Eswatini-born actor Richard E Grant still has an “ongoing conversation” with his late wife, Joan Washington, who died in 2021.
Her death plunged him into an “abyss of grief”. They met in 1983, and married three years later.
There is one dying wish of hers he refused to honour. A month before she died, she recorded a poem and requested Richard play it on their daughter Olivia’s wedding day.
“It would have wiped everybody out. That’s the brutal bit,” Richard shared. So, instead, someone close to the family read the poem aloud.
Richard E Grant performs nightly ritual for his wife four years after her death
Such is the strength and endurance of Richard E Grant’s love for his late wife Joan Washington.
The Withnail And I star, now 68 years old, lost his life partner four years ago. Yet he still emails her regularly – nightly, even – with news of what he got up to that day.
“I have no woolly spiritual delusion that she’s hearing this, or that I’m going to get a response, but it somehow keeps the connection going,” he told Davina McCall on an episode of her Begin Again podcast earlier this year.
“So I write to her – ‘Dear J, today would really have amused you…’ It makes it feel like that person is still there – it’s an ongoing conversation.”
He lost his mother two years after Joan died
Almost exactly two years ago – and two years after Joan passed away – Richard E Grant lost his mother, too.
“Complicated gratitude to my mother, who died this morning at the age of 93, for giving me the Gift of Life,” he tweeted at the time.
“During a filming break this morning I saw that I had eight missed calls from Africa and knew weirdly why, which proved to be that my 93-year-old mother died this morning,” he said in a short video.
“We had an incredibly complicated relationship, and she was somebody that for me anyway, was emotionally withdrawn, withheld her approval of anything.
“I went to stay with her for a couple of weeks, six weeks after my wife had died, with Covid restrictions being lifted, and she sent me a very terse email at the end of the trip, saying: ‘I regret to say your visit was an absolute disaster, we only have two things in common, books and classical music,'” he said.
So, complicated indeed. But with Joan, not so.
Before she died, she challenged Richard and their daughter Olivia to find a pocketful of happiness each day. It served as a mantra by which he could navigate the “abyss of grief” that followed her passing.
He will ‘never again’ speak to people who refused to acknowledge his grief
During a conversation at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival last year, Richard said that, after Joan passed away, he has had “people cross the road rather than talk” and acknowledge his grief, per the Mail.
“Whether they think you’re going to fall apart and you’re an emotional wreck, I don’t know. But I will never speak to them again.”
He recalled a couple ignoring him when he waved to them. They had lived close to the holiday home Richard and Joan shared in Provence, France.
“As I walked towards them they both turned their heads. I thought, [bleep] you. I felt I was being punished because Joan had died. They had never acknowledged it. Maybe they didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Catch Richard E Grant on Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel on Saturday at 7:05pm on BBC One.
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