W: Richard welcome to Waterstones
RG: Thank you very much.
W: I live my life on social media so I actually want to start
with your viral social media moments. A lot of people would have seen you joyous at your
Oscar nomination (true) and joyous outside the house of a certain Barbra Streisand
RG: StreisAND!
W: I'm sorry (please), I know I'm with the expert here.
But both of those moments speak to something which I think is really important which is
your genuine enthusiasm. Because there's no faking that and I wonder if you could tell us a
little bit about maybe that moment with the Oscar nomination, what it felt like to be walking past a
building from your past and to be having this great moment in your present.
RG: Well it was, it felt like out of body because I had gone to a restaurant called Mediterraneo on
the corner of Kensington Park Road and Blenheim Crescent and I had a bedsit there for 30 pounds
a week in 1982 when I was a waiter at Tuttons in Covent Garden, which is still there. And
I'd just had lunch with my daughter where we had seen the live feed of the Oscar nominations and
I happened to park my car around the corner and didn't take that on board it was just sort of so
obsessive you know. Will I get nominated or not and so when we were walking back
I said oh my God that's where, I lived in that one bedroom thing, 89 Blenheim Crescent, and my
daughter said talk about it. So she put the phone in my face and then I did and then it went viral
as you say. And the whole way that my memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness came about was because
again on New Year's Day this year I posted a video saying that my wife had challenged my daughter and
I four days before she died to try and find a pocketfull of happiness in each day. And
so I talked about that and it had an absolutely phenomenal response. You know how the numbers
sort of click up, it's like watching gambling machines. And then all the comments that came
from it. and then my literary agent called up and said we've had interest from a publisher,
would you write a book and I said absolutely not I couldn't possibly even contemplate that.
And she said well there are two publishers now who've asked.
So I spoke to my daughter and she said I think it'll help you through this grieving process to
you know write a book, write a memoir about it. So that's how it came about and I made
deal with the devil in that I said to Simon & Schuster who won the contract - you know people
that bid against each other, it completely flabbergasted me that they would - that I
would write everything out and if my daughter felt she wanted to veto the whole idea or veto pieces
of it that would be her prerogative. So I said I can't take any money and will you accept this as
an unspoken, in my contract. Now, whether they would have honoured that, I don't know,
but they said yes and she then read it, once it was done and fully endorsed it as a real tribute
to our 38-year marriage, partnership, and a portrait of her mother. So I couldn't have
asked for better endorsement although she kept me waiting for three days and I speak to her twice a
day. So when I didn't hear for three days I was absolutely apoplectic with paranoia. Convinced
that I'd ruined my relationship with my daughter and that the book couldn't be published so what
was I going to say to Simon & Schuster. Anyway, I blathered on. That's how the book came about.
W: You say, there's a fantastic quote you shared from Martin Amos
which is 'Somehow the very act of composition is an act of love.'
RG: Bullseye.
W:As you say, that's exactly what you wanted to do with this this diary that you're writing. There is
this immediacy to the book because it feels like you're sharing everything as it happens and as you
feel it (yeah). Was it ever difficult to to sit down and write that diary or did it help actually?
RG: I've kept a diary since I was 10 years old because when I was 10, I woke up on the back
seat of a car and inadvertently saw my mother bonking my father's best friend on the front
seat. So I tried God, got no answer, couldn't tell my father obviously, couldn't tell my friends. So
in order to not feel that I was going mad I then started keeping a diary and have done ever since.
So my sense from having had psychoanalysis when I was 42 that
secrets I think are toxic and especially in families so
writing about stuff seems to me the most healing and mental health inducing way of dealing with the
world. And because I never honestly anticipated or expected that any of the people that I've met
or worked with over the last 40 years in showbusiness could ever have happened to,
you know, a boy like me from the smallest country in the southern hemisphere, Swaziland, now called
Eswatini, a diary again as as I've gone through decades of my life is a way of making something
that is still seems unreal to me concrete. That I can look at the end of the day and go,
I did meet this person and this is what they said and this is what you know they did or didn't do.
So I found that very helpful and it also means that you don't ever get a rose-tinted view of
something. It is in the immediacy of the day and I think that is what makes diaries so compelling.
W: It's very interesting you say that you think that secrets are toxic because it felt
from reading the book that one of the absolute key themes of it is honesty (yes). You talk about the
honesty that was the bedrock of your marriage with Joan, also the honesty with which you spoke to
each other about her illness, and the honesty with which she spoke to the healthcare professionals
about it, how you dealt with what you were you know being told. Is honesty the most important
thing, one of the most important things in your life, especially I suppose as somebody who works
in a profession which is filled with phonies. Is it really important to have that honesty?
RG: Yes and the irony of, you know, there's a kind of misconception I think that people think
that actors have to be good liars. When you're acting or interpreting a part you have to be
brutally honest and try and go to the mindset and the emotional makeup of the person you're
playing with as much honesty and integrity as you can muster. Otherwise nobody would believe it.
And I also think that within this book I in being absolutely honest and as
vulnerable as you'd dare be in a diary, it then, it's like a prism in that it then
radiates out and reaches many more people. Because every single person I know has suffered loss and
if they haven't now, they will do. So that is a common denominator of all human beings. And
I know from the social media that you mentioned that the responses you see that people say this
chimes exactly with what I have experienced or it's very similar to what I've experienced.
I mean what I enjoyed, the positive part about writing the book was that the structure of it is
it begins with the day of my wife's terminal illness diagnosis and ends with her death,
nine months, eight months later. But within that,
there's this elastic seesawing backwards and forwards into the past to
illuminate the present if you like. And it's certainly the way my mind obviously operates, that
you're thinking one thing or you're going along one path and then suddenly you think oh my God
that reminds me of and then you divert down there. So I've always done that and got berated
for doing that at school endlessly by my various teachers because they said you've got to stick
to the topic. But I think in real life you do you know you smell something you go oh my
God it reminds me of that or you meet somebody and that segues you off into another story so
that's what I've done within this. So hopefully there's enough pocketfuls of joy, happiness and
celebration alongside the sort of devastating month by month deterioration of my wife's life.
W: That thing you were just saying there about how your brain goes all over the place, you say that
you had a nickname and that, my pronunciation will not be right here, the Swazi word mondlwani...
RG: Oh yes, in Swaziland there's a tradition where you're given, you have your actual name you know
obviously my name is Richard but you're then given a name that supposedly encapsulates your
physical being as well as your emotional way of being and mine was called mondlwani which means
the man who walks with his head in the clouds. And my father's was matlaganibani which meant
the man whose brain runs faster than his feet, which absolutely just pinpoints who and what he
was like. You know it's difficult for me to see that about myself but I certainly know
that I spend most of my time daydreaming, I'm also tall, so it seems to be a combination.
W: Would you say that your relationship with Joan was one where, did she keep you grounded
or did she in fact allow you to have your head in the clouds and to pursue your dreams?
RG: She always told me that she was the one who was level and you know she was grounded. But you
know I kind of refuted that in the last nine months of her life because she expected once
we heard her terminal diagnosis, she said I genuinely thought that you would lose the plot
and that you would go sort of like a headless chicken running in all directions and I was
completely bedrock-calm, practical, all of those things. So it was a slight role reversal because
she'd always be the one who said you know I am the rock in this situation, you're the one who's
sort of emotionally all over the place so we've absolutely balanced each other out in a way.
W: You mentioned that you had a 38-year relationship, 35 years of that married,
you talk about when you met Joan when you were a young man and there seems to be something
inevitable about the two of you getting together; did it feel like that at the time?
RG: Oh god no. Because she was married, she was 10 years older than me, she had a 7 year old son. And
I went to her for accent classes at the Actor's Centre, so I did the six-week course of that,
irritated her quite a lot. I asked so many questions and every time that anybody talked
about farting I fell about laughing which she thought was extremely childish and I still laugh
about farting. So it's only when she asked me to put a Royal Shakespeare Company script on tape for
her at her house that I then stayed the evening and I then realised that her marriage was over and
that her husband was living with somebody else in Manchester because he was a TV director. So
then everything shifted and you know it happened pretty fast. So in that one night over delicious
food, so she went via my stomach. You know, a journalist asked me what is the secret of your
relationship and I thought about it and I thought well there is no secret other than that we began
a conversation essentially in January 1983 which ended when she died on the 2nd of September 2021.
And we slept with each other in the same bed for that entire time so it seemed as simple as
that. So I'm absolutely horrified when, you know, certainly people in my vintage, I'm 65, who tell
me oh no they haven't slept with their partners or husbands or wives for the last 10 years. How do
you sustain a relationship if you're not doing the old business? The idea is awful! Each to his own.
W: You share very honestly the experience of those eight months
dealing with that terminal illness and then your grief when Joan dies. And you
said something really interesting which is it's the kindness of other people...
RG: ... that undoes you.
W: Tell me a little bit about that.
RG: I think that it's when people do something that is incredibly generous and unexpected that it
just discombobulates you because you kind of think well I've got to be strong about this and hold it
together for my daughter. Or I've just been in the south of France and saw people that because
of Covid lockdown because I have a house there and I then would meet people in the village who hadn't
seen either of us since this happened and then you're having to console people that are literally
falling apart because they finally can say oh my goodness you know I'm so sorry. So that is very,
when you see how much people cared for her and it's very, very touching and life enhancing but
it's a thing that is, you know, it wipes away all cynicism, because you see how how generous people
can be. But by the same token on the other side there are people that I will never speak to again
because they've sent maybe one text and I'm thinking of a particular couple that
I've known for 25 years and paid for endless meals and holidays and
when it came down to it I thought they were in the sort of apex of the
pyramid of friendship as I see it, and they proved not to be. So, out.
W: Was that a surprise?
RG: Yeah, real surprise. And it's not that you, you know the old adage, you find out who your
friends are... I would say more specifically you find out what your friends are or what kind of
friends they are. And for the most part you know 99% of people have been absolutely extraordinary
but I found it very hard not to judge the ones that haven't.
W: The end of the book is a testament to Joan where you share the words of others.
RG: All the people ho knew her, yeah.
W: It's an extraordinary testament to the woman that she was. What were the qualities do you think
about her as a person that mean that she had such an impact on people that she worked with?
RG: First of all she was an incredible teacher. That was an innate gift that she had
so she made people and especially actors who are so insecure, every time you start
a new job the terror increases as you get older. She had this innate ability to make
you feel that you could do it without her but you had enough talent or skill or whatever it
was that you could do it. And imparting that into somebody is something that you can't...
that is a real gift. And she also had something else that I have so admired and was something
that my father drummed into me that you treat a prince or a pauper with exactly the same
respect. So she was as forthright with Prince Charles who we've known for a long time, 30 years,
as she would be with somebody who had just bought her a plate of food. And I think that
in showbusiness, that's fairly unique because people get, you know the entitlement that happens
with fame and money and success can remove people very very quickly away from the nuts and bolts of
please and thank you and just you know speak to somebody like they're a human being rather than
you know you have no consequence to me because I'm so important. So that innate quality is what
she had, so that Aberdonian, Calvinist, you know, moral compass, ethic that was ingrained in her.
And you know I see it, that's been passed on to our daughter as well, she's exactly the same.
W: It's a very moving end to a very moving book. I think a testament obviously to who
she was to those people and obviously who she was to you. Richard, thank you so much for sharing it
RG:Thank you. I hope you can cut all this so it's not five hours long
W: I'm cutting nothing, everyone gets the full edit. Thank you so much.
RG: Thank you.