Vanessa Redgrave, the Academy Award-winning actress, recently gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 in which she spoke about the death of three members of her immediate family in the last year and a half.
In March of last year, Redgrave’s daughter, the actress Natasha Richardson, died following a skiing accident. She was 45. Then, in April of this year, Redgrave’s brother Corin died at age 70. Less than a month later their younger sister Lynn also died aged 67. Both Corin and Lynn were well regarded actors in their own right; indeed, Lynn was nominated for an Academy Award for Georgy Girl and Corin garnered a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play in 1999 for his portrayal of Boss Whalen in Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales.
The death of Natasha came soon after Vanessa Redgrave had played the part of Joan Didion in an adaptation of Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking, performing first on Broadway and then at London’s National Theatre.
In the BBC interview with Jenni Murray, she spoke about the similarity between the subject-matter of the play and her own circumstances:
Everybody who came to see that play said they realised we all go through these extraordinary experiences of walking into another country that we never imagined and couldn’t imagine – the country of having lost the member of the family whom we just adore.
It’s a very strange country and it does strange things to your mind but among those strange things is the wonderful thing that you realise how important it is to be very, very grateful for the love you’ve had and all the wonderful things to remember. And things like that don’t end.
She also spoke about how the presence of death had impacted her own mind:
There’s a lot of denial and magical thinking that comes with death but the great thing is that if you are thinking about the children and grand children you’re also thinking a lot more deeply than perhaps you were before. I certainly realised what a gift Natasha was to everyone, certainly to me as her mum. Her boys have a wonderful father and that’s what she would most wish for.
Redgrave went on to explain that she is currently taking a break from work, opting instead to “take time to think, to read, to garden with my daughter and be with my grandchildren more and, you know, take stock.”
Play interview with Vanessa Redgrave and Jenni Murray on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour:
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