Another wintry storm Friday

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Lynn Redgrave, an introspective and independent
player in her family's acting dynasty who became a 1960s sensation
as the freethinking title character of "Georgy Girl" and later
dramatized her troubled past in such one-woman stage performances
"Shakespeare for My Father" and "Nightingale," has died. She
was 67.

      Her publicist Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her
children, said Redgrave died peacefully Sunday night at her home in
Connecticut. Children Ben, Pema and Annabel were with her.


      "Our beloved mother Lynn Rachel passed away peacefully after a
seven year journey with breast cancer," they said in a statement
Monday. "She lived, loved and worked harder than ever before. The
endless memories she created as a mother, grandmother, writer,
actor and friend will sustain us for the rest of our lives. Our
entire family asks for privacy through this difficult time."


      Her death comes a year after her niece Natasha Richardson died
from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident and just a month
after the death of her older brother, Corin Redgrave.


      The youngest child of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lynn
Redgrave never quite managed the acclaim -- or notoriety -- of elder
sibling Vanessa Redgrave, but received Oscar nominations for
"Georgy Girl" and "Gods and Monsters," and Tony nominations for
"Mrs. Warren's Profession," "Shakespeare for My Father" and
"The Constant Wife." 

In recent years, she also made appearances
in the television shows "Ugly Betty," "Law & Order" and
"Desperate Housewives."


      "Vanessa was the one expected to be the great actress," Lynn
Redgrave told The Associated Press in 1999. "It was always,
'Corin's the brain, Vanessa the shining star, oh, and then there's
Lynn.'"


      In the theater, Redgrave, with her striking dark red hair, often
displayed a sunny, sweet and open personality, much like her
ebullient offstage personality. It worked well in such shows as
"Black Comedy," her Broadway debut in 1972 and again two years
later in "My Fat Friend," a comedy about an overweight young
woman who sheds pounds to find romance.
    


  Tall and blue-eyed like her sister, she was as open about her
personal life as Vanessa has been about politics. In plays and in
interviews, Lynn Redgrave confided about her family, her marriage
and her health. She acknowledged that she suffered from bulimia and
served as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers. 

With daughter Annabel
Clark, she released a 2004 book about her fight with cancer,
"Journal: A Mother and Daughter's Recovery From Breast Cancer."
      

 Redgrave was born in London in 1943 and despite self-doubts,
pursued the family trade. She studied at London's Central School of
Speech and Drama and was not yet 20 when she debuted professionally
on stage in a London production of "A Midsummer's Night Dream."

Like her siblings, she appeared in plays and in films, working
under Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier as a member of the National
Theater and under director/brother-in-law Tony Richardson in the
1963 screen hit "Tom Jones."


      "Before I was born, my father was a movie star and a stage
star," the actress told the AP in 1993. "I was raised in a
household where we didn't see our parents in the morning. We lived
in the nursery. Our nanny made our breakfast, and I was dressed up
to go downstairs to have tea with my parents, if they were there."
     

 True fame caught her with "Georgy Girl," billed as "the
wildest thing to hit the world since the miniskirt." The 1966 film
starred Redgrave as the plain, childlike Londoner pursued by her
father's middle-aged boss, played by James Mason.
     


 Dismissed by critic Pauline Kael as a false testament to free
thinking ("Underneath all the nonconformity gear are the crooked
little skeletons of old Shirley Temple pictures"), the film was
branded cool by moviegoers on both side of the Atlantic and
received several Academy Award nominations, including one for
Redgrave and one for the popular title song performed by the
Australian group The Seekers.
     

 "All the films I've been in -- and I haven't been in that many
attention-getting films -- no one expected anything of, least of all
me," Redgrave said in an AP interview in 1999.
      


But "Georgy Girl" didn't lead to lasting success and by age
50, Redgrave was as known for her weight problems as for her
acting. 


As she wrote in the foreword to "Shakespeare for My
Father," she was out of work and set off on a "journey that began
almost as an act of desperation," writing a play out of her
"passionately emotional desire" to better understand her father,
who had died in 1985.

      In the 1993 interview, Redgrave remembered her father as a
fearless stage performer yet a shy, tormented man who had great
difficulty talking to his youngest daughter.
     

 "I didn't really know him," Redgrave said. "I lived in his
house. I was in awe of him and I adored him, and I was terrified of
him and I hated him and I loved him, all in one go."

      She looked at her mother's side of the family in "The Mandrake
Root" and "Rachel and Juliet." In 2009, her play "Nightingale"
touched upon her health, the life of her grandmother (Beatrice
Kempson) and the end of her 32-year marriage to actor-director John
Clark, who had disclosed that he had fathered a child with the
future wife of their son Benjamin.
      


"Redgrave, a cancer survivor, sits at a desk ... and works from
a script because of what has been described as an unspecified
medical ailment -- but not a recurrence of cancer -- requiring
immediate treatment. It doesn't affect her touching, beautifully
realized performance," the AP wrote last year.
      

"And reading gives the evening an almost storybook quality in
which it seems as if the actress, buoyed by a radiant smile, has
gathered a few good friends to hear her reminisce about this
formidable woman -- mother of Rachel, mother-in-law of Michael and
grandmother to Lynn, Vanessa and Corin."
      

Lynn Redgrave is also survived by six grandchildren, her sister
Vanessa, and four nieces and nephews.


      A private funeral with be held later this week.
      
      

Gallery

Arts and Culture

Actress Lynn Redgrave died Sunday night at her home in Connecticut, after a seven-year battle with cancer.

Actress Lynn Redgrave dies at age 67

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox