Richard E Grant’s wife, Joan Washington, died a year ago. The actor’s new book, A Pocketful of Happiness, chronicles the nine months from her cancer diagnosis to her death, interspersed with longer, happier memories of their 38 years together.
This month, he starts oneman shows based on the book on a tour that brings him to New Zealand for a second time – he was first here in the late 1990s on the writer’s festival circuit with his first memoir, With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant. That book showed a wry eye on being in the movie business. The new one does, too, but mostly A Pocketful of Happiness is about those months when Grant and Washington and their only daughter, Olivia, were preparing themselves for the worst, then the worst happening.
He and Washington met in 1982, when she was a dialect and dialogue coach to the stars’s Henry Higgins on stage a couple of times.
