We all have days when we don’t look so good. But who is this waif and stray sitting on the steps of Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in the winter of 1960? Actually, it’s none other than and actor and activist Vanessa Redgrave.
The picture originally appeared under the heading of An Irishman's Diary, which, in those days, had a sort of breezy, Hello magazine jauntiness. The piece is too delicious to paraphrase, so let's have it in full.
"Even if she was head girl of her school (not St Trinian's) Miss Vanessa Redgrave is just as forgetful as the next woman. When the cast of Look On Tempests came into London from Cambridge, Vanessa walked out of the train, leaving her two overcoats behind her on the luggage rack.
“There wasn’t time before coming to Dublin to retrieve the lost coats, so she picked up the first coat that came to hand in her father’s house. The coat happened to be her father’s and although Vanessa is a good five foot eleven, Sir Michael is appreciably longer in the arms. Hence the Little Orphan Annie look of the pretty girl in the photograph . . .”
Little Orphan Annie was clearly not a role the young Redgrave was cut out to play; those cheekbones and that confident smile would rule her out right away.
Later in 1960, she would get her first big role, costarring with her father in a play called The Tiger and the Horse.
She has had a dazzling career ever since, and will shortly be on our screens once again, in Jim Sheridan's film of Sebastian Barry's novel The Secret Scripture.
Equally, however, she has always spoken up in support of the downtrodden and underprivileged of the world. So perhaps she wasn’t all that far removed from Little Orphan Annie after all.
Arminta Wallace
