TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100989/10098900.031

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 12KB | 206 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