‘Does time heal? I don’t think so’: Richard E Grant on love, loss – and bonking

A month before she died, the acclaimed dialect coach Joan Washington recorded a poem to be played on her daughter’s wedding day. Washington died on 2 September 2021 from lung cancer, concluding a 38-year marriage to the actor and diarist Richard E Grant. Olivia, the couple’s daughter, celebrated her marriage this past September at the house Grant and Washington shared in London. Grant wore an elegant tuxedo, his blue eyes startling, and the house was swollen with flowers. His speech included “all the things a father says. You want it to be as humorous and as heartfelt as possible, in that combination, so people aren’t stabbing themselves with their forks.” But the family couldn’t bring themselves to play Washington’s recording: “It would have wiped everybody out.” The event, with Washington absent, was bittersweet. “That’s the brutal bit,” Grant goes on. “You so want to share that with her,” and then, referring to Olivia, “Not having her mum there…” He trails off.

Grant and I are meeting at a hotel in Richmond, a brisk uphill walk from his home. He has arrived punctually, impeccably clothed and groomed, with a watch on each wrist, his dark hair greying slightly now at 67 years old. Olivia’s celebrations are fresh in his memory. In the end, someone close to the family read Washington’s selected poem. Olivia was supported by, among others, three women in the congregation, all good friends of Grant’s, who have “appointed themselves her fairy godmothers, like something from Sleeping Beauty.” The thought seems to cheer him. “They took her to buy her wedding dress. They took her to lunch. They’ve offered themselves up as mother mentors…” He shrugs in astonishment.

Eyes up: coat and scarf by driesvannoten.com; and jumper by omhu.co.uk. Photograph: Simon Emmett/The Observer

I ask who they are.

“Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he says. “It will sound name-droppy.”

This is at odds with the man I was expecting to meet. Grant has been one of the UK’s best-loved actors since 1987, when he appeared as a perpetually drunk out-of-work actor in Withnail and I. But since Washington’s death he has become almost as well-known for sharing, with remarkable candour, across Instagram and in his diaries, his experience of bereavement and grief. Last year he published A Pocketful of Happiness, a memoir that charts Washington’s illness. The book is named for an instruction Washington gave to Grant while she was unwell: to look for moments of joy in the everyday, a sudden downpour, the changing of the seasons, the ability to run gleefully alongside a river. In it are the gritty, sometimes banal details of terminal illness: the scans, the diagnoses, the sharing of diagnoses with friends, the slow and desperate descent into loss. And yet mixed with all the bad news is Grant’s other life, that of an actor still active in Hollywood, taking meetings, conducting an impromptu Oscar campaign, having dinner with well-known friends. The book is as name-droppy as a celebrity diary could get, in exactly the way readers would hope for. And it, too, is bittersweet.

In person, Grant is charming and strikingly open and quick to laugh – entertaining company, even while discussing loss.

I ask how his grief has changed over the past three years.

“I suppose you get used to the unreality of not having that person there,” he says. “What I’ve found so difficult is not having her to download to, to download everything that has happened in my day.” When Washington was becoming ill, beginning to prefer solitude over parties, Grant began to feel increasingly isolated. A psychotherapist suggested he was suffering withdrawal symptoms – the illness was slowly extracting Washington from his life. “This platitude that ‘time heals’…” he goes on, but the thought seems to vanish briefly. “I don’t think it does. I think you navigate your way around it. You never get over it. And I’m not actively trying to get over it, either.”

I ask what has helped. “I write to her every night,” he says. “What do you write?” I ask. “Everything,” he says. “Stuff I know would amuse her.” He looks at me steadily. “I’ll describe what you look like. What you’re wearing. How old you are. Do you have kids. All of that. She would want to know what your accent is, because that was her speciality. She would ask, ‘What did Alex sound like? What is the shape of his mouth? Does it open when he talks?’”

The questions hang between us for a moment.

“I have no spiritual or religious delusion that I’m ever going to get a reply. But after 38 years of marriage, I can hear what her response would be. It feels as close a connection as I can have. And I’ve found it very hopeful, that at the end of the day I’m having a conversation.”

Grant and Washington met in 1983 when he, a mostly out- of-work actor, convinced her, an established professional, to give him private dialect lessons despite not having enough money. Washington agreed, a little reluctantly, and from there they remained together. Grant has written that his marriage is “the story of my adult life” and that “we began a conversation in 1983 and we never stopped.” When I bring this up he says, “Well, it officially ended,” and then: “The ongoing conversation is now in written form.” Grant believes discussion was the bedrock of his marriage. “The physical intimacy…” he begins. “Even if you’re in five hours of tantric sex with someone, it’s relative to the amount of time in your day – it’s a very small amount of time. Most of your life with somebody is spent in the intimacy of conversation. When you share absolutely everything with another human being, who sees you completely for who you are, to me that is unquantifiable.” He sighs, then adds, “What a thing to have.”

Washington sometimes described Grant’s later career as “the condiment-ary years” – if a film was a roast, he would be the mustard, meant to complement the dish. This idea seems to diminish his ability and range as an actor: he was Oscar-nominated in 2019 for Can You Ever Forgive Me; he stole the show in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn; he has appeared in some of the UK’s greatest comedies and dramas and comedy-dramas, including How To Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), in which he sometimes wears on his neck a boil in the shape of a second face.

Star turn: with Paul McGann in a scene from Withnail and I, 1987. Photograph: Handmade Films/Kobal/Shutterstock

But Grant agrees with Washington’s analysis. “The way my career has gone, the majority of things I’ve done have been supporting roles, which puts you very much in the flavour department,” he says. This is true of Grant’s latest project, The Franchise, a TV series in which he plays a poison-tongued actor making his way through the filming of a superhero movie – a role perfect in its intermittent impact. When we meet, Grant has yet to see a finished episode. But he trusts its writers, Armando Iannucci and Jon Browne, and the series director, Sam Mendes, none of whom he’d worked with previously. “I’d met Sam before. And Armando. But meeting them and getting a job are two separate things.”

Grant has suffered from self-doubt throughout his life. His diaries zing with unexpected worries: that he won’t make an audition, that he’ll miss out on a part, that even when a part has been awarded to him, it might be taken away. Before he landed the role of Withnail, Grant had been out of work for almost a year. To pass the time he spent hours reading magazines in WH Smith, hoping not to be ejected. It was a destabilising period that brought him close to giving up on acting. But when the offer came, his self-worth rocketed. It is not lost on Grant that his entire career is built on his depiction of an actor who cannot find work.

I wonder if he still feels relief when he gets parts now. “It would be disingenuous to say that I still feel the same level of, whatever you’d call it, relief, I suppose. But yes. I was speaking to some actor friends the other day and they said, ‘We always feel we’re going to be fired on the first day.’ They till feel it. It doesn’t go away. What does change is you get used to that fear or neurosis. It doesn’t crush you in quite the same way. But the terror doesn’t abate. And people do get fired. People got fired from The Franchise! The terror is reality-based. And there’s no safety net. If you’re fired, you’re fucked.”

Family ties: with daughter Olivia, left, and wife, Joan Washington. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy

“Have you been fired recently?” I ask.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “But would I know?”

I ask if his approach to work has changed since Washington’s death.

“The approach hasn’t changed,” he says. “There’s been perhaps a shift in perspective about what I might previously worried or got uptight about. When you’ve gone through a bereavement, you think: it’s just another job, it will pass. You become more third eye. Things have less impact on you. Though in the middle of filming, you on’t think about that. You think, ‘My God, am I going to be fired today?’”

I ask if he can recall something that might have bothered him five years ago that no longer bothers him now. “There’s always one person on a job who drives everybody crazy,” he says. “I’m sure it’s the same for you. I would come home and have a rant about what this person was doing. But now, because I don’t have somebody to rant to, it’s forced me to, I suppose, take a step back. I think: it really doesn’t matter, in the scheme of things. Which I know is a terrible cliché.”

Grant grew up in Swaziland, now Eswatini, as part of an expat society trapped in the dying breaths of empire. He arrived in London in 1982, hoping to become an actor. In his diaries he writes frequently about his ambition at the time, a great drive to play a role in the world. Partway through our meeting, I ask if he’s as ambitious as he once was. “Oh, I think that if you’re a son of a narcissist, it is probably the greatest motivation to keep that ambition alive,” he says. He is referring to his mother, Leonne Esterhuysen. “She died a year ago, she was 93, and she withheld approval right up until her last breath. The lifelong habit to prove yourself to somebody, that doesn’t go away just because the person’s died…” He pauses. “I’ve seen people who have had more stable upbringings than I had who are less driven, less ambitious. The drive comes as a result of trying to prove wrong all the people I grew up with – who mocked the notion of me becoming a professional actor.”

‘I’ve seen people who have had more stable upbringings who are less driven’: Richard E Grant wears coat, top, trousers, boots, all givenchy.com. Photograph: Simon Emmett/The Observer

Grant’s father Henrik was Swaziland’s head of education. His mother was a homemaker. Grant describes his upbringing as “unrestricted”. Among adults there was “a laxity, maybe, in the moral compass,” he says, because it felt a little like everyone was on holiday. He describes the expat life as centring on “the three ‘B’s: boredom, booze and bonking.” When Grant was 10, he awoke from a nap to find his mother having sex with his father’s best friend – they were all together in a car. “Saw my mother bonking,” is how he puts it to me. Grant kept the discovery to himself. When the pressure of his silence became too much, he let the secret spill out into the diary he has kept ever since.

A year later, Grant’s parents divorced. He sided with his father, the cuckolded party, and became estranged from his mother, who eventually moved to South Africa. Soon afterward, Grant’s father fell into alcoholism, and he became verbally and physically abusive. “My father hadn’t been a heavy drinker before then,” he says, “but once she left, he drank a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch daily until he died – the next 30 years.” At work, Grant’s father would be “charming, erudite, funny, a very engaged person”. At home he would become “an unrecognisable monster”.

Grant believes that his childhood ended when his parents divorced, when he was 11. “I was having to parent my parent,” he says, “on a nightly basis.”

I ask what that involved, exactly.

“Trying to get him into bed. Getting out of the way when he got violent. Answering the phone and lying to people. Saying, ‘Oh, he’s in the bath’ or ‘He’s not back from work’ or ‘He’s gone out.’”

Once, Grant had the idea to fix his father’s alcoholism by pouring his drink – 12 or so bottles of scotch – down the drain. His father walked in on the attempt and brought a gun to the back of Grant’s head. Grant ducked and escaped into the garden, where his father eventually found him, and took a shot. The bullet missed, only because, Grant thinks, his father was already drunk.

While Grant recalls this story he seems unfazed. “It was the one and only time he had a gun to my head,” he says. “And I think that night was a kind of watershed moment for him.” His father had remarried by this time, and Grant believes his stepmother removed the gun from the home. “But the drinking continued.”

When I call these events abuse, he smiles, and I ask why. “Because it’s so long ago now. And if you know that as the norm of your adolescence… It’s relative to somebody who’s been held in a cellar for 10 years and impregnated by an incestuous father. What I had is not that.”

I ask if the word “abuse” seems overblown.

“No,” he says. “But I think it has become a word that in the current conversation is applied to everything. Somebody can say a maître d’ has been abusive towards me, my boss has been abusive. There are so many variations.”

In his diaries, Grant writes with great fondness about his father. He recalls watching his name appear on the end credits of Withnail and I and feeling the overwhelming desire for his father to have witnessed his success. His father, who once described Grant as “an overwound clock” because of his remarkable energy, had worried his son was escaping Swaziland to “live a life wearing makeup and tights and narrowly avoiding buggery,” Grant says. “His abiding terror was that I would become destitute.”

Every inch a hero: in a scene from the Franchise. Photograph: Richard E grant in the Franchise/HBO

He goes on, “I loved and adored him. Who he became when he was drunk was not who he was. If he’d been like that all day long, I would have run away. But he was so filled with remorse, it was clear that the alcoholism was something he had difficulty controlling.” Grant supported him until he died, in 1981. “He had been cuckolded and robbed. And I saw first-hand the cost of what that did to him.” On his deathbed, his father had whispered, “I’ve never stopped loving your mother.”

In 1999, aged 42, Grant experienced a kind of nervous breakdown. “I was angry and unhappy with my life and career,” he has written, and “became convinced I was paralysed.” (Grant’s father was also 42 when the divorce occurred.) Worried for her husband, Washington called Steve Martin, a longtime friend, who passed on the name of an analyst who convinced Grant to reconcile with his mother. “It took 18 months,” he says, “but we had a conversation in which she finally said three magic words: ‘Please forgive me.’” It was the first time Grant had revealed to his mother what he had witnessed in the car. “And she cried, which I’d never seen her do before.” The conversation was the “greatest epiphany” of Grant’s life. “I went from holding on to resentment and anger towards someone to forgiving them, and all of the pain shifted instantaneously.”

Around this time, Grant came to the conclusion that all secrets are toxic, and that laying bare his life could become a therapeutic act. “My thinking went, if you’re open about everything, it can feel like protection. What can somebody say to you? What’s the worst that can happen? You can’t be wrongfooted. If somebody’s going to take a pot-shot at you, you think, ‘Well, OK, go ahead, I’m not hiding anything.’” He gives this as the reason for publishing his diaries, and for sharing frank moments of happiness on Instagram, where he has amassed several hundred thousand followers. If his life is already made public, there is no reason for people to come looking for more.

When Washington first became unwell, she asked Grant and their daughter not to share the news with friends. “We argued about it,” Grant says. “She didn’t speak to us for two days.” Grant felt obliged to, and he worried the lying would become too much. “I couldn’t go back to being 11 years old, having to say, ‘Oh, no, dad’s at work,’ or ‘Sorry, Joan’s not available.’” When they did announce the news, Washington “experienced an avalanche of generosity and love, and she apologised.” Grant shrugs a beautiful, mournful shrug. “She said, ‘OK, I see the value in this.’”

The Franchise starts on Monday on Sky Comedy and NOW

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Dani Guinsberg using Daimon Barber Haircare & Facetheory Skincare; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photographer’s assistant Tom Frimley; digital tech by Claudia Gschwend; shot on location at The Petersham Hotel