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Dame Vanessa Redgrave DBE (born 30 January 1937) is an English actress. Throughout her career spanning over six decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades , including an Academy Award , a Tony Award , two Primetime Emmy Awards and an Olivier Award , making her one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting .
- List of Vanessa Redgrave Performances
Vanessa Redgrave is an English actress whose career has...
- Lynn Redgrave
Lynn Rachel Redgrave OBE (8 March 1943 – 2 May 2010) was a...
- Joely Richardson
Early life. Joely Kim Richardson was born in Marylebone,...
- Redgrave Family
Left to right, Jemma, Corin, Lynn, and Vanessa Redgrave...
- Franco Nero
Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero (born 23 November...
- Natasha Richardson
Natasha Jane Richardson (11 May 1963 – 18 March 2009) was an...
- Carlo Gabriel Nero
Carlo Gabriel Redgrave Nero (born Carlo Gabriel Sparanero;...
- List of Awards and Nominations Received by Vanessa Redgrave
The following is a list of awards and nominations received...
- Tony Richardson
With his wife Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson was the father to...
- Corin Redgrave
Corin William Redgrave (16 July 1939 – 6 April 2010) was an...
- List of Vanessa Redgrave Performances
IMDb provides a comprehensive overview of the life and career of Vanessa Redgrave, a renowned British actress, producer and director. Learn about her early stage roles, her controversial political activism, her Oscar-winning performance in Julia (1977) and her other notable films and awards.
- January 1, 1
- 1.81 m
- Blackheath, London, England, UK
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Oscar contender: roles from the 1960s and ’70s
- Movies of the 1980s and ’90s
- Political activism and documentaries
- Movies from the 21st century
Vanessa Redgrave (born January 30, 1937, London, England) British actress of stage and screen who received numerous accolades—including an Oscar, two Emmys, a Tony, and a Laurence Olivier Award—for her performances. She was also a longtime political activist, supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA)...
Called “the greatest actress of our time” by the playwright Tennessee Williams, Redgrave came from a legendary theatrical family. Her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, was one of Britain’s most popular and respected actors, and her mother, Rachel Kempson, was a noted stage actress. Her sister, Lynn, did both stage and film work—most notably in Georgy Girl (1966) and Shine (1996)—and her brother, Corin, was a successful stage director and actor. Redgrave is also the mother of actresses Natasha and Joely Richardson from her marriage in the 1960s to director Tony Richardson.
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Redgrave made her professional debut in the play A Touch of the Sun (1957), in which she costarred with her father. She appeared in her first film, Behind the Mask, in 1958 but concentrated mostly on stage work throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s and was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon during the 1959–60 season. Her film career began in earnest in 1966; within the space of two years, she appeared in four films that established her reputation as an intelligent actress with a commanding presence. The first of her six Academy Award nominations was for Morgan! (1966), her first motion picture in eight years. She then had a role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), a psychological mystery that became a cult favourite. Redgrave’s unbilled cameo as Anne Boleyn in A Man for All Seasons (1966) and her performance as Guinevere in Camelot (1967) further secured her status as one of the most popular and respected actresses of the era.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s Redgrave showed her mastery of both classical and commercial fare. She received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of dancer Isadora Duncan in Isadora (1968), and she appeared as Nina in Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1968). In 1971 Redgrave took on the role of Andromache in The Trojan ...
During the following two decades, Redgrave eschewed popular fare in favour of smaller films with well-written scripts or classical overtones. Her controversial performance as a Nazi concentration camp victim in the television adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time (1980) won her an Emmy Award, though, as a longtime supporter of the Palestin...
For many years Redgrave was nearly as well known for her outspoken and controversial political activism as she was for her acting. In addition to supporting the PLO and the Irish Republican Army, she ran unsuccessfully for the British Parliament as a candidate for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. She produced a number of documentaries that reflect her convictions, including The Fifth War (1978), Occupied Palestine (1980), Can’t They Put Humans First (1991), which she also directed, and Wake Up, World (1993). Her political activities were not without repercussions: she was loudly booed at the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony when, during her acceptance speech, she referred to those who had objected to her nomination because of her support for Palestinian causes as “Zionist hoodlums.” Jewish organizations also protested when she was cast as Holocaust survivor Fania Fenelon in Playing for Time. There is little doubt that Redgrave’s political views affected her career, although public resentment waned in the 1990s, when she played character roles in popular films such as Mission: Impossible (1996) and Deep Impact (1998).
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Thereafter Redgrave continued to work steadily. In 2003 she won a Tony Award (for best actress in a play) for her performance in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Redgrave was cast in a recurring role (2004–09) on the television series Nip/Tuck and subsequently starred onstage in The Year of Magical Thinking, which was adapted from Joan Didion’s memoir of the same name, and Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy. The two plays earned her Tony nominations in 2007 and 2011, respectively. As she entered her 70s, she appeared in the film dramas Atonement (2007), an adaptation of the novel by Ian McEwan, and Evening (2007), in which she starred as a woman who remembers a long-lost love as she lies on her deathbed.
In 2010 Redgrave had roles in the romantic comedy Letters to Juliet and the drama The Whistleblower, about the United Nations’ role in a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Anonymous (2011), which advanced the theory that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, Redgrave portrayed Elizabeth I. She then appeared as the strong-willed Volumnia in a 2011 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and played a cancer victim in the uplifting Song for Marion (2012; U.S. title Unfinished Song). From 2012 she was the narrator of the BBC television series Call the Midwife. She returned to the stage as a Polish Holocaust survivor in the Off-Broadway drama The Revisionist (2013) and evinced the mother of disturbed wrestling fanatic (and multimillionaire) John du Pont in the film Foxcatcher (2014).
Redgrave also appeared in the TV movie The Go-Between (2015), an adaptation of L.P. Hartley’s novel of youthful misunderstanding (1953), and the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017), playing the mother of American actress Gloria Grahame. She then portrayed Juliana Bordereau, an elderly recluse living in a Venetian palazzo in The Aspern Papers (2018), a drama based on Henry James’s novelette (1888). Redgrave had previously portrayed Tina, Juliana’s skittish niece, in the 1984 revival of her father’s stage adaptation of the work (1959). In the 2018 film Redgrave’s daughter Joely assumed the role of Tina. Vanessa’s later films included Christoph Waltz’s Georgetown (2019), in which she played a wealthy woman married to a grifter, and the romantic drama Finding You (2021).
Redgrave was created Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1967, and she advanced to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours List.
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Apr 2, 2014 · Learn about the life and career of Vanessa Redgrave, an acclaimed actress of stage and screen who won an Oscar for Julia and a Tony for Long Day's Journey into Night. Find out about her family, political views, and roles in films like Camelot, Mary Queen of Scots, and Mrs. Dalloway.
Dame Vanessa Redgrave DBE (Blackheath, London, England, 30 January 1937) is an English actress and activist. Life and career. Born in a theatrical family, her father was actor Sir Michael Redgrave (1908-1985). Her mother was actress Rachel Kempson (1910-2003).
YearTitleRole2012Song for MarionMarion20112011Mama Topolino/Queen2011
