Redgraves keep it in family as they swap roles for movie
THEY COME from one of acting’s most famous dynasties.
Now Vanessa Redgrave has teamed up with daughter Joely Richardson for a film, who will play a part once performed by a her mother. They will star in a version of Henry James novella The Aspern Papers, out soon. Ms Redgrave, now 81, first saw the play as a child when her famous father Michael Redgrave adapted it from the novella and played the male lead.
Decades later, Redgrave played the role of Miss Tina on stage. More time has passed and now she is playing the forbidding grande dame Juliana Bordereau in the big-screen version which is opening in the US, with Richardson cast in the younger woman’s role.
“I’ve been through every version of it,” says Redgrave. “My father was in it with two wonderful actresses, which I saw a number of times. Then I was in it much later as Miss Tina, and suddenly I get the chance to be this ferocious Bordereau, the old lady, which is kind of the full stretch of the bow, if you see what I mean.”
She says of her daughter: “It was heaven working with Joels.”
It is the fourth time the two have paired, a sequence that includes Redgrave joining her daughter on the popular TV series Nip/Tuck including one in which Redgrave sought a facelift from one of the two young plastic surgeons at the heart of the show.
At the time, Richardson worried that her mother might not cope well with the demands of weekly television, including rapidly memorising scripts.
For Richardson, working with her mother highlights what she calls “that Mum-Vanessa thing”.
“It’s so funny because obviously mum’s mum to me, but when I’m talking about her in a professional capacity, I tend to call her Vanessa ,” Richardson said.
Redgrave is the matriarch of a dynasty that includes father Michael, her late siblings Lynne and Corin Redgrave, and her children – Natasha Richardson, who died in 2009, Joely Richardson and writer/director Carlo Nero.