet.
MOSLEY: I'm so glad she had a chance to read some of them for sure.
GRANT: Yeah. Yeah.
MOSLEY: Richard E. Grant, thank you for this conversation, and thank you for sharing Joan with us.
GRANT: Thank you so much for all your incredibly informed questions and enthusiasm for the book. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you, Tonya. Thank you.
MOSLEY: Richard E. Grant is an award-winning actor and author of "A Pocketful Of Happiness." To keep up with what's on the show and to get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "IF I NEEDED SOMEONE")
MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "IF I NEEDED SOMEONE")
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