Richard E Grant reveals how Steve Martin helped him achieve the ‘greatest epiphany’ of his life

Richard E Grant has revealed how fellow actor Steve Martin helped him get over a nervous breakdown that he suffered in 1999 after becoming “angry and unhappy with his life and career”.

Grant, who told The Independent in 2023 that he still has “silent conversations” with his wife Joan Washington, who died from lung cancer in 2021, has opened up on how she and Martin guided him through a low period in his life and helped him reconnect with his mother.

The 67-year-old actor’s parents divorced when he was just 11. Grant, who grew up in Swaziland, sided with his father after the separation, with his mother moving to South Africa. Earlier in his childhood, Grant had seen his mother having an affair with his father’s friend, a secret which he kept in his diaries. The Withnail and I star cared for his father, who had slipped into alcoholism, until he died in 1981.

After earning famed and stardom, Grant became convinced at the age of 42, that he was metaphorically “paralysed” after becoming disillusioned by his career.

A concerned Washington then reached out to Steve Martin, who had become friends on the set of the 1991 film LA Story, who recommended him some expert help. From there Grant was told to contact his mother in order to reconcile their differences.

“It took 18 months, but we had a conversation in which she finally said three magic words: ‘Please forgive me,’” he told The Guardian.

Grant also revealed to his mother that he knew of her affair, saying that “she cried, which I’d never seen her do before.”

“I went from holding on to resentment and anger towards someone to forgiving them, and all of the pain shifted instantaneously,” he added, calling the conversation the “greatest epiphany” of his life.

In October 2023, when speaking at the The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Grant said that after Washington’s death that “I have had people cross the road rather than talk”.

“Whether they think you’re going to fall apart and you’re an emotional wreck, I don’t know. But I will never speak to them again.”

The actor continued by recalling an occasion during which a couple who’d lived near to his and Washington’s Provence holiday home ignored him when he waved.

“As I walked towards them they both turned their heads,” Grant told the broadcaster Emma Freud.

“I thought, ‘F*** you.’ I felt I was being punished because Joan had died. They had never acknowledged it. Maybe they didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Washington, a dialect coach, was 75 when she died of lung cancer in September 2021. The couple, who married in 1986, share two children, and had been together for 38 years at the time of her death.