Actor Hugh Grant, still grappling with the loss of his wife Joan Washington who died from lung cancer in 2021, reflects on heartbreak, ambition, and his challenging upbringing. He shares poignant details about his daughter Olivia's recent wedding, where they chose not to play a recorded poem by Washington due to its emotional weight.
was real and has never left him. Now the actor and diarist, still grieving the loss of his wife, talks openly about heartbreak, ambition and his traumatic upbringingmonth before she died, the acclaimed dialect coach Joan Washington recorded a poem to be played on her daughter’s wedding day. Washington died on 2 September 2021 from lung cancer, concluding a 38-year marriage to the actor and diarist.
Grant and Washington met in 1983 when he, a mostly out- of-work actor, convinced her, an established professional, to give him private dialect lessons despite not having enough money. Washington agreed, a little reluctantly, and from there they remained together. Grant has written that his marriage is “the story of my adult life” and that “we began a conversation in 1983 and we never stopped.
Grant has suffered from self-doubt throughout his life. His diaries zing with unexpected worries: that he won’t make an audition, that he’ll miss out on a part, that even when a part has been awarded to him, it might be taken away. Before he landed the role of Withnail, Grant had been out of work for almost a year. To pass the time he spent hours reading magazines in WH Smith, hoping not to be ejected. It was a destabilising period that brought him close to giving up on acting.
A year later, Grant’s parents divorced. He sided with his father, the cuckolded party, and became estranged from his mother, who eventually moved to South Africa. Soon afterward, Grant’s father fell into alcoholism, and he became verbally and physically abusive. “My father hadn’t been a heavy drinker before then,” he says, “but once she left, he drank a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch daily until he died – the next 30 years.
While Grant recalls this story he seems unfazed. “It was the one and only time he had a gun to my head,” he says. “And I think that night was a kind of watershed moment for him.” His father had remarried by this time, and Grant believes his stepmother removed the gun from the home. “But the drinking continued.”
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