The gift Richard E. Grant’s wife gave him before she died

Richard E. Grant is an actor best known for best known for playing Withnail in Withnail & I. The 65-year-old opens up about the woman who was like a surrogate mother to him, reconnecting with his first crush, and his daughter.

“I had psychoanalysis at 40 and it led me to understand why my mother did what she did.”Credit: Trunk Archive/Snapper Images

My mother and father had an acrimonious split when I was 10. She got up and left. Mum was very sporty – she played a lot of tennis and golf – and was 24 when she had me. If she had her life over again, perhaps she wouldn’t have had a child so early.

My father soon remarried and my stepmother, Anna-Marie, was a very kind woman. I am indebted to her for taking on an 11-year-old child who wasn’t her own.

I saw Mum intermittently over the years, but she moved from Swaziland, where we lived, to another country. I had psychoanalysis at 40 and it led me to understand why she did what she did. She still lives in Africa and I speak to her once a week on Skype.

My earliest memory of a woman I really liked and stayed friends with until she died at the age of 92 was Polly Barnes, a Scottish lady who was my English and French teacher at school in Swaziland. She taught me piano and became a surrogate mother, in a way, the person whose opinion I valued most. She was hilarious and taught me everything I know about classical music.

I had a mad crush on an American girl called Betsey Clapp in 1969, when I was 12. I tried to make perfume for her birthday because I couldn’t afford to buy it. I boiled gardenia and rose petals in sugar water to impress her. I snogged her. Neil Armstrong had just landed on the moon, so to me in Swaziland everything American was exotic.

In 2018, I went on a chat show to promote the film Can You Ever Forgive Me? and talked about Betsey. Within half an hour, thanks to social media, we were in contact. That was extraordinary.

The woman I’ve been most inspired by, and who was my first celebrity crush, is Barbra Streisand. This is a one-way love affair I’ve had since 1969, though I’ve met her many times since. Everyone had told Barbra she couldn’t succeed and that chimed with me. She and Donald Sutherland didn’t look like conventional stars, and if these two could make it, then why not have a go.

Joan Washington was a dialect coach I met while she was teaching regional accents at the Actors Centre in London. Many dramas were being made in the early 1980s that required Irish accents and Joan gave me lessons. I was enormously attracted to her but found out she was married and had a seven-year-old. I realised it wasn’t to be.

Then, in January 1983, Joan asked me to visit her home to record a script for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she worked. She needed somebody who spoke Swazi. That’s when I discovered her relationship was over. We got together quickly and we stayed together until she died last year.

The 38 years I was with Joan is the longest relationship I have had. Because my parents divorced, I never thought I’d get married and have a child. But then I didn’t realise when you fall in love with somebody, those are the things you end up doing – and for that I am grateful.

Four days before she died last year, Joan told me and our 33-year-old daughter, Olivia, to not be sad but to find a pocket full of happiness. That was a great gift and I have the saying pasted across my laptop screen.

When she was 20, Olivia told me that we have “twin-brain syndrome”. She explained that every time I feel or think something, she is in sync with that feeling and thought. And we often say the same thing at the same time.

When I was asked if I would play a pompous, hair-flicking page, Alain, in the 2012 film Kath and Kimderella, I couldn’t resist. That’s how I became friends with Jane Turner and Magda Szubanski. Every time I’m in Australia, I catch up with them.

See An Evening with Richard E. Grant in Melbourne on November 18 and Sydney on November 20.

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