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‘Does time heal? I don’t think so’: Richard E Grant on love, loss – and bonking

The raw intensity and personal honesty that Richard E Grant brought to Withnail and I 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 upbringing

The book is named for an instruction Washington gave to Grant while she was unwell: to look for moments of joy in the everyday, a sudden downpour, the changing of the seasons, the ability to run gleefully alongside a river. This idea seems to diminish his ability and range as an actor: he was Oscar-nominated in 2019 for Can You Ever Forgive Me; he stole the show in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn; he has appeared in some of the UK’s greatest comedies and dramas and comedy-dramas, including How To Get Ahead in Advertising(1989), in which he sometimes wears on his neck a boil in the shape of a second face. This is true of Grant’s latest project, The Franchise, a TV series in which he plays a poison-tongued actor making his way through the filming of a superhero movie – a role perfect in its intermittent impact.

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