Lynn Redgrave RIP

Lynn Redgrave, who died on May 2 aged 67, was for most of her career viewed as the "normal" member of her theatrical family – the one without the bisexual husband, the revolutionary politics, or indeed the brilliant career; in the 1990s, however, she began to rival her better-known siblings, Corin and Vanessa, both in terms of her career and her unorthodox private life.
Published: 6:26PM BST 03 May 2010

For much of her life, Lynn Redgrave was defined by who she was not. Her father, the actor Michael Redgrave, had invested all his energies in his first two children, Vanessa and Corin, and expected little of his younger daughter. When Lynn found his diaries many years later and looked up the day of her birth, she found a lunch appointment and a note of the night's performance, but no mention of her own arrival. When the Redgrave children acted out the Anglo-American "special relationship", Vanessa was the President, Corin the prime minister; Lynn was the President's dog.

Tall, with grey-blue eyes and an intelligent, attractive face, Lynn Redgrave made her mark, aged 23, as the plump and pathetic protagonist in Silvio Narizzano's Georgy Girl (1966). Her sympathetic yet comic performance in the title role earned her an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics.

"Give a cheer all you 'Uglies' for Lynn Redgrave," wrote Ann Leslie in the Daily Express. "Up the Fatties!" The film led to her playing roles in a number of films on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1974 she emigrated to America with her new husband, John Clark – the BBC's first Just William in the 1940s. She had children and the invitations began to dry up.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the film director Scott Hicks offered her a part in a small film, playing the wife of the brilliant, mentally ill Australian pianist David Helfgott. Shine won numerous awards and became a mini-blockbuster. A couple of years later she took the part of Hanna, the frumpy and religious Hungarian housekeeper in Gods and Monsters and earned another Oscar nomination, a second Golden Globe and the London Film Critics Circle Award.

But at about the same time, her personal life began to fall apart. In 1998 she discovered that the little boy she had regarded as her grandson was, in fact, her husband's son. In 1991 he had had a clandestine affair with her assistant, Nicolette Hannah; Nicolette had a baby, Zachary; she kept the father's identity secret, but then fell in love with Ben, Lynn Redgrave's son by Clark, and married him.

When Nicolette and Ben's marriage failed, John Clark began to pursue her again; Nicolette took out a restraining order against him, threatening to tell Lynn who Zachary's true father was. In the end, it was unnecessary. Clark bared his soul at a family Thanksgiving dinner in 1998 and Lynn Redgrave, after 32 years of marriage to the man she had described as her "mainstay and support through fat and thin", decided that enough was enough.

The divorce, messy even by Hollywood standards, was front page news for months. She accused him of being cheap, penny-pinching and controlling, making her wear second-hand clothes, clean their swimming pool and tend the garden. He accused her of turning his children against him, destroying his career as a director and refusing to try to save the marriage. She persuaded a judge to send him to prison on his 68th birthday for his failure to produce vital financial documents in court; he complained that the £40,000 alimony she offered to pay him was inadequate – his psychotherapy bill alone amounted to some £10,000 a year.

But Lynn Redgrave regarded the experience as a liberating one which allowed her to take a more dispassionate look at her own life, not only her relationship with her estranged husband, but also with the strange, talented, dysfunctional family into which she had had the privilege of being born.

Lynn Rachel Redgrave was born on March 8 1943, the youngest of the three children of Sir Michael Redgrave and his wife, the actress Rachel Kempson. Sir Michael, a bisexual who had a long-term affair with Noël Coward, had little time or affection to spare for his younger daughter. A desperately shy and rather sickly child, it seemed she was not destined to follow the family trade and her father offered her no encouragement; at school her acting experience was limited to a performance as a shepherd in a Nativity play. She perceived herself as boring and dumpy beside her more glamorous siblings, and found pleasure only in the company of her beloved pony.

Yet she was enthralled by the theatre. An accomplished mimic, she would borrow her father's tape recorder and record an entire performance of Journey Into Space, doing all the characters, then play it back to Vanessa and Corin, to entertain them.

Lynn did not enjoy her time at Queensgate School and dropped out early in 1959, hoping to train as a professional show jumper. She enrolled on a cookery course, planning to raise the necessary funds by cooking gourmet meals for the rich, but soon concluded that this was impractical and gave up.

The family usually spent their summers at the annual Shakespeare Festival at Stratford upon Avon and it was Dorothy Tutin's performance in Twelfth Night in 1959 that convinced Lynn that she wanted to become an actress. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then, aged 18, joined the Royal Court Theatre as a general dogsbody. She made her debut as Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by her future brother-in-law Tony Richardson, appeared in Twelfth Night, toured with Dundee Rep in Billy Liar and made her West End debut in The Tulip Tree, starring Celia Johnson.

As director of the rumbustious Tom Jones, Richardson cast her in the minor role of the barmaid Susan. Her performance, which consisted of a scene in which she runs across the set screaming "Rape!", impressed Sir Laurence Olivier who invited her to audition for the new National Theatre Company.

She joined the company in 1963 and played Ophelia opposite her father and Peter O'Toole. In 1964 she attracted favourable reviews for her performance as Barblin in Max Freisch's Andorra, and as the featherbrained flapper Jackie in Noël Coward's Hay Fever she impressed critics with her flair for comedy.

In 1965, as Kattrin, the deaf and dumb daughter in Brecht's Mother Courage, she moved some in the audience to tears.

Taking time off from the stage, she appeared in The Girl With Green Eyes (1964) as Rita Tushingham's brash room-mate. Though she was no sylph, she had to gain 18 pounds for Georgy Girl, a part that had been rejected by a number of better-known actresses, including her elder sister Vanessa.

After her success in this role, Lynn Redgrave made her Broadway debut in 1967 as the eccentric debutante in Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy; took a supporting role in Sidney Lumet's spy thriller A Deadly Affair; and co-starred with Rita Tushingham in Smashing Time. In 1967 she married John Clark, who became her agent and manager.

By now she was established in the public mind as a comedienne, and in the 1970s Lynn Redgrave appeared in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) and took the title role in The Happy Hooker (1975).

Towards the end of the decade her film career was in the doldrums, though she had regular work in television comedies and miniseries, including the American shows House Calls (1979-81), Teachers Only (1982-83), Chicken Soup (1989) and the BBC's Faint-hearted Feminist (1984). She was also a popular guest on the television talk and game show circuit and made her mark in television commercials.

Lynn Redgrave was always known as the non-political Redgrave: during the 1991 Gulf War she and her sister Vanessa had a very public falling-out while they were performing together in Chekov's The Three Sisters, when Vanessa condemned the Americans as imperialist pigs and Lynn said she could not cope with her sister's views and was thinking of changing her name. Yet in her own quiet way, Lynn Redgrave probably achieved more for gradual social reform than her siblings ever achieved for the Workers' Revolution.

In 1981 she launched a lawsuit against Universal Television, claiming she had been sacked from the sitcom House Calls because she was not allowed to breast-feed her baby during breaks in shooting.

The case involved her in a 13-year legal wrangle which cost her some $500,000 and ended up in a tangle of cross-complaints, countersuits and allegations of legal malpractice. The case became a cause célèbre for American working mothers, and she was called to give evidence to congressional committees. As a result, American politicians began to feel that they had to include statements about child care in their election manifestos.

Lynn Redgrave also became a role model for women with weight and emotional problems. She confessed how, in her youth, she had suffered from the eating disorder bulimia and, after a determined effort to shed the pounds she had put on for Georgy Girl, for almost a decade she was the public face and body of Weight Watchers.

In 1991 Lynn Redgrave began to bounce back from comparative obscurity when she starred with Stewart Granger and Ricardo Montalban in Don Juan in Hell, her first Hollywood production. She then returned to the theatre.

In 1993, she launched a new career as a actor-playwright with a one-woman show, Shakespeare For My Father, a moving, cathartic and sometimes painful exploration of her complex relationship with the father who had rejected her. It played to packed audiences across America and enjoyed a successful run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

She went on to write The Mandrake Root, exploring the relationship between mothers and daughters in a tale of a dyspeptic 80-year-old actress whose arrival on her daughter's doorstep spurs an attempt to reclaim the past.

Again, there was much of Lynn Redgrave's own life in the play – her relationship with her mother, Rachel Kempson, and with her own daughter, Kelly, who had come out as a Buddhist lesbian before finding a husband and having two children. Lynn Redgrave's third play, Nightingale (2002), told the story of a pinched, disappointed woman whose past is slowly revealed.

After her divorce Lynn Redgrave starred in Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off (Piccadilly Theatre, 2001). She also starred with Madonna in The Next Best Thing; with Kenneth Branagh in How to Kill Your Neighbour's Dog; and with Jonathan Pryce and Rupert Everett in Who Killed Victor Fox? In 2003 she starred with Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson in David Cronenburg's Spider.

In September 2006 she appeared in the American premiere of her one-woman play Nightingale. The following year she appeared on television in an episode of Desperate Housewives.

Lynn Redgrave was appointed OBE in 2002.

She had been suffering from breast cancer, and her death comes only a month after that of her brother Corin.

She and John Clark had a son and two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/theatre-obituaries/7674056/Lynn-Redgrave.html