A prominent career

This beautiful British actress is one of my favourites. Not sure when I first saw her, may be in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ remembered for that dramatic climax – Sudden, stunning and picturesque. It was also my first impression of that great Italian director.

But since then she has been regular in her appearances. Even more memorable as that Joshua Logan musical ‘Camelot’ (“I wonder what the king is doing tonight?”) where she was alongside Richard Harris and Franco Nero but really stole the show. That oval face of hers is etched in memory. And such a delightful musical with a number of catchy songs fetchingly put across.

But Redgrave will also be remembered for her torrid love affair with Franco Nero during the filming of ‘Camelot’. She even had a love child with him. It was during that “Decade of Change” (1965 to 1975) when Moon-landing, flower power set the anti-establishment trend in the world.

The daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and sister of Lynn of ‘Georgy Girl’ fame, theirs was a celebrated British family of performers. But sadly I do not have pleasant memories of meeting her. In a West End theatre, where she was performing, she refused me an autograph backstage in the 1970s. She wasn’t the only one. Aussie cricketer Neil Harvey did the same in my college days.

In the 1960s and 1970s she had the freshness of youth and also acted in a number of films. There was ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (1971) where she played the Scottish Queen most convincingly. But before that she acted in ‘Isadora’ (1968) as the dancer Isadora Duncan, where her physical prowess came to the fore. Much as one enjoyed the music and dance it was that tragic end that lingers in one’s mind. Isadora’s death after her scarf gets caught in the rear wheel of her sports car and she chokes.

She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Fred Zinemann’s ‘Julia’, where she plays the childhood friend of the famed Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda). Jason Robards also won an Oscar for the Supporting Actor for the same film.
Incidentally, both Redgrave and Fonda were political persons in real life and when Redgrave won the Oscar that year she made a political statement on the Palestinian cause and was promptly flayed by scriptwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who thought she misused the platform when he later came to the dais.

Unbelievable, but she also had a bit part in Tom Cruise – starrer ‘Mission: Impossible’. Another bit role was as the wife of Sir Thomas Moore, played by Charlton Heston, in Robert Bolt’s ‘A Man for All Seasons’. But I remember the bold play for the deep impression it made on my mind in my distant college days.

It is hard to single out any performance of hers as her best but if I were asked to see any one of her films it would easily be that musical ‘Camelot’ with its “I wonder what the King is doing tonight?”