Richard E Grant says there are friends he’ll ‘never speak to again’ after death of wife Joan

‘Withnail and I’ star has felt he ‘was being punished’ by absent friends after wife’s death

Richard E Grant has expressed his frustration over former friends abandoning him after the death of his wife Joan Washington.

Washington, a dialect coach, was 75 when she died of lung cancer in September 2021. The couple, who married in 1986, share two children, and had been together for 38 years at the time of her death.

Grant, 66, has spoken about his grieving process on several occasions in the two years since Washington died. In his 2022 memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, the Withnail and I star included letters that she’d sent him over the course of their relationship.

More recently, the Swazi-British actor has spoken about the changes he noticed in his social circles after Washington’s death, claiming that some friends have intentionally avoided speaking to him.

“Subsequent to her death, I have had people cross the road rather than talk,” Grant said in a conversation at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Sunday (15 October).

“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.”

The actor continued by recalling an occasion during which a couple who’d lived near to his and Washington’s Provence holiday home ignored him when he waved.

“As I walked towards them they both turned their heads,” Grant told the broadcaster Emma Freud.

“I thought, ‘F*** 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.”

Grant and Washington pictured together in 2012 (Getty Images)

Grant went on to say that he believed that by not discussing a person who has died with their loved ones, “you are essentially saying to the person who is bereaved that person didn’t exist, or they have been cancelled”.

He continued: “In not talking about it, you are denying somebody. I don’t know whether it’s a particularly English thing, but I find that if people don’t talk about it, it feels very hurtful. Or just mean.”

Richard E Grant (Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

In an interview with The Independent in May, the Jack and Sarah actor explained that he still regularly “speaks” to his wife in his head, as he knew her so well as to anticipate how she would reply.

“I don’t talk out loud [to her], but after 38 years together I know I can anticipate or predict what her response to whatever’s happening in my day would be,” he explained.

“So I have a silent conversation with her, especially at the steering wheel at the end of a day, or at the end of a show... cross-reference what she would be thinking.”