Celebrity Traitors’ Richard E Grant lost his wife to cancer after epic 38-year love story

Richard E Grant made everyone emotional when he spoke about his wife on Celebrity Traitors. She passed away from lung cancer five years ago, and here’s a look at their epic love story. 

The Loki, Game of Thrones, and Saltburn actor said to the camera during the first episode: “My wife said to me four days before she died, ‘Richard, try and find a pocket full of happiness in each day’ and I feel like I’ve got a wheelbarrow full and then some.”

He joins Miranda Hart, Joe Lycett and Maya Jama in the second series of the BBC show, and is enjoying every second of it, so much so that he majorly slipped up within the first five minutes. He said it’s the most joy he’s felt since his wife died in 2021. 

Who Richard E Grant’s wife was and how they met 

Richard E Grant was married to voice coach Joan Washington for 35 years. They met in 1982 and married three years later in 1986. 

“I met her at the Actors’ Centre in London. She was wearing a boiler suit and had fairly short, cropped hair and Kicker shoes, and was chain-smoking, which I thought was insane. She was teaching an accent session with a bunch of actors, and I thought she had the most wonderful voice and huge, sort of monkey eyes. She seemed fairly frenetic. I thought that she was really cute and all that. It was December 1982,” he told The Independent. 

At the time, she was actually still married to someone else. Washington was doing a play at the Royal Shakespeare Company and needed a black African accent. She told Grant that he was the only person she knew in London who could do that, and asked him to make some tapes for her. Grant was born in Swaziland, the African country now known as Eswatini.

“I didn’t go home that night. We found that we had a fair amount in common, and that we liked speaking a huge amount. She seemed very un-English in that way. We just got on instantly,” he said. When she split from her first husband, they started dating. 

Credit: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock

He got down on one knee at Heathrow Airport

After he’d been in England for four years, Grant went back to Africa for Christmas for six weeks and realised that he really missed Joan. So, the minute he got back home, he proposed to her at Heathrow Airport. 

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“I’d never really thought about getting married, didn’t think it was necessary. Joan had been married, and she had staunchly said to me that she didn’t want to get married again, and so we’d never talked about it,” he said. 

“When I was away I spoke to her on the phone a lot and wrote every day, and I thought, well, you know, they’ve been doing it like this for… how many thousands of years? – and I couldn’t think of a better way of making some kind of commitment. So I came back and went on bended knee with my trolley at 6.30am at Heathrow Airport – and, luckily for me, she said yes.”

They said “I do” at a registry office, not really bothered by the whole big wedding thing. Shortly afterwards, Joan fell pregnant with their first child, who was sadly stillborn. 

“Our worst time was the loss of our first child. You get around it; you don’t get over it. I was working at Shepperton, and I got a call to say that she was in an ambulance. Your world goes upside down. Joan’s father had died during the time that we’d been together, and mine died just before. I think that sort of thing either splits a couple up, because the person doesn’t come up with the compassion or the support that you need, or it binds you in a way that nothing else can,” he recalled. 

They went on to welcome their daughter Olivia in January 1989, who works as a casting director and recently had her own baby boy, making Grant a grandfather. The actor also has a stepson, Tom, from Joan’s previous marriage.

Joan Washington sadly passed away in 2021