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Natasha Richardson, 45, Stage and Film Star, Dies
Natasha Richardson, a Tony Award-winning
actress whose career melded glamorous celebrity with the bloodline of
theater royalty, died Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
She had suffered head injuries in a skiing accident Monday north of
Montreal, and was flown to New York on Tuesday. She was 45 and lived in
Manhattan and in Millbrook, N.Y.
Alan Nierob, a spokesman for her husband, the actor Liam Neeson, announced Ms. Richardson’s death Wednesday night.
“Liam
Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by
the tragic death of their beloved Natasha,” a statement said. “They are
profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and
ask for privacy during this very difficult time.”
The statement did not disclose the cause of death or discuss Ms. Richardson’s medical condition.
The
gravity of her injuries had prompted an outpouring of public interest
and concern and flurries of rumor and speculation since Monday, when
reports of her accident began filtering out of the Mont Tremblant ski
resort in the Laurentian hills.
Ms. Richardson, who was not
wearing a helmet, had fallen during a beginner’s skiing lesson, a
resort spokeswoman, Lyne Lortie, said Tuesday. “It was a normal fall;
she didn’t hit anyone or anything,” Ms. Lortie said. “She didn’t show
any signs of injury. She was talking and she seemed all right.”
Still,
an instructor and a ski patrol member accompanied her off the slopes,
and when Ms. Richardson complained of a headache about an hour later in
her hotel, she was taken by ambulance to a hospital nearby and later
transferred to one in Montreal. She was flown to Lenox Hill on Tuesday
afternoon.
On Wednesday, as television news vans stood outside, friends including Lauren Bacall and family members including Ms. Richardson’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and sister, the actress Joely Richardson, were observed arriving. Mr. Neeson was seen crouched beside her in an ambulance in Montreal the day before.
The
news media attention harked back to the early 1990s, when the couple’s
relationship was noted in newspapers. She was a blond, beautiful
English actress, he was her ruggedly handsome Irish co-star, and the
two were thought to be courting right on stage, during a New York
production.
Ms. Richardson was an intense and absorbing actress
who was unafraid of taking on demanding and emotionally raw roles.
Classically trained, she was admired on both sides of the Atlantic for
upholding the traditions of one of the great acting families of the
modern age.
Her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave, one of England’s finest tragedians. He passed his gifts, if not always his affection, to his daughters, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, and his son, Corin Redgrave. The night Vanessa was born, her father was playing Laertes to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Ms. Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the film director Tony Richardson,
known for “Tom Jones” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”
Married in the early 1960s, they were divorced in 1967. He died of AIDS
in 1991 at the age of 63.
Ms. Richardson came to critical
prominence in England in 1985 as Nina, Chekhov’s naïve and vulnerable
ingénue in “The Seagull,” a role her mother had played to great acclaim
in 1964. It was a road production, and when it reached London, Vanessa
Redgrave joined the cast as the narcissistic actress Arkadina. The
production became legendary, but working with her mother intimidated
her.
“She rehearsed like a tornado,” Ms. Richardson recalled in a
1993 interview with The New York Times Magazine. “It was completely
crazy. She rolled on the floor in some scenes. I was terrified of being
on stage with her.”
But almost no one doubts that Ms. Redgrave
inspired her daughter as well. Like her mother, Ms. Richardson was
known for disappearing into a role, for not capitalizing on her looks
and for being drawn to characters under duress.
In the
performance that made her a star in the United States, she played the
title role on Broadway in a 1993 revival of “Anna Christie,” Eugene O’Neill’s
grueling portrait of a waterfront slattern in confrontation with the
abusive men in her life. Embracing the emotional wreckage that showed
in her character’s face, she modeled her makeup each night on Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”
Her
performance, nominated for a Tony Award, was vibrantly sensual, and her
scenes with her co-star, Mr. Neeson, were acclaimed as sizzling and
electric. The chemistry between them extended offstage as well; shortly
after the run, Ms. Richardson separated from her husband, the producer
Robert Fox. She and Mr. Neeson married in 1994.
Besides her
husband, Ms. Richardson is survived by their two sons, Micheal Richard
Antonio Neeson, 13, and Daniel Jack Neeson, 12, as well as her mother,
her sister and a half-sister, Katherine Grimond.
Ms. Richardson’s
Tony Award came in 1998, for best actress in a musical, for her
performance as Sally Bowles, the gifted but desperately needy singer in
decadent Weimar Berlin who is at the center of “Cabaret.”
It was
a remarkable award: Ms. Richardson’s strengths did not include singing.
But her reinvention of a role that was performed memorably by Liza Minnelli in the film proved that a performer could act a song as well as sing it and make it equally affecting.
“Ms.
Richardson, you see, isn’t selling the song; she’s selling the
character,” Ben Brantley, writing in The Times, said of her delivery of
the title song. “And as she forges ahead with the number, in a defiant,
metallic voice, you can hear the promise of the lyrics tarnishing in
Sally’s mouth. She’s willing herself to believe in them, and all too
clearly losing the battle.”
Natasha Jane Richardson was born in
London on May 11, 1963. She made her first film appearance at the age
of 4, playing a bridesmaid at the wedding of her mother’s character in
“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” directed by her father. She attended
the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and got her first job
in an outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
She
eventually moved to the United States, where “no one cares about the
Redgrave baggage,” as she once said. She gave her greatest performances
there.
In the movies she played the title character in Paul Schrader’s
film “Patty Hearst” (1988), about the heiress and kidnap victim. She
worked with Mr. Schrader again on “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), a
creepy psychological drama with a screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan.
The same year, she also starred in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” an adaptation of the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood about subjugated women in a pseudo-Christian theocracy. In a 1993 television adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer,” she was Catherine Holly, a young woman (played by Elizabeth Taylor in the original movie) driven to the brink of insanity by the gruesome
death of her young cousin. And she played the title role in the 1993
television movie “Zelda,” based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ferociously competitive and emotionally delicate wife.
Ms.
Richardson’s more recent work has included more conventional Hollywood
fare, including a remake of “The Parent Trap” (1998), the comedy “Maid
in Manhattan” (2002) and the teenage melodrama “Wild Child” (2008).
On stage, she appeared on Broadway in “Closer,” Patrick Marber’s
play about infidelity and the Internet, and as Blanche DuBois in a
revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Though the production did not
draw much praise, Ms. Richardson’s performance did, as perhaps her
grandfather had envisioned.
In 1985, a week before he died, Sir
Michael, enfeebled by Parkinson’s disease, went to see Ms. Richardson
as Ophelia in a production of “Hamlet.” Turning to his daughter
Vanessa, Ms. Richardson’s mother, he uttered a brief review. “She’s a
true actress,” he said.