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Vanessa Redgrave: Roles
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During these early years of her career, Redgrave hovered on the brink of stardom, due in large part to the uneven quality of the films in which she appeared. In 1968, she played the title role in Isadora, the biography of avant garde dancer Isadora Duncan, earning her first Oscar nomination and her second best actress award at Cannes (her first was for Morgan). The film represented one of Redgrave's first attempts at creating an independent, strong-willed, feminist character with strong socialist leanings. Throughout the 1970s, Redgrave continued to appear in films of varying quality, although her characters were almost always complex and controversial; the highlights from this period include The Trojan Women (1971), her Oscar-nominated turn in Mary Queen of Scotts (1971) and most notably the tragic Julia (1977), which won Redgrave an Oscar for best supporting actress. At the Oscar ceremony, the actress generated considerable controversy during her acceptance speech by using the ceremony as a forum for her tireless campaign for Palestinian rights in Israel. That, coupled with her outspoken support for the communist-oriented Workers' Revolutionary Party, made life difficult for Redgrave, who at one time was considered the British equivalent to actress/social activist Jane Fonda.
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The 1980s would begin with a bang as Redgrave approached the Nazi terror in a far more serious manner. Based on Fania Fenelon's autobiography, The Musicians Of Auschwitz, and adapted for television by Arthur Miller, Playing For Time took Redgrave into the concentration camps as one of a group of female musicians who must perform for their captors in order to escape death. Though Redgrave's pro-Palestinian views made her a controversial choice to play a Jewish heroine, she of course excelled in the role and duly won an Emmy. Now maturing as a medium, television was beginning to deal in both historical epics and hard-hitting pieces dealing with social, political and sexual injustice. It would provide fertile territory for the still-burning Redgrave.
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During 1989 Vanessa arranged for two companies from the USSR to perform at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith - Shalom Theatre Company in THE TRAIN TO HAPPINESS and The Vakhtangov Company in PEACE OF BREST - LITOVSK. Vanessa appeared in the last play of this season - CHEKHOV'S WOMEN. She followed this by playing Heather and Mrs Honey in A MADHOUSE IN GOA at the Lyric Hammersmith and Apollo Theatre. Vanessa went on to recreate the role of Lady in ORPHEUS DESCENDING at the Neil Simon Theater on Broadway to great critical and audience acclaim, and this was recorded for television by Turner Television, again with Sir Peter Hall directing.
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Redgrave's kudos include an Emmy Award for HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000) and an Emmy nomination for The Gathering Storm (2002). Recent feature films include roles in Mrs. Dalloway, Tim Robbin's politically charged Cradle Will Rock, the critically acclaimed Girl, Interrupted, and Sean Penn's The Pledge. For her work in Miramax Films' A Month By the Lake (1995), Roger Ebert declared her to be "at the absolute peak of physical and mental perfection."
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Redgrave long ago entered the stars' pantheon. Dench and Mirren have managed something no American actress has: they're at the top of their game at 71 and 61, respectively. As for Jackson, since 1992, her stage has been the House of Commons, where some would like to see her as the next Prime Minister. That would be a challenging role.
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During the 1990s, Redgrave came into her own as a leading character actress. She appeared in a number of distinguished films, including an acclaimed performance as the lonely eccentric in the Merchant-Ivory masterpiece Howards End (1992), Miss Bentley in A Month by the Lake (1995), Max in the Brian De Palma blockbuster Mission Impossible (1996), Oscar Wilde's mother in Wilde (1997), and a cameo role in the adaptation of Peter Hoeg's best-selling thriller Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997). As the 90s drew to a close Redgrave continued her productive screen career by appearing in numerous star vehicles including the role of Robin Lerner in Deep Impact (1998), Dr Wick in Girl, Interrupted (1999) and a cameo appearance in The Pledge (2001). Redgrave probably remains too outspoken to be awarded a much-deserved damehood.
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