Vanessa Ascending

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

On the day Vanessa Redgrave entered the world, her father Michael Redgrave was playing Laertes opposite Laurence Olivier's Hamlet at London's Old Vic Theater. During the curtain call, Olivier gestured for silence and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a star is born. Laertes has a daughter." Olivier probably thought he was being gracious rather than oracular. But the man generally acknowledged as the greatest actor of his age in the English- speaking world proved as inspired in his fortune-telling as in his art: the infant born on Jan. 30, 1937, has ripened into the greatest actress in the English-speaking world. Her trophies include the Oscar, the Emmy and London's equivalent of Broadway's Tony (appositely named for Olivier). She also has a prize even more important to her: the awestruck regard of virtually everyone in her craft.

However offbeat the part -- and she has played everything from a shaved- headed musician in the Auschwitz women's orchestra (Playing for Time) to / the transsexual physician Renee Richards (Second Serve) -- Redgrave never camps up a performance, never tips the audience the equivalent of a wink to distance herself from neurotic excess. She gives every character she plays her loyalty and respect. Trying to puzzle out how she achieves such artless naturalness, fellow actors gather to scrutinize her work. Says writer-director David Hare, who starred Redgrave in his movie Wetherby: "She's the one they all watch. Vanessa has an access to her feelings without parallel. She is the least flustered, most completely focused actress; she barely needs to study a part."

Her fragile beauty has cast her on film as Isadora Duncan, Mary Queen of Scots and Guinevere. Her toughness made her an anti-Nazi adventurer in Julia and a fierce literary agent in Prick Up Your Ears. Onstage in the summer of 1986 in London, she demonstrated her range by alternating as the worldly queen in Antony and Cleopatra and the humiliated, housebound maiden in The Taming of the Shrew. If anything linked those two roles, it was only the pained look they shared, that unforgettable gaze from those grave and piercing eyes as they take in the unimaginable perfidy of the world.

The same haunted, haunting look is hers in the role that has brought her back to Broadway after an absence of a dozen years: the thickly accented daughter of an Italian immigrant in the steamy Southland of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, which opened last week. The production, by Sir Peter Hall, former artistic director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Britain's National Theater, was a hit in London in December. Yet it took a risky struggle to transfer the show. Redgrave is a fervid member of a radical group called the Marxist Party; she has poured much of her income into its causes and four times stood as a candidate for Parliament representing the Workers' Revolutionary Party. That commitment helps explain why she has endured for more than a decade an unannounced but unmistakable boycott by much of the American entertainment business.

Her employment problems began on the night in 1978 when she accepted an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for Julia. As militant Jewish groups picketed outside to denounce a pro-Palestinian documentary film she had financed by selling her house in Britain, Redgrave injudiciously responded in a speech telecast worldwide. In words aimed at the protesters, she told Academy voters, "You have stood firm and refused to be intimidated by a small band of Zionist hoodlums who have insulted Jews all over the world in their struggle against fascism and Nazism." Heard out of context, the phrase gave birth to a mistaken belief that Redgrave regarded all Jews as hoodlums.

Even producers and directors who grasped her position -- that Palestinians have homeland rights, which Israel must accommodate -- often passed her by for the sake of convenience. "It's not surprising that she's perceived by most Jewish people as anti-Jewish," says her ex-husband, director Tony Richardson. "She has created this image for herself, which makes her almost uncastable in a leading role in Hollywood. She's totally unrealistic in her attitude: when she says 'Zionism,' she thinks she isn't talking about Jews. But there isn't a single bit of anti-Semitic blood in Vanessa." Embittered, Redgrave nowadays declines to cooperate on articles -- including this one -- unless the publication pledges in writing not even to mention her politics.

Although she makes films elsewhere, Hollywood has not cast Redgrave since Yanks in 1979. She has secured only sporadic U.S. TV work. Other actors report that merely suggesting her for a role is enough to damage their own careers. The protest peaked in 1982, when the woman whom Redgrave was playing called for her to be ousted from the Emmy-winning lead in Arthur Miller's CBS-TV drama Playing for Time. Politics also excluded her from being cast in the Broadway drama Plenty. That same year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, allegedly fearful of disruptions and of losing donor support, dumped Redgrave from scheduled performances as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. She brought a civil rights suit pleading that "people's livelihoods should not depend upon their holding 'correct' political views." The U.S. Supreme Court last January rejected her bid for a punitive-damages award, although it let stand a judgment of $39,500 to cover lost employment -- an amount far smaller than the legal fees she spent fighting for her principles.

Happily, thus far Orpheus has met no protest, according to co-producer Elizabeth McCann. Says she: "Redgrave is controversial, and controversy brings a certain degree of risk. I'm not kidding myself that there aren't people out there still deeply hurt or offended by her views."

The unorthodoxy of her political life has extended at times to her personal life. After Richardson began an affair with actress Jeanne Moreau and thereby precipitated the end of an already troubled marriage, Redgrave had a romance with actor Franco Nero, with whom she had a son, Carlo, now 19. More recently, she shared bed and the boards with actor Timothy Dalton, almost ten years her junior (and the latest James Bond), who was her Antony and Petruchio in the repertory triumphs of 1986.

Talent and stubborn individuality are Redgrave family legacies. The tradition of performing reaches back to her grandparents and includes her father, her mother Rachel Kempson, brother Corin, 50, and sister Lynn, 46 -- plus, now, Vanessa's film-star daughters Natasha Richardson, 26 (Patty Hearst), and Joely Richardson, 24 (Drowning by Numbers). In Vanessa's generation, the clan paid a steep emotional price. Says Lynn: "All families are peculiar in some way, but ours was extraordinary, a volatile, emotional and passionate mix, which probably helped us to be good actors. My parents never got us up in the morning or picked us up from school. We could live a week in the same house and not see them once. My father was distant. His main means of communication was acting."

From the start, Lynn recalls, Vanessa weathered the rackety Redgraves with ego intact: "She was the only one of us who wasn't shy. If someone asked her to get up and sing, it wouldn't have bothered her for three seconds." The family's expectation that Redgrave would go into show business was tempered by her abrupt adolescent growth spurt to an eventual 5 ft. 11 in. She towered over classmates of both sexes and was considered too tall for anything but character parts. Her father had her study ballet so she would move well and tap dancing so she might have a chance at musical comedy. Still, according to a classmate at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Redgrave was not thought especially talented, perhaps because inner turmoil got in her way.

By her early 20s, she joined what became the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. She was a hit as the lanky Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a role played sooner or later by most of the willowy Redgrave women; as Rosalind in As You Like It, Redgrave gave a performance many still consider definitive. In 1961, when she appeared in The Lady from the Sea, critic Kenneth Tynan said, "If there is better acting than this in London, I should like to hear of it." By 1967 she was up for an Oscar as Best Actress for Morgan!, competing with her sister, who was nominated for Georgy Girl. (They lost to Elizabeth Taylor for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.)

Despite a trying childhood and the dual demands of art and political activism, Redgrave has been, by all accounts, a stable and nurturing parent. Says Joely: "Mother may have been a free spirit before we came along, but we were terribly normal and conventional as a family. Domestically, she's nothing like the force she is in acting and politics. She is not a creature of comforts. She will always take the smallest room in the house."

Indeed, while Lynn and Vanessa rarely discuss acting technique and have not appeared together onstage, Vanessa has worked with both her daughters. Joely played Vanessa's character when young in flashback scenes of Wetherby. Natasha portrayed Nina, one of her mother's celebrated early roles, in a 1985 London staging of The Seagull that featured her mother as the virago actress Arkadina. Both daughters report receiving useful maternal advice. When Joely at 19 was cast to play the worldly, thirtyish title role in Miss Julie, Vanessa counseled, "Whatever insecurities you have, share with the audience. Be open, and they'll accept you more." When Natasha wrestled with Nina's madness-streaked fifth-act monologue, Vanessa spoke of technique: "I could be wrong, but I notice you have gotten into a slow pattern of speaking." Natasha speeded up; the problem was solved.

Both daughters say Redgrave relies heavily on props and research in developing a role, but does not misappropriate pieces of her own life or blur the line between reality and performance. "When she delivers emotion," says Natasha, "she doesn't do it by thinking of the cat's dying. And when she performs Lady in Orpheus Descending, she doesn't remain in character as she sips tea at intermission."

When the stage lights go back up, however, Vanessa Redgrave is Lady, a woman who has endured half a lifetime remembering her father's agonizing death by fire, only to discover that her husband led the killers. Nothing is histrionic in Redgrave's inhabitation of the part. Infatuation with a mysterious newcomer makes her faintly schoolgirlish. Pregnancy gives her a subtle glow. A plan for revenge on her husband sets only her eyes aglitter. The shifts are subtle, her mood lightly ironic. She greets her own violent death with a Mona Lisa smile of sad amusement and, as she crumples to the floor, a shrug.

The play's final image is a glimpse of her lover being carried, naked and screaming, to be murdered with a blowtorch. Yet what lingers is Redgrave, all the more poignant for the utter absence of any plea for sympathy. That is the public figure as much as the actress and the character: unapologetic, unrelenting and determined to the end to do things her way. For almost anyone else, Orpheus would be the highlight of a career. For Redgrave, it is another luminous interlude in a lifetime of incandescence.

With reporting by Anne Constable/London and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles