A gorgeously candid account of acting and show business. And an intimate and heartfelt story of love, loss and a life spent together. It is an honour to be invited in on these diaries. I cannot remember being so moved by a book' Dolly Alderton Allow the BAFTA-winning screen legend to reveal what you need to know about the new, most escapist show on telly… The BAFTA Film Awards will be broadcast from the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on February 19. It’s as if we’ve made an unspoken pact not to family-fall-apart and go about prepping food for tomorrow. Those old clichés “business as usual” and “the show must go on” apply.

Some years later, I was promoting a film on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast and there was a live phone-in segment where a member of the public called in to speak to the TV guest. It was Mrs. Grant from Bromley who advised that I could drop the “E.” as her husband Peter had died six months previously. He details with evocative precision what it was like to care for Washington during her illness. Anyone who has ever looked after a terminally ill person will know exactly what he means when he describes her “lemony irritability” on a bad day, and I especially liked his description of Washington’s moods vacillating “like the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, between Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, Happy, Bashful and visiting the Doc”.This honest and frequently hilarious memoir is written in honor of that challenge—Richard has faithfully kept a diary since childhood, and in these entries he shares raw detail of everything he has experienced: both the pain of losing his beloved wife, and the excitement of their life together, from the role that transformed his life overnight in Withnail and I to his thrilling Oscar Award nomination thirty years later for Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Because Jason Segel is an actor, writer and director, he’s a triple whammy. He’s very articulate and persuasive. It just seemed worth taking a leap of faith, as Sally Field did as well. Not knowing how something’s going to end makes a change from shows where everything is predictable and you’re foretold how it’s all going to end. I liked that about it.” Not to be disingenuous about it, but that’s the nature of an actor’s life,” he tells Shortlist of his current, homebound life, “I have actor friends that have said that apart from not being able to go anywhere, it doesn’t really feel any different because, for a lot of the time it’s feast or famine: if you’re working, then you’re filming every hour of the day, and you’re so grateful when you have a day off, but the majority of the time you’re not working.” Probably a very good thing that I didn’t know any of this when we first got together, otherwise she might have run for the Highlands at the prospect of having to accommodate three people in this relationship. Herself, Barbra, and me!Thank you. You have very brown, hairy arms, considering it’s the middle of winter. Have you been skiing?” I was wearing a cream cable-knit sweater, and had pulled the sleeves up while eating. Around this time, I received a letter from Equity, the actors’ union, and was informed that a retired actor called Richard Grant had complained, after seeing his name outside the Churchill Theatre, requiring me to change mine. Called Equity in a panic and explained that I had no money, and that my name was printed on all my ten-by-eight photos already.

Large-lettered CANCER RESEARCH CENTRE sign panics Joan. Reach for her hand. Park up, hug her, and whisper love and assurance as best I can. Walk arm in arm into the deserted reception. Eerie. As though everyone has been vacuumed away. The staff are incredibly kind, soft-spoken and gentle, which underlines the gravity of our situation. Form filling then ushered into a small room where a nurse asks her to lie down and injects a saline solution into her arm, followed by a radiation drug that will circulate through her bloodstream, taking an hour to fully absorb, during which she has to lie still and not talk. Attempting to be “normal” in this uniquely abnormal situation exhausts us all, and we’re in bed by 9 p.m. The right lung is ninety-five percent intact and it’s clear to see that the left lung has a growth all over it, which is why you’re experiencing such shortness of breath. You’re breathing with only one lung.”I was an out-of-work actor from the southern hemisphere, from nowhere, earning a subsistence wage as a waiter, schlepping home after midnight, listening to “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” on my prized Walkman. Not exactly a “catch” of any kind— and pipe-cleaner thin. Joan on the other hand was already a legend in her field. Such was the success of Richard Eyre’s landmark National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in 1982, and Joan’s accent coaching, that Barbra Streisand enquired, “Who are these American actors I’ve never heard of?” Which resulted in Joan being interviewed to coach Mitteleuropean accents for Streisand’s directorial debut movie, Yentl. As I’ve been a Streisand fanatic for half a century, the details she recalled of their first meeting have been imprinted, like a talisman, on my memory ever since. When Richard E Grant’s wife, Joan Washington, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer just before Christmas 2020, she didn’t really want anyone to know. “It won’t cure me!” she said. But Grant and their daughter, Oilly (Olivia), had different ideas. They felt they needed the support of their huge circle of friends: anything else would be too lonely. And perhaps, they also pointed out, this worked both ways. Grant remembered how upset he’d been on hearing, out of the blue, of Victoria Wood’s death in 2016. The news had made him feel he’d failed her; that he wasn’t close enough to her to be told her cancer had returned.