Richard E. Grant wife Joan Washington died in September 2021 after eight months with lung cancer, and he has described being at her bedside when she died at their home. The account lands now because he is appearing in the second season of The Celebrity Traitors, putting his family history back in view.
Grant said he was with Washington all day, holding her hand as her breathing and temperature changed before she died at seven thirty on 2 September 2021. “On the day that she died, I was sitting, talking to her all day… holding her hand, and then I felt that at about ten past seven her hand was starting to get colder and thought, 'This must be the end,'” he said.
Joan Washington in September
Washington was 74 when she died in September 2021, eight months after her lung cancer diagnosis. Grant said, “And then at seven thirty, twenty minutes later, she died.” That detail is the hard edge of the story: a private loss, described in public in exact minutes, with no room for varnish.
The timeline matters because it shows how quickly the illness moved from diagnosis to death. Grant and Washington had married in 1986, and they had already lived through the stillbirth of their first child before welcoming Olivia in January 1989. He also became a stepfather to Tom, Washington’s son from a previous relationship.
London home with Olivia
By September last year, Grant said Olivia and her husband had come to live in his London home with their cat. He described the arrangement as one where they “see one another every day, cook together and live a communal life, sharing everything, yet maintaining independence within that,” which gives the household a clearer shape than a simple multigenerational address.
That shared life sits alongside a grief that has not settled into a neat past tense. In 2022, Grant said, “Like the weather, it changes a lot every hour. Something can trigger you completely unexpectedly.” He added, “So I think you don't get over grief – and I know this from the death of our first child – but you go around it. It's a daily navigation.”
The Celebrity Traitors and grief
The contradiction is what gives the story weight: Grant describes a communal daily life in London, but he also talks about loss as something that still interrupts ordinary moments. He said, “A conversation that began in bed in January 1983 then stopped 38 years later on the 2nd of September 2021, still talking and still holding each other's hands,” and that is the clearest way to read the history around his wife’s death.
For viewers coming to The Celebrity Traitors, the useful takeaway is simple. Grant is not presenting a polished memoir version of bereavement; he is describing the practical shape of life after Washington’s death, from shared meals at home to grief that can still hit without warning in a supermarket. Olivia and Florian Herbst’s move into his London home explains the present tense, and the story stops there, on a family life built around absence as much as company.
