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Vanessa Redgrave

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Vanessa Redgrave during the 2004 season of Nip/Tuck.
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Vanessa Redgrave during the 2004 season of Nip/Tuck.

Vanessa Redgrave, CBE (born 30 January, 1937) is an Academy Award-winning British actress and member of the Redgrave family, one of the enduring theatrical dynasties. She is also a left-wing social activist for human rights (see [link]).

Contents

Ancestry and Family

Vanessa Redgrave was born in London, England. Her parents were Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson (Lady Redgrave). Her sister, Lynn Redgrave, and her brother, the equally outspoken Corin Redgrave, are also acclaimed actors. Vanessa Redgrave's daughters, Natasha Richardson and Joely Richardson (by her 1962-1967 marriage to film director Tony Richardson) have also built respected acting careers. Redgrave also has a son, Carlo Nero (né Carlo Sparanero), a writer and film director, by a relationship with Italian actor Franco Nero (né Francesco Sparanero), whom she met while filming Camelot in 1967. During the late 1970s and '80s she had a long-term relationship with actor Timothy Dalton.

Stage Career

Vanessa Redgrave entered the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1954. She first appeared in the West End, playing opposite her father, in 1958.

Redgrave continues to regularly work in the theatre. In 2003 she won a Tony Award for "Best Actress in a Play" for her performance in the Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. In January 2006, Redgrave was presented the Ibsen Centennial Award for her "outstanding work in interpreting many of Henrik Ibsen's works over the last decades" (see[link]). Previous recipients of the award include Liv Ullmann, Glenda Jackson, and Claire Bloom.

Redgrave will play Joan Didion in Didion's upcoming New York stage adaptation of her recent book, The Year of Magical Thinking (see[link]).

Film Career

Early Film Career

Highlights of Vanessa Redgrave's early film career include her first starring role in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (for which she earned an Oscar nomination, a Cannes award, a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA Film Award); her portrayal of the cool London swinger, Jane, in 1966’s Blow Up, her spirited portrayal of dancer Isadora Duncan in Isadora (for which she won a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress, along with a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination in 1969); and various portrayals of historical figures - ranging from Andromache in The Trojan Women, to Mary of Scotland in Mary, Queen of Scots.

Julia

In 1977, Redgrave funded and narrated a documentary film on the plight of the Palestinian people. That same year she starred in the film Julia, about a woman murdered by the Nazi regime in the years prior to World War II for her anti-Fascist activism. Her co-star in the film was Jane Fonda who, in her 2005 autobiography, noted that "there is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if she resides in a netherworld of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals. Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets. Watching her work is like seeing through layers of glass, each layer painted in mythic watercolor images, layer after layer, until it becomes dark - but even then you know you haven't come to the bottom of it . . . The only other time I had experienced this with an actor was with Marlon Brando . . . Like Vanessa, he always seemed to be in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm."

Redgrave's performance in Julia garnered an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. However, members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), chose to picket the awards ceremony in the spring of 1978 to protest against both Redgrave and her support of the Palestinian cause.

Aware of the JDL's presence outside, Redgrave, in her acceptance speech, denounced all forms of totalitarianism, and noted that she would not be intimidated by "a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature to Jews all over the world." Her statement was greeted by both applause and boos from the audience.

Later in the broadcast veteran screenwriter and Oscar presenter Paddy Chayefsky told the audience members that “there's a little matter I'd like to tidy up…at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like to say that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you' would have sufficed.” He received thunderous applause.

Later Film Career

Later film roles of note include those of suffragette Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians (1984, a fourth Best Actress Academy Award nomination), transsexual Renee Richards in Second Serve (1986); Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End (1992, her sixth Academy Award nomination, this time in a supporting role); crime boss Max in (1996, when discussing the role of Max, DePalma and Cruise thought it would be fun to cast an actor like Redgrave, luckily they decided to go with the real thing); Oscar Wilde’s mother in Wilde (1997); Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway (1997); and Dr. Wick in Girl, Interrupted (1999). Many of these roles and others, garnered various accolades for Redgrave.

Her performance as a lesbian grieving the loss of her longtime partner in the HBO series If These Walls Could Talk 2 earned her a Golden Globe for “Best TV Series Supporting Actress” in 2000. This same performance also led to an “Excellence in Media Award” by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). The award honors “a member of the entertainment community who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people” (see [link]).

Political Activism

Since the 1960s Redgrave has supported a range of human rights causes, including opposition to the Vietnam War, nuclear disarmament, independence for northern Ireland, freedom for Soviet Jews (she was awarded the Sakharov medal by Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner in 1993 for her efforts), and aid for Bosnian Muslims and other victims of war. She serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and was a co-founding member of Artists Against Racism.

Redgrave identifies as a socialist, but her opposition to Soviet oppression led her, early in her career, to join the anti-Stalinist Workers' Revolutionary Party (UK) (WRP), on whose ticket she twice ran for Parliament. Redgrave's Trotskyist political views have been a cause of controversy for some, as has her membership with the WRP. She remained loyal to WRP founder Gerry Healy when he was expelled from the WRP in the mid-1980s. She and other Healy loyalists founded the Marxist Party in the 1990s.

In 1980 Redgrave made her first American TV debut as concentration-camp survivor Fania Fénelon in the Arthur Miller-scripted TV movie Playing for Time – a part for which she won an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress in 1981. The decision to cast Redgrave as Fenelon was, however, a source of controversy for some Jewish individuals and organizations. In light of Redgrave's outspoken support for the Palestinian people, even Fenelon objected to her casting. Such hostility perplexed Redgrave, who shared in her 1991 autobiography her long-held belief that "the struggle against anti-Semitism and for the self-determination of the Palestinians form a single whole." (p. 306)

In December 2002 Redgrave paid £50,000 bail for Chechen separatist Deputy Premier and special envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who had sought political asylum in the United Kingdom and was accused by the Russian government of aiding and abetting hostage-takings in the Moscow Hostage Crisis of 2002, and guerrilla warfare against Russia.

At a press conference Redgrave said she feared for the life of Zakayev if he were to be extradited to Russia on terrorism charges. He would "die of a heart attack" or some other mysterious explanation which would be offered by Russia, she said (see [link]). On 13 November, 2003, a London court rejected the Russian government's request for Zakayev's extradition. Instead, the court accepted a plea by lawyers for Mr Zakayev that he would not get a fair trial - and could even face torture - in Russia. "It would be unjust and oppressive to return Mr Zakayev to Russia," Judge Timothy Workman ruled (see [link]).

In 2004, Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin Redgrave announced the launch of the Peace and Progress Party which would campaign against the Iraq War and for human rights. The party only ran a handful of candidates and called for votes for candidates from other parties who supported their agenda, mainly the Liberal Democrats but also even individual Tories who claimed to support human rights. The aim of this tactic was to attempt to maximize the possibility of defeat for the Labour Party at the 2005 general election.

Redgrave has been an outspoken critic of the "War on Terror" - the US and British governments' response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (see [link],[link]). During a June 2005 interview on Larry King Live, Redgrave was challenged on this criticism and on her "far left" political views. In response she questioned if there can be true democracy if the political leadership of the United States and Britain doesn't "uphold the values for which my father's generation fought the Nazis, [and] millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime. [Such sacrifice was made] because of democracy and what democracy meant: no torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial...[Such] techniques are not just alleged [against the governments of the U.S. and Britain], they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being 'far left'...to uphold the rule of law" (see [link]).

In March 2006, Redgrave remarked in an interview with US broadcast journalist Amy Goodman, that “I don't know of a single government that actually abides by international human rights law, not one, including my own. In fact, [they] violate these laws in the most despicable and obscene way, I would say.”

Goodman’s interview of Redgrave took place in the actress’s West London home on the evening of 7 March, and covered a range of subjects – though in particular, the cancellation of the Alan Rickman production, My Name is Rachel Corrie, by the New York Theater Workshop. Such a development, said Redgrave, was an "act of catastrophic cowardice" as "the essence of life and the essence of theater is to communicate about lives, either lives that have ended or lives that are still alive, [and about] beliefs, and what is in those beliefs" (see [link]).

Quotes

"I've come to see through the course of my life that people understand what I've tried to do, however inadequately I do it. I've just found people have come to understand me and be glad that I tried to do what I tried to do. And I do feel very inadequate about it, but I feel I must try . . . I think that any citizen can understand that you must raise your voice and do the best you can to speak out" (see [link]).

"I've been to Sarajevo a few times and have gotten to know a lot of people there who put on plays during the siege. I wanted to share in that because I knew it was important to them . . . I began to see something of what was going on there in terms of actually keeping up people's spirit to resist - the resistance that causes change - even in the worst imaginable circumstances. And I realized that it paralleled the same spirit that existed during the Holocaust and in the gulag. Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. That experience changed me, because I realized that if, as actors or writers or directors or designers, we can keep the will to resist alive in as many people as possible, then that's what we are about, and that's what we can do. It's more and more important because of the terrible things that are happening in our cities and the political and economic agendas that various governments have" (see [link]).

"As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future" (see [link]).

On 24 June 2006 an open letter was published in the Guardian newspaper; this letter came from a small Romanian village whose inhabitants were protesting at the fact Vanessa delivered a speech calling for a halt to the proposed consruction of a mining operation for the village. Vanessa believed this would damage their environment; however the letter stated that the village was in extreme poverty and needed the mine to go ahead for the village to have an economically viable future.

Academy Award and Nominations

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Filmography

Redgrave in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966)
Redgrave in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966)

Redgrave in Mrs Dalloway (1997)
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External links

 

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