Like mother . . . and sister and grandad

That Redgrave dynasty (nearly) in full

THE REDGRAVE GENES are mighty genes indeed. Joely Richardson has made a significant mark on the profession. She bounced around on top of Sean Bean in Ken Russell’s characteristically lubricious take on Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 101 Dalmatians she held her own against that many dogs and one Glenn Close. She watched the citizens of Los Angeles being chopped up in Nip/Tuck. But when she walks into the room one’s first thoughts, despite those notable achievements, are of her mother, sister and grandfather. Those long features, that rigid bearing, those drawn-out vowels: the strain of molecules that gave us Michael Redgrave (grandad), Vanessa Redgrave (mum) and Natasha Richardson (Joely’s late sister) will not be resisted.

You can ponder the genetic ties in an odd new film called Anonymous. Directed by (of all people) Roland Emmerich, creator of Independence Day and 2012, the attractive-looking, nicely acted drama ponders questions concerning a progenitor of the Redgrave family business. Did one modestly educated man from Stratford-upon-Avon truly write all of Shakespeare’s plays? The film thinks not. If Emmerich and his writers are to be believed, Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, a nobleman suspected of romancing Queen Elizabeth I, was the real talent behind the greatest oeuvre in the English language.

In a nice touch, Richardson plays the queen as a young woman and her mum essays the older, more disappointed monarch.

“It wasn’t necessary to impersonate one another because she is, after all, my mum,” Richardson says. “We did have a talk, and we all decided it would be wrong. It would be gimmicky. It would be better to play the truth of our characters. The young Elizabeth is a completely different woman.”

Redgrave and Richardson do, as it happens, sound more similar than many mothers and daughters. I can hear the senior actor’s signature purr in every sentence.

“Really? It’s hard for me to see that,” Richardson says. “Actually, somebody did send me a tape of her in her early 30s doing an interview. It was fascinating. I could barely recognise the person. She still spoke the queen’s English in a way she doesn’t now. That showed me how much voices change.”

Now what’s all this nonsense about Shakespeare not writing his own plays? Richardson seems a sensible woman, so surely she must know that this is the grandmother of all nutty conspiracy theories. At some point in the 19th century various precursors of internet chatter – communicating by carrier pigeon, perhaps – began putting forward various candidates as alternative authors of the great man’s dramas. A smidgen of snobbery seemed to drive the argument. How could a humble glovemaker’s son from Warwickshire have written so many significant works? Surely the author must have been posher than that. Hmm?

“Do you know what? That is my least favourite argument against the authorship question,” she says with a tolerant sigh. “With all due respect, this is just playing an emotional card. It’s nothing to do with class. It’s to do with what he would have been exposed to. How could he have written with such knowledge about the court? The topics were just so diverse. He had to have access to wide-open knowledge.”

Well, yes. But, aside from anything else, some of the plays were first performed after the earl of Oxford’s death.

“Many works are first released posthumously. There are other questions as well. There is evidence that . . .”

And she’s off. Richardson makes it clear that she savours this sort of argument. But she’s not going to take no for an answer. The more forceful she becomes, the more strongly the indestructible Redgrave genes show through. It’s like carrying on a debate with theatrical royalty.

Laurence Olivier famously announced the birth of Vanessa on the stage of the Old Vic before a performance of Hamlet, in which Sir Michael Redgrave, her father, was playing Laertes. With that start, nobody could be surprised that she drifted towards acting. But Vanessa, who devotes much of her spare time to hard-left politics, was never happy about the third generation following in her footsteps. I had heard that she begged Joely, a talented tennis player as a child, to do something less thespian with her life. But Joely and Natasha’s father, the film director Tony Richardson, seems to have nudged her back towards the stage.

“I wanted to be a gymnast,” she says. “I was obsessed with ice skating. I did want to be a tennis player. But Dad loved us putting on shows when we stayed with him. I was horribly shy. It’s the old cliche: I was shy in life but found a release through acting. My mother said: ‘Be anything but that.’ ”

We must assume that Redgrave has now come round. “It’s funny. Recently she asked me: ‘Did I really say that? Did I really say be anything else?’ She was genuinely surprised that she’d felt that way once. I don’t know what it was. Was it to do with her politics? I have a daughter, and I would want to protect her from the rejection that comes with acting. But I don’t think it was that with my mother.”

At any rate Richardson did attend a tennis academy, but she quickly realised that she had left it too late to move into the professional sphere of that sport. With the linear inevitability of Greek tragedy, she took a few roles in rep theatre, then drifted towards the Royal Shakespeare Company and found herself appearing in independent films. An early break came when she secured a role in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers.

“Then I did Lady Chatterley’s Lover with Ken Russell and balanced that by appearing in 101 Dalmatians. For many years I didn’t do much theatre because I had a young daughter – or that was my excuse,” she says with a laugh.

There were a few high-profile romances during the 1990s. She spent time with Archie Stirling, an older Scottish laird, and dallied with popular party boy Jamie Theakston. She was married for a spell to Tim Bevan, founder of Working Title film company, and their daughter, Daisy, was born in 1992. But the tabloid media is a peculiar beast. Her most prominent headline during this period came in 2000 when, in an unintended sequel to Elizabeth Hurley’s That Dress moment, she wore some kind of backless number to the premiere of Ben Elton’s Maybe Baby.

“I was in my mid-30s,” she says, sighing. “That is supposed to be a difficult time for actors. Then there was That Dress. God, it seems like a lifetime ago.”

Richardson has found a niche for herself. A flexible actor, with a strong face and (of course) a beautiful voice, she has profited from the new respectability of American television. For six series she played the wife of Dr Sean McNamara, ace plastic surgeon, in the delightfully tacky Nip/Tuck. Over the past few years she has made frequent trips to Ardmore Studios, in Co Wicklow, to play Catherine Parr in the breathless historical epic The Tudors. “That is such a lovely experience,” she says.

Did she get a chance to fall down drunk in Temple Bar? “Do you know what? I am not a fall-down-drunk sort of person. Ha ha! Sorry, sorry. There are ages and stages of life when that’s suitable and there are stages when it isn’t. It may sound pretentious, but I don’t think I could meet my schedule if I was doing that. The Tudors is such a well-oiled machine. That is one of my loveliest working experiences.”

There is, sadly, no avoiding mention of the tragedies that have hung over the Redgrave family recently. In 2010 both her uncle, Corin Redgrave, the actor and Marxist firebrand, and her aunt Lynn Redgrave, yet another fine performer, passed away. These deaths followed the more unexpected passing of her sister, Natasha – Liam Neeson’s wife – after a skiing accident in 2009. One can’t help but wonder how the family are bearing up. Her mother lost two siblings and a daughter in little more than a year.

“I think that it has been a very brutal two and a half years,” she says after a pause. “It is, you know, completely heartbreaking. I feel like we have been levelled in life and that we keep going for all the people we love.”

They seem like a pretty robust bunch. Later tonight Richardson will stroll before the crowds for the BFI London Film Festival screening of Anonymous. A few hundred yards away her mother will be appearing opposite James Earl Jones in the West End production of Driving Miss Daisy. Richardson smiles at the prospect.

“But I will not be wearing That Dress.” Very wise.

MICHAEL REDGRAVE (1908-1985) Himself the son of a silent-movie actor, Sir Michael can be seen to advantage in such pictures as The Lady Vanishes, The Way to the Stars and, as the best-ever possessed ventriloquist, the superb Dead of Night (above).

VANESSA REDGRAVE

(born 1937) Michael’s elder daughter with wife Rachel Kempson (also an actor). Attracted attention playing Rosalind in a 1961 Royal Shakespeare Company production of As You Like It (left). Went on to be a key screen actor. Check out Isadora, Julia and (if you can take it) Ken Russell’s The Devils.

CORIN REDGRAVE (1939-2010) If anything even more radical than sister Vanessa, Corin, though a fine actor, devoted much of his time to running the Workers Revolutionary Party. Scary in In the Name of the Father. Charming in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

LYNN REDGRAVE (1943-2010) Vanessa’s likable and less intimidating sister. Won acclaim and an Oscar nomination for the Swinging Sixties flick Georgy Girl (left) and did good later work in films such as Kinsey and Spider.

NATASHA RICHARDSON (1963-2009) Before her untimely death in a skiing accident, Vanessa’s daughter, and wife of Liam Neeson, offered turns in Patty Hearst, The Handmaid’s Tale, The White Countess (right) and Ken Russell’s Gothic.

JEMMA REDGRAVE

(born 1965) Corin’s daughter appeared in Howards End

and Lassie (left), as well as TV shows such as Cold Blood, Bramwell and The Buddha of Suburbia. Amazingly, she has no Ken Russell credits as yet.

JOELY RICHARDSON (born 1965) Now best known for TV performances in such series as Nip/Tuck and The Tudors (right) Vanessa’s younger daughter broke through as the posh libertine in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, directed by (it’s that man again) Ken Russell.