Richard E Grant says he permanently cut friends out of his life over how they handled his wife’s death

Richard E Grant has revealed that he “edited” friends out of his life after they avoided him following the death of his wife, Joan Washington.

Washington — a renowned dialect coach — died in 2021, aged 74, eight months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She and Grant, 69, had been married for 35 years and shared one daughter, Olivia, 37.

In the past, Grant has described how friends would avoid him following Washington’s death to avoid an awkward conversation.

In a new interview with The Times of London, Grant said he would never forgive those who kept their distance during that time.

“I’m very unequivocal, black and white, all or nothing,” he said.

“I’ve tried to go for the grey areas but it’s not succeeded for very long. There are people that have been edited out of my life and I will never see them again. If I had done that to them, I wouldn’t be able to look them in the face.”

“No, portcullis down,” he added. “Goodbye.”

Grant went on to share that he still writes to Washington every night before bed and that the idea of finding companionship again was incomprehensible. “I know it happens but I’ve not had any twinkles of that yet,” he said.

It’s not the first time that Grant has been ruthless about cutting friends out of his life.

Earlier this year, the Withnail and I actor revealed he cut off a friend of 29 years after he was accidentally CC’d on an email filled with “brutal” comments about him.

During a February episode of the Mad, Sad, & Bad podcast, Grant described the person as someone who he “thought was one of the five best friends in my life.”

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“She sent an email from Africa to a mutual friend in Australia who’d asked for my email address, and, because my name was in the body of the email, I got inadvertently sent this email.”

Grant explained that the message “arrived on a day when I had heard for a third time that a film that I’d written and was about to direct, the finances had collapsed. And I was doing the final episode of Frasier,” which aired in May 2004.

He said that the email contained “such toxicity” that he immediately decided to cut off the friendship.

“And I thought, ‘That’s not a real friend anymore.’ And I was absolutely devastated,” Grant said. “So I copied and pasted that and then sent it back. And I said, ‘29 years of friendship?’”

Asked what the offensive comments were about, Grant replied: “It was of my script that I had written, which was entirely autobiographical.” Grant’s 2005 comedy Wah-Wah was loosely based on his own life. “And she had read this script.”

He said that years later, his daughter, now 37, had questioned whether the friendship was really genuine in the first place.

“Our daughter was very smart, because she was 16, so exactly 20 years ago. She said to me, ‘In your heart of hearts, haven’t you always known this about that person?’”

Grant added that the turn of events was “just brutal.”

“Because that person knows you in the most formative part of your life, when you’re still dreaming of getting regular work out there as an actor,” Grant said. “Nevermind the other things that have happened to me since. So when you’re betrayed like that, there’s no going back for me.”