‘After some tough years, I’m done with sadness’
Some devastating losses sent Joely Richardson reeling, but in her fifties she’s made a vow of happiness and plans to celebrate everything that’s left, she tells Celia Walden
When Joely Richardson turned 50, she made a vow: “This is going to be the happiest time of my life. I’m making that decision here and now.” The actress pauses for a moment – eyes wide, defiant.
Then she smiles, embarrassed by her own solemnity. “Honestly, though, I do feel that as English people we get nervous saying: ‘I want to be happy.’ But the thing is, I’ve done sadness and I will do sadness again. So right now I just choose to get as much joy out of life as I can.”
That the 53-year-old star of Snowden and Red Sparrow immediately qualifies this statement with the kind of English semi-apology she’s just warned against – “not that I mean I’ll only do frivolous things” – is endearing. And maybe it’s the illustrious theatrical dynasty the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late Tony Richardson is a part of, the string of weighty roles she’s played over the course of her 35-year career (everyone from Lady Chatterley, Wallis Simpson and Catherine Parr to Marie Antoinette and Emily Dickinson) and her catwalk-model height and posture, but I didn’t think Joely Richardson would be reachable enough to find endearing.
It didn’t help that I spent the previous night watching her play Lila, a brittle Hollywood actress, in her new film: the feel-good Christmas caper
of the year, Surviving Christmas with
the Relatives. Married to her alcoholic agent (Michael Landes), she, her sister Miranda (Gemma Whelan) and their families (James Fox, Sally Phillips and Ronni Ancona are all part of the dysfunctional mix) reunite in their deceased parents’ dilapidated country house for a three-day Christmas ordeal of the kind we all recognise.
Breaking off from an account of filming with Fatal Attraction director, James Dearden, who based the script on manic Christmases of his own, she makes the poignant aside: “I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking a lot of my father recently.” These conversational tangents – betraying a restless mind cluttered with literary references – are another reason you warm to Richardson. But it’s the idea that the actress needs to explain what led her to make her “happiness vow” that’s perhaps most touching. Because as the sister of the late Natasha Richardson, who died in a skiing accident in 2009, hers is a story and a sadness we’ve followed for years.
“Losing my sister meant that there were many years of grief and those years were tough,” she says quietly. “Because it wasn’t just three months or six months, it was a great big chunk of time. And it wasn’t just my loss, it was my mum’s and her boys’ loss.”
She doesn’t want to go back over a pain she’s spoken about honestly in the past, or see another headline about her grief, she adds with a small smile, “because now I’d sort of like to see a different headline. And, yes, there were other losses around the same time – some of my best friends died. So for a few years I just thought: ‘God!’” Closing her eyes for a second, Richardson rakes her hands through her thick blonde hair: “‘I didn’t think life was going to be like this!’ And there was an element of just surviving. But then
I turned 50 and had this reaction. Because we have this window, don’t we?”
Her sister’s death and the near-fatal heart attack her mother suffered in 2015 may have heightened Richardson’s awareness of this opportunity to wring joy, but the actress has always come across as someone who lives fully, vigorously – in her private and professional life.
She may have thrown herself into work after her marriage to Working Title co-founder Tim Bevan ended (the pair have a 26-year-old daughter, Daisy, also an actress), and swung from the hit US TV drama
Nip/tuck and one-woman shows like the off-broadway The Belle of Amherst to blockbuster movies like
Red Sparrow, but she found time for relationships with high-profile men such as Jamie Theakston and Russian businessman Evgeny Lebedev over the years – as well as others she won’t discuss. All she’ll tell me today is that there was someone she recently split from. “So this Christmas is a bit of a ‘wait and see’ job, but it’ll probably be a family one in London because Mum’s doing a play here. And I’ve got the builders in.”
The “petty fights, strange shenanigans and logistical issues involving turkeys” that crop up in Surviving Christmas with the Relatives are something Richardson can relate to. But the curious sadness many feel at this time, at the passing of another year? “No. I don’t feel that. Yes, time becomes more precious and the choices you make more essential, but it goes back to me wanting to enjoy the time I have. And I’m not going to say that because I’m over 50 and a woman, I’m no longer desirable,” she adds with an eye roll. “All of that is surface stuff. And the great thing about getting older is that it becomes