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Vanessa Redgrave: Daughters
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On the occasion of Vanessa Redgrave's birth, Laurence Olivier, who was playing Hamlet to Michael Redgrave's Laertes at the time, announced to the audience, "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter". He could not have known then how prescient his words would be.
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Redgrave's present status was prophesied on the day of her birth by no less a luminary than Sir Laurence Olivier. On January 30th, 1937, during the curtain call of a performance at London's Old Vic Theatre, he announced to the audience "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter!" (Laertes being the character played that night by Vanessa's father, the renowned Michael Redgrave). It really wasn't such a wild guess on Olivier's part. Michael was already an esteemed member of the thespian establishment.
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Born in London, England on Jan. 30, 1937, Redgrave was the daughter of legendary stage and screen performer Michael Redgrave (Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,†1938) and actress Rachel Kempson. The sister of two equally notable actors – Lynn Redgrave and Corin Redgrave – she entered the School of Speech and Drama in 1954 and made her professional debut four years later in “A Touch of the Sun,†which co-starred her famous father. Redgrave quickly became one of the British stage’s shining lights in the ‘60s in productions of “As You Like It†and “The Seagull;†her turn in the title role of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie†(1966) marked her greatest stage achievement of the period. She was unable to follow the play to Broadway or appear in its movie adaptation – which would win Maggie Smith an Oscar – due to her own film career. Having made her on-screen debut as the daughter of Michael Redgrave’s character in the 1958 film “Behind the Mask,†Redgrave became a movie star thanks to the 1966 film “Morgan!†in which she played eccentric David Warner’s long-suffering ex-wife. For that film, she earned nominations from the Oscars, Golden Globe, and BAFTA, as well as the Cannes Film Festival Award.
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After she'd camped it up as the evil queen taunted by a mirror voiced by Vincent Price in a Faerie Tale Theatre adaptation of Snow White, Redgrave would move on to David Hare's Wetherby. Here she'd play a small-town teacher still pining for a boy who died many years before. When a dinner guest no one knows commits suicide, everyone in the town is driven to re-examine their lives, Redgrave being played in flashback by her own daughter Joely. Following this would come another major TV production, Three Sovereigns For Sarah. Here, years after the Salem Witch Trials, Redgrave would attempt to clear the names of her executed sisters, in the process clearly explaining the madness of the time. Many critics considered it to be the most accurate portrayal yet of those terrible events.
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