With almost 100 films under her belt, Vanessa Redgrave is now part of the eclectic cast of a new Irish musical, writes Michael Dwyer
On January 30th, 1937, Laurence Olivier was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic theatre in London, with Michael Redgrave as Laertes. During the curtain call, Olivier announced to the audience: "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter!"
"I never asked my father or Laurence Olivier about it," Vanessa Redgrave says at the mention of that story, "but my mother told me it's absolutely true, although, of course, she was not there on that night. It's a wonderful story."
She is tired when we meet, after getting up in the middle of the night for a flight to Dublin. She is taller than most actresses I've met - apart from Sigourney Weaver and Geena Davis.
She speaks warmly about working on Irish writer-director Anthony Byrne's first feature, the ambitious and stylised musical, Short Order. She has a cameo as a mysterious stranger who turns up in a bar and tells a story about a man who wanted to live forever - and did, in paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, just as Redgrave will live on in her indelible screen performances. John Hurt, comedian Jack Dee, Croatian actor Rade Sherbedgia and vibrant young French actor-singer Emma de Caunes also feature in the eclectic cast of Short Order, a film that is obsessed with connecting the pleasures of food and sex, and exhibits a vigorous visual style that dazzles.
REDGRAVE LAUGHS WHEN I ask how she got involved with it. "Do you know that it's a mystery to me, a complete mystery? You'll have to ask Anthony. However, I'm very pleased I did it. It was a lovely piece of work that came my way from a very good new young director. "
Did Byrne seem at all intimidated to be working on his first feature with such celebrated actors? "Oh, you'll have to ask him," she says again. "I wouldn't dare ask him that, although I suppose I might these days. I've got a little bit more daring. But he was very calm and confident, which I liked very much because once in a while you can find yourself working with a director who you can tell is very tense and fussy. All the best directors are calm. That is a fact."
Having appeared in close on 100 movies, Redgrave knows more than most actors about working with different directors. At 69, she is the eldest member of the remarkable extended family of actors that includes her siblings, Corin and Lynn Redgrave; her daughters, Natasha and Joely Richardson, whose father Tony Richardson directed the Oscar-winning Tom Jones; and her son with her Camelot co-star Franco Nero, is Carlo Nero, who directed Vanessa in the recent feature, The Fever, of which she is exceptionally proud and which she describes as "my testament". Corin's daughter, Jemma Redgrave, is an actor, and Vanessa's son-in-law, Natasha's husband, is Liam Neeson.
Vanessa's parents were prominent stage and screen actors, Rachel Kempson and the afore-mentioned Michael Redgrave. "And my grandparents, too, and their parents, actually," she adds. Is acting in the family genes? "I believe the biggest issue is not what's innate in you, but what surroundings and conditions you grow up in," she says. "I grew up with my parents singing, playing the piano and playing charades, and that was before I ever saw either of them on stage."
She had acted on stage with her father and had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the invitation of Peter Hall before she met Tony Richardson, who was to the forefront of the new realist British cinema movement as the director of Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey. "Tony Richardson's father was a chemist up north," she says, "and wartime was a misery for the kids up there without any arts or sports facilities. That was England for the majority at that time. The best thing the Labour government did after the war was to allow people to go to university on the basis of doing well at exams and not on the basis of what you could pay. That's vanished now, and destroyed, shamefully.
'Tony was one of that first generation who brought a flood of creativity into the universities, and then into the arts. They changed everything. They were iconoclastic and they were also prepared to learn from people who were light years ahead in film-making, such as the French, or, in a more classical sense but equally admirably, in American theatre and film. After the war, young people all over Europe looked to America for new music, plays and films."
Redgrave was catapulted to stardom in 1966 with her first two leading roles in key films of that dynamic era - Karel Reisz's Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment, which brought her an Oscar nomination and the best actress award at Cannes, and in Michelangelo Antonioni's enigmatic Blow Up. "They felt so new and fresh," she says. "It was wonderfully exciting, and I learned so much. It was my education after my education."
IN 1977 SHE won an Oscar as the eponymous Resistance fighter in Julia. Her acceptance speech was one of the most controversial in Oscar history, when she castigated the "Zionist hoodlums" she believed to be the root of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Despite her own subsequent castigation for that speech, she received further Oscar nominations for the Merchant-Ivory productions, The Bostonians (1984) and Howards End (1992). She features with Ralph Fiennes, her daughter Natasha and her sister Lynn in the final Merchant-Ivory film, The White Countess, which was completed before producer Ismail Merchant died last year.
Three years ago she added a Tony award to her many trophies, for her portrayal of Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night. Does she enjoy the thrill of live performance? "I do when it's a production as good as Hecuba, when I did it last year in Washington. Tony Harrison directed it. He's inspired and a genius, but such a humble, unassuming man."
That Euripides adaptation featured Redgrave as Hecuba, the Trojan queen reduced by the Greeks to a grovelling slave, and it was set on the mountainside edge of a modern refugee camp. "The play hit on the nerve centre of our times, which is that without justice, you get revenge and terror," she says.
It's hardly surprising that Redgrave feels passionately about Tony Blair's support for the invasion of Iraq. "I think this Labour government has been shameful, absolutely shameful," she says, "but I feel the same way about it as my American friends feel about the present administration." I ask her how Glenda Jackson, her co-star in Mary, Queen of Scots and now a Labour MP, reconciles her membership of the party with her objections to its Iraq policy. " I don't know how she feels, " Redgrave sighs. "I haven't asked her. But I don't know how so many Labour MPs can reconcile themselves with what has been happening because they disagree so profoundly with it. Glenda is an example of a wonderful person and a wonderful MP, and there are some others in the party."
WAS REDGRAVE EVER tempted into running for parliament? "No, I never wanted to, although I've campaigned door to door to door. We've got a human rights party, Peace and Progress, and we stood three candidates at the last election, which wasn't addressing some of the most important human rights issues of our time, and we had to draw attention to them - the detaining of people without charge and without trial for indefinite periods, and the issue of torture, which can never be legitimised."
Given her trenchant left-wing views, her response is unexpectedly philosophical when I note that she has appeared in two film versions of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons - as Anne Boleyn in the 1966 movie and, 22 years later, as Lady Alice More in the TV adaptation directed by Charlton Heston, Redgrave's polar opposite politically.
"There might have been a time in my life when I would have thought differently, but I don't believe there was," she says about working with Heston. "I think it would be very wrong toallow such differences to come into play in film or theatre. We should always be willing to work with people who believe in what the film is about. The arts are the last place in society that helps people retain their sanity, encourages them to think and to discuss, and to discover new aspects of certain questions. Everybody - anybody of any faith, any politics, any nationality, any race - can come in without discrimination and of their own free will and not break their own rules. I think it is vital that that never changes, and it's very important to defend that. We have to remain inclusive."
Short Order is running at Movies@Dundrum, Dublin, and the Slaney Plaza, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. The White Countess will be released on Mar 31