Thursday Minute
No. 15 | January 21, 2010

It Runs in the Family

Our theme this week
Families with three (or more) generations of film actors

Featured this week
Monday         —   The Fondas
Tuesday         —   The Hustons
Wednesday    —   The Carradines

The Redgraves

The essentials
First Generation:  Roy, m. Daisy Bertha Mary (Margaret) Scudamore et al.
Second Generation:  Michael
Third Generation:  Vanessa, Corin, Lynn
Fourth Generation:  Natasha Richardson, Joely Richardson (Vanessa); Jemma (Corin) 

Roy, the patriarch of the Redgrave family, if you will, is more than likely not one of the Redgraves you’ve heard about.  He worked on the stage in London more than a century ago.  He was married to an actress and had several children, both in and out of wedlock.  He married a second time, and soon after son Michael was born in 1908, Roy left permanently for Australia.  He performed on stage there, and mostly during the 1910s appeared in a handful of silent films.  His second wife, who changed her name to Margaret after Roy abandoned her, raised Michael, remarried, and acted in the theater.  Later in life, she appeared in several British films.

Sir Michael Redgrave is one of the great names of the British stage.  He also has amassed an impressive body of work in film.  Redgrave started his professional acting career at the Old Vic, under Tyrone Guthrie, in the ’30s.  For five decades he performed on the London stage, at Stratford as a member of the Shakespeare company, and in New York.  He won numerous acting awards.  He directed as well.  He made an impressive film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Lady Vanishes (1938), and in the next few years appeared in three Carol Reed films, including The Stars Look Down (1940).  He went on to make three films with Anthony Asquith as well, most notably as the repressed teacher in The Browning Version (1951).  He traveled to the U.S. on occasion, appearing in Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) and Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).  Bringing the stage to film, he played the title role in a highly regarded adaptation of Uncle Vanya (1963).  Redgrave wrote books on acting and an autobiography.  He admitted privately that he was a bisexual.  It’s worth noting, unlike most of the actors covered this week, Redgrave had but one wife.  He was married to the actress Rachel Kempson for 50 years.

Vanessa Redgrave, like her father, has had a long and prosperous stage career.  She’s won Olivier and Tony Awards for performances on the West End and on Broadway.  Her other work has also been richly rewarded.  She’s won an Oscar, Emmys, Golden Globes, Cannes awards, and multiple prizes from critics’ groups.  She received good reviews for her first starring film role, in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).  She played a London swinger for Michelangelo Antonioni in his provocative English-language debut, Blowup (1966).  She portrayed the life (and odd death) of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan in Isadora (1968).  With Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, she played the title role in Julia (1977).  She played Ruth Wilcox, the owner of the estate, in Howards End (1992), and Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway (1997).  She made a brief but memorable appearance as the older Briony Tallis in Atonement (2007).  Throughout her life she has been outspoken in her support of a number of political causes, among them civil rights, nuclear disarmament, Soviet Jews, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).  She has worked as an ambassador for the United Nations.

Corin Redgrave, like his sister Vanessa, has both a career as actor and political activist.  He has worked in theater, on television, and in films.  His movie credits include A Man for All Seasons (1966), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), In the Name of the Father (1993), and as Hamish, the groom of wedding two, in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

Lynn Redgrave has been active on stage, television, and film since the ’60s.  She had a part in the hit Tom Jones (1963) and won raves for Georgy Girl (1966).  All her charm couldn’t do much to save The Happy Hooker (1975).  She played the supportive lover and wife of the pianist in Shine (1995), and the disapproving housekeeper of gay director James Whale in Gods and Monsters (1998).

Natasha Richardson was the older daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and film director Tony Richardson, and, no surprise, had a long and distinguished career onstage.  Her film performances included the role of Mary Shelly in Gothic (1986) and the title role in Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst (1988).  She played in the lead in the film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), set in a dystopian religious tyranny.  She and her husband-to-be, Liam Neeson, costarred as doctors trying to help the isolated girl in Nell (1994).  She starred in Asylum (2005) and with her mother in Evening (2007).  Her life was tragically cut short in a skiing accident in Quebec in March 2009.  In The Wildest Dream (due in 2010), a documentary about George Mallory’s ill-fated expedition up Mt. Everest, Richardson’s voice will provide the off-screen role of Mallory’s wife.

Joely Richardson has also appeared in films, on stage, and on TV (notably Nip/Tuck).  Her films include roles in Wetherby (1985), James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything (1994), and as Marie Antoinette in The Affair of the Necklace (2001).  In 2004 she appeared in the HBO film The Fever, which starred her mother and was directed by her half-brother Carlo Gabriel Nero.

Jemma Redgrave has been a star of British television for a couple of decades (perhaps best known for the lead in the Bramwell series).  In film she played the daughter of her aunt Vanessa in Howards End.

Beyond the final credits
Rachel Kempson was a Redgrave by marriage and an actress in her own right.  (She was Lady Redgrave, formally, though she didn’t use that name professionally.)  She was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the English Theatre Company, and the Old Vic, and she appeared with Michael many times on stage.  She acted on British television across several decades.  Among her notable films are The Captive Heart (1946), Tom Jones (1963), and Out of Africa (1985).

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The Browning Version (1951)
Michael Redgrave

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One of the Greats
Yakima Canutt is often regarded as the greatest stuntman in the history of Hollywood.  Canutt was a double for top stars such as John Wayne and Clark Gable.  He famously performed the “drop” stunt in Stagecoach, jumping across a team of galloping horses and falling to the ground.  He was the second unit director on Ben-Hur and staged that film’s memorable chariot race.

…58…59…60.