Although not exactly a mummy’s girl, Natasha Richardson, who has died after a freak skiing accident, was most definitely Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, from first to last.
Sightings of her on the London stage were rare but unforgettable. As Nina in The Seagull in 1985 she trod the very same boards — the Queen’s in Shaftesbury Avenue — as had her mother in the same role in a famous production by her father, Tony Richardson, in 1964.
That 1985 Chekhov revival had opened in Hammersmith and toured to Oxford, with Charles Sturridge’s production also including Samantha Eggars as Arkadina and John Hurt as Trigorin. Both were missing in London, Vanessa joining her daughter as the overbearing actress.
Natasha positively erupted on the stage in a tumult of joyful innocence, making her fourth act desolation all the more powerful. You closed your eyes and you heard the same voice as Vanessa’s: caramel-smooth, lustrous, riveting.
And in her last London stage appearance, as Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, at the newly refurbished Almeida in 2003, she echoed Vanessa’s performance thirty years earlier as the land-locked water spirit, a cascade of emotion and yearning, haunted by her past liaison with a maritime murderer, in thrall to the call of the deep.
In between, there were two other significant sightings: as Tracy Lord, the Grace Kelly role, in Cole Porter’s High Society, adapted for the stage and directed by Richard Eyre at the Victoria Palace in 1987; and as Anna Christie in the Eugene O’Neill play at the Young Vic in 1990.
The first was a mixed blessing, mostly memorable for Angela Richards singing “In the Still of the Night” but also notable for Stephen Rea’s relaxed charm in the Frank Sinatra role and Richardson’s magnetic beauty and bouncing spirit.
In the second, as the slatternly Anna, you felt Richardson was keeping a deeply felt date with destiny opposite the Irish actor David Herlihy as the muscular stoker Mat Burke.
It was Natasha’s idea to cast Liam Neeson as Mat when the production went to New York a couple of years later and the brainwave wrecked her recent marriage to producer Robert Fox. The split, in the end, was amicable: Richardson and Neeson really did seem meant for each other, and their domestic life in upstate New York with their two young boys seemed almost idyllic.
It’s shocking this has all come to an untimely end. It’s as though the Redgrave dynasty is living out its own House of Atreus saga in accordance with the intervention of the gods and their own larger than life passions and instincts.
Natasha’s grandfather Michael Redgrave died in 1985, a career wrecked by Parkinson’s disease and illuminated in hindsight by the revelations of his “secret” homosexual life. Vanessa herself has not been in the best of health these past few years.
Tony Richardson, father to Natasha and Joely, died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991 and Vanessa’s sister Lynn discovered that her longstanding husband and business partner John Clark had sired a child by their own daughter-in-law.
Vanessa’s brother, Natasha’s uncle, Corin Redgrave, suffered a herat attack while on the political stump in Billericay, Essex, four years ago, and has battled cancer for several years even as he grows into his kingdom as an actor, often playing roles made famous by his own father.
And as if that wasn’t enough, six years ago, Liam suffered severe injuries when a deer jumped out of the forest and landed on him and his Harley Davidson motorbike while returning from a ride to pick up some muffins for a family tea table.
Now this. The tragedy of Natasha is not only a great loss to the world of movies and theatre, it’s a devastating blow to a family that has had more than its fair share of grief already. Vanessa herself was already welling over in her miraculous performance last year in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, memorialising a lost husband and a daughter.
“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?”
If ever Vanessa needed another motive or a cue for passion, Hamlet-like, she has it now. But the memories of this most beautiful of actresses and women will help to keep them all going and, you can’t help feeling, the prayers of many people they know and many more they don’t.
A much better appreciation of Natasha Richardson’s life than appeared in the newspapers’ obituaries and online.
In particular,I hope your description of the 1985 production of The Seagull will correct the widely held misconception published everywhere and exemplified in Tim Pulleine’s Guardian obituary:
“However, she soon gained a reputation in her own right in the theatre, in particular from a 1985 staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters alongside her mother, and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave.”
Of course,that Three Sisters was performed in 1990 with Vanessa,Lynn and Jemma Redgrave – daughter of Corin. Natasha was not involved.
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