A Pocketful of Happiness

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Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost forty years. 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? 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.

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 were writing a review of this moving memoir, there would be many, many fond and admiring adjectives used to describe almost everyone who appears in the pages: witty, forthright, feisty, silky-soft, button-bright, hilarious, loving, generous, heartbreaking, warmhearted, inclusive, brilliant, sparky, amazing, charming, gilded, entertaining. It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.

But it’s also possible that he hopes to make the reader understand that it doesn’t matter how many glamorous friends a person has if their true love is dying. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. Funny, moving and perceptive, A Pocketful of Happiness is an insight into the life of a much loved British actor.

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). 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).

When Joan died in 2021, her final challenge to him was to ‘find a pocketful of happiness in every day’. When his beloved wife Joan died in 2021 after almost forty years together, she set him a challenge: to find a pocketful of happiness in every day. 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. If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over. When she felt utterly terrible, it was wonderfully distracting to have Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson eating ice-cream on her bed; to listen to Rupert Everett talk of his latest starring role (“I’ve just finished playing a gay stroke victim so might as well go straight to the Oscars now, darling, as I’m a shoo-in”).

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. It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name.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. he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm.