Richard E Grant’s bereavement diary is painfully moving – until he’s sidetracked by Barbra Streisand

The actor Richard E Grant has always kept a diary ever since, aged 10, he woke up in the back of his mother’s car to see her bonking his father’s best friend in the front seat. He couldn’t tell anyone but he wanted to write it down so that was the start of his diary-keeping habit. This book is based on the diary he kept from December 2020 to September 2021 while his wife Joan Washington was dying.

She was a famous voice and dialect coach and he first met her in 1982 when, as a beginner actor, he was trying to lose his Swaziland accent. She was 10 years older than him and already highly respected in the acting profession; he was working as a waiter while failing to get any parts. Moreover he could only afford two lessons with her. But then someone at the RSC needed to learn a Siswati accent and Joan asked him to her house for supper in return for recording a passage in Siswati, and they ended up in bed. Soon afterwards his career took off when he starred in Withnail and I and they were married in November 1986. After many miscarriages and a stillbirth, they had a daughter Olivia, known as Oilly, “our supreme and perfect being” to whom this book is dedicated.

Their lives were going swimmingly until, just before Christmas 2020, Joan complained of feeling breathless and went for a chest X-ray. After that, everything moved terrifyingly fast. She was given a CT scan, and a Pet scan, and told on January 11 2021 that she had stage four lung cancer which had already spread to her lymph nodes, adrenal glands and brain. She was given 12 to 18 months to live, an estimate which turned out to be sadly optimistic.

Joan didn’t want to tell anyone but Richard insisted they tell their friends, who all rallied round. Nigella Lawson and Skye Gyngell sent food, Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson sent flowers, Miriam Margolyes and Emma Thompson wrote lovely letters and Prince Charles came to visit them in their Cotswold cottage. But Joan faded quickly – by March she needed a wheelchair to attend the Marsden, and by June the oncologist said there was no point in further treatment.

Joan made Richard promise she would die at home, not in a hospice, and he agreed – he says the NHS were wonderful in sending palliative care nurses to their cottage. By August she had patches of lucidity but not often and he was thinking if she were a dog or a cat, a vet would have put her down. On September 1 he was holding Joan’s hand while scrolling through local funeral directors on his iPhone. On September 2, she died. They had been married for 35 years.

All the diary part of this book is incredibly moving, but then, weirdly and in my view tastelessly, Grant intersperses it with flashbacks to his own Hollywood career. There is a long account of attending the 2019 Oscars when he finally got to meet his long-term crush, Barbara Streisand. He had first written to her as a boy of 14 when he invited her to come and stay in Swaziland to recover from her failed romance with Ryan O’Neal. Later, as an adult, he commissioned a two-foot high sculpture of her head for his garden and took a selfie outside her gates in Los Angeles.

But then at the 2019 Oscars he actually met her and helped to re-attach a brooch on her dress. “Swaziboy is now on his knees, before his lifelong idol, leaning in and taking his sweet time to get his fingers dexterously around that rogue pin, and making sure it’s reattached. Veeeeery. S L O W L Y.” His daughter, who is with him, remarks: “Just as well Mum’s not here!”

Quite. I mean having spent so many pages convincing us that Joan is the love of his life, you then wonder if he wouldn’t rather have been married to Barbra Streisand. If you ever need evidence of the weirdness of luvvies, this book is a peerless example.

A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant is published by Simon & Schuster at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books