TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.031

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.6 KB | 222 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 109

Vanessa Ascending


The pre-eminent actress of her time returns to Broadway

By William A. Henry III


    On the day Vanessa Redgrave entered the world, her father
Michael Redgrave was playing Laertes opposite Laurence
Olivier's Hamlet at London's Old Vic Theater. During the curtain
call, Olivier gestured for silence and announced, "Ladies and
gentlemen, tonight a star is born. Laertes has a daughter."
Olivier probably thought he was being gracious rather than
oracular. But the man generally acknowledged as the greatest
actor of his age in the English-speaking world proved as
inspired in his fortune-telling as in his art: the infant born
on Jan. 30, 1937, has ripened into the greatest actress in the
English-speaking world. Her trophies include the Oscar, the Emmy
and London's equivalent of Broadway's Tony (appositely named for
Olivier). She also has a prize even more important to her: the
awestruck regard of virtually everyone in her craft.

    However offbeat the part -- and she has played everything
from a shaved-headed musician in the Auschwitz women's
orchestra (Playing for Time) to the transsexual physician Renee
Richards (Second Serve) -- Redgrave never camps up a
performance, never tips the audience the equivalent of a wink
to distance herself from neurotic excess. She gives every
character she plays her loyalty and respect. Trying to puzzle
out how she achieves such artless naturalness, fellow actors
gather to scrutinize her work. Says writer-director David Hare,
who starred Redgrave in his movie Wetherby: "She's the one they
all watch. Vanessa has an access to her feelings without
parallel. She is the least flustered, most completely focused
actress; she barely needs to study a part."

    Her fragile beauty has cast her on film as Isadora Duncan,
Mary Queen of Scots and Guinevere. Her toughness made her an
anti-Nazi adventurer in Julia and a fierce literary agent in
Prick Up Your Ears. Onstage in the summer of 1986 in London, she
demonstrated her range by alternating as the worldly queen in
Antony and Cleopatra and the humiliated, housebound maiden in
The Taming of the Shrew. If anything linked those two roles, it
was only the pained look they shared, that unforgettable gaze
from those grave and piercing eyes as they take in the
unimaginable perfidy of the world.

    The same haunted, haunting look is hers in the role that
has brought her back to Broadway after an absence of a dozen
years: the thickly accented daughter of an Italian immigrant in
the steamy Southland of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending,
which opened last week. The production, by Sir Peter Hall,
former artistic director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company
and Britain's National Theater, was a hit in London in December.
Yet it took a risky struggle to transfer the show. Redgrave is
a fervid member of a radical group called the Marxist Party; she
has poured much of her income into its causes and four times
stood as a candidate for Parliament representing the Workers'
Revolutionary Party. That commitment helps explain why she has
endured for more than a decade an unannounced but unmistakable
boycott by much of the American entertainment business.

    Her employment problems began on the night in 1978 when she
accepted an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for Julia.
As militant Jewish groups picketed outside to denounce a
pro-Palestinian documentary film she had financed by selling
her house in Britain, Redgrave injudiciously responded in a
speech telecast worldwide. In words aimed at the protesters, she
told Academy voters, "You have stood firm and refused to be
intimidated by a small band of Zionist hoodlums who have
insulted Jews all over the world in their struggle against
fascism and Nazism." Heard out of context, the phrase gave birth
to a mistaken belief that Redgrave regarded all Jews as
hoodlums.

    Even producers and directors who grasped her position --
that Palestinians have homeland rights, which Israel must
accommodate -- often passed her by for the sake of convenience.
"It's not surprising that she's perceived by most Jewish people
as anti-Jewish," says her ex-husband, director Tony Richardson.
"She has created this image for herself, which makes her almost
uncastable in a leading role in Hollywood. She's totally
unrealistic in her attitude: when she says `Zionism,' she
thinks she isn't talking about Jews. But there isn't a single
bit of anti-Semitic blood in Vanessa." Embittered, Redgrave
nowadays declines to cooperate on articles -- including this one
-- unless the publication pledges in writing not even to mention
her politics.

    Although she makes films elsewhere, Hollywood has not cast
Redgrave since Yanks in 1979. She has secured only sporadic
U.S. TV work. Other actors report that merely suggesting her for
a role is enough to damage their own careers. The protest peaked
in 1982, when the woman whom Redgrave was playing called for her
to be ousted from the Emmy-winning lead in Arthur Miller's
CBS-TV drama Playing for Time. Politics also excluded her from
being cast in the Broadway drama Plenty. That same year, the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, allegedly fearful of disruptions and
of losing donor support, dumped Redgrave from scheduled
performances as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. She
brought a civil rights suit pleading that "people's livelihoods
should not depend upon their holding `correct' political views."
The U.S. Supreme Court last January rejected her bid for a
punitive-damages award, although it let stand a judgment of
$39,500 to cover lost employment -- an amount far smaller than
the legal fees she spent fighting for her principles.

    Happily, thus far Orpheus has met no protest, according to
co-producer Elizabeth McCann. Says she: "Redgrave is
controversial, and controversy brings a certain degree of risk.
I'm not kidding myself that there aren't people out there still
deeply hurt or offended by her views."

    The unorthodoxy of her political life has extended at times
to her personal life. After Richardson began an affair with
actress Jeanne Moreau and thereby precipitated the end of an
already troubled marriage, Redgrave had a romance with actor
Franco Nero, with whom she had a son, Carlo, now 19. More
recently, she shared bed and the boards with actor Timothy
Dalton, almost ten years her junior (and the latest James Bond),
who was her Antony and Petruchio in the repertory triumphs of
1986.

    Talent and stubborn individuality are Redgrave family
legacies. The tradition of performing reaches back to her
grandparents and includes her father, her mother Rachel Kempson,
brother Corin, 50, and sister Lynn, 46 -- plus, now, Vanessa's
film-star daughters Natasha Richardson, 26 (Patty Hearst), and
Joely Richardson, 24 (Drowning by Numbers). In Vanessa's
generation, the clan paid a steep emotional price. Says Lynn:
"All families are peculiar in some way, but ours was
extraordinary, a volatile, emotional and passionate mix, which
probably helped us to be good actors. My parents never got us
up in the morning or picked us up from school. We could live a
week in the same house and not see them once. My father was
distant. His main means of communication was acting."

    From the start, Lynn recalls, Vanessa weathered the rackety
Redgraves with ego intact: "She was the only one of us who
wasn't shy. If someone asked her to get up and sing, it wouldn't
have bothered her for three seconds." The family's expectation
that Redgrave would go into show business was tempered by her
abrupt adolescent growth spurt to an eventual 5 ft. 11 in. She
towered over classmates of both sexes and was considered too
tall for anything but character parts. Her father had her study
ballet so she would move well and tap dancing so she might have
a chance at musical comedy. Still, according to a classmate at
London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Redgrave was not
thought especially talented, perhaps because inner turmoil got
in her way.

    By her early 20s, she joined what became the Royal
Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. She was a hit as the
lanky Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a role played sooner
or later by most of the willowy Redgrave women; as Rosalind in
As You Like It, Redgrave gave a performance many still consider
definitive. In 1961, when she appeared in The Lady from the Sea,
critic Kenneth Tynan said, "If there is better acting than this
in London, I should like to hear of it." By 1967 she was up for
an Oscar as Best Actress for Morgan!, competing with her sister,
who was nominated for Georgy Girl. (They lost to Elizabeth
Taylor for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.)

    Despite a trying childhood and the dual demands of art and
political activism, Redgrave has been, by all accounts, a
stable and nurturing parent. Says Joely: "Mother may have been
a free spirit before we came along, but we were terribly normal
and conventional as a family. Domestically, she's nothing like
the force she is in acting and politics. She is not a creature
of comforts. She will always take the smallest room in the
house."

    Indeed, while Lynn and Vanessa rarely discuss acting
technique and have not appeared together onstage, Vanessa has
worked with both her daughters. Joely played Vanessa's character
when young in flashback scenes of Wetherby. Natasha portrayed
Nina, one of her mother's celebrated early roles, in a 1985
London staging of The Seagull that featured her mother as the
virago actress Arkadina. Both daughters report receiving useful
maternal advice. When Joely at 19 was cast to play the worldly,
thirtyish title role in Miss Julie, Vanessa counseled, "Whatever
insecurities you have, share with the audience. Be open, and
they'll accept you more." When Natasha wrestled with Nina's
madness-streaked fifth-act monologue, Vanessa spoke of
technique: "I could be wrong, but I notice you have gotten into
a slow pattern of speaking." Natasha speeded up; the problem was
solved.

    Both daughters say Redgrave relies heavily on props and
research in developing a role, but does not misappropriate
pieces of her own life or blur the line between reality and
performance. "When she delivers emotion," says Natasha, "she
doesn't do it by thinking of the cat's dying. And when she
performs Lady in Orpheus Descending, she doesn't remain in
character as she sips tea at intermission."

    When the stage lights go back up, however, Vanessa Redgrave
is Lady, a woman who has endured half a lifetime remembering
her father's agonizing death by fire, only to discover that her
husband led the killers. Nothing is histrionic in Redgrave's
inhabitation of the part. Infatuation with a mysterious newcomer
makes her faintly schoolgirlish. Pregnancy gives her a subtle
glow. A plan for revenge on her husband sets only her eyes
aglitter. The shifts are subtle, her mood lightly ironic. She
greets her own violent death with a Mona Lisa smile of sad
amusement and, as she crumples to the floor, a shrug.

    The play's final image is a glimpse of her lover being
carried, naked and screaming, to be murdered with a blowtorch.
Yet what lingers is Redgrave, all the more poignant for the
utter absence of any plea for sympathy. That is the public
figure as much as the actress and the character: unapologetic,
unrelenting and determined to the end to do things her way. For
almost anyone else, Orpheus would be the highlight of a career.
For Redgrave, it is another luminous interlude in a lifetime of
incandescence.


-- Anne Constable/London and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles