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. The guy who goes to the Oscars is the same guy who sits alone in a chain restaurant in Salisbury waiting for his béarnaise sauce to arrive. 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). 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? To have someone always beside you – or even just on the end of the phone – who understands these dizzying shifts and all their attendant lonelinesses, and who loves you wherever in the world you are, is a precious thing indeed.

Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP View image in fullscreen Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’.The most revealing moment in his book comes late on, when Grant spends a night alone in Salisbury, where he has been filming Persuasion with Dakota Johnson. Grant moved to the UK to pursue his acting career, and has been a fixture on our screens since his breakout role in Withnail and I in 1987. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor. Richard E Grant: ‘his feelings for everyone and everything are so immediate, and always blasted out undiluted’. There is a too-muchness about him, a Tiggerish-ness born of his desire to please (a trait common in those whose parents divorced when they were children, as his did).

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.

But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book.

It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name.Nevertheless, those things that he is able to describe – the sight of her tapestry kit by their bed, the way he still talks to her even though she is no longer in the world – have a universality about them, an ordinariness that resonates. Told with candour in Richard’s utterly unique style, A Pocketful of Happiness is a powerful, funny and moving celebration of life’s unexpected joys. A deeply personal memoir of love, loss and a life lived together told brilliantly with candour and humour. Convinced of his own persuasiveness, he once tried, he tells us, to get a part exchange, not on a car, but on a loo seat.

I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling. All this is carefully described by Grant in his new memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, which takes the form mostly of the diary he wrote in the last year of his wife’s life (Washington, a celebrated voice coach, died in September 2021, two months before their 35th wedding anniversary).Even as I admired Grant for his obvious devotion to, and care for, his wife at the end, I was uneasy: suspicious, you might say. 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. Sometimes, this took the form of cheering visits: our now King Charles, for instance, arrived at their cottage bearing a bag of mangoes and flowers from Highgrove. In 1982, aspiring actor Richard E Grant met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. 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 ?