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 NATASHA RICHARDSON ...in all her glory |
They met aboard ship on
turbulent lake waters
of TheColumnists.com
The news had to be startling to us all: Actress Natasha Richardson was dead from a brain injury suffered in a simple fall on a Canadian ski slope on March 16. She was only 45 years old.
The thought that this vital and energetic woman was gone so early in life hit me especially hard because I remembered her so clearly from that sweltering July day in 2002 when we first met aboard ship on Lake Ontario as Richardson was completing her work on the TV miniseries called "Haven." It was her last day before departintg Toronto.
There was a breeze that day and Lake Ontario was churning up with sizeable waves. The filming was taking place aboard a famous Liberty Ship and Richardson was one among a large cast that included Anne Bancroft, Hal Holbrook, Martin Landau and Bill Petersen from "CSI." I was quite willing to brave the elements that day for the promise of a one-on-one interview with the dazzling Natasha.
Getting out to the ship in a dinghy was
more than perilous. We bobbed up and down in the frothy waves
and when I got there everybody was chattering about Anne Bancroft’s
outburst of star pique that had rattled the entire crew. Bancroft
had departed the set after unleashing choice epithets about filming
conditions.
It had been a difficult shoot to say the least and on the last
day nobody wanted to talk to the press. All were concerned with
those last shots and getting back to shore in one piece. I didn't
mind the rough weather because I felt the prize was worth the
trouble.
As it turned out, the Natasha I met wasn't the long-stemmed blonde lovely of such international hits as "Gothic" (1986), in which she played young authoress Mary Shelley and "The Comfort of Strangers" (1991), in which she co-starred with handsome Rupert Everett. She glowed in those films, which emphasized her youth and her golden-haired beauty.
No, the Natasha I met that day was a matronly
figure with dyed mud brown hair, dressed in wooly wartime garb,
every bit of loveliness missing from her tired face.
I think Natasha sensed my horror at her appearance because she
mumbled something about being in character and it was a story
set on the high seas during World War II. No time for a clingy
cocktail dress or even a hint of makeup.
It was so hot that day she said we’d have to stay on deck
and rough it as the waves made the whole ship bob and sway. I
felt I should have taken a motion sickness pill or something.
She immediately put on a wide brimmed hat to protect her face
from the scorching sun.
After the usual familiarities I asked her if she had ever visited
Toronto’s Royal Alexandra theater, home to many of grandfather
Michael Redgrave’s biggest stage triumphs. (I’d seen
him there in "A Voyage 'Round My Father"). But she
was having none of that and said she wanted only to talk about
her part of Ruth Gruber, whose memoir was the basis for the story.
“It’s all true,” Natasha said and rambled on about
Gruber’s attempts to ferry Jews across the Atlantic at the
height of the war, using Liberty ships. Those slow-moving cargo
ships transported precious cargoes to Europe but needed ballast
on the voyage home and poundage was supplied by the Jewish refugees.
We kept talking about the themes of refugees and anti-Semitism,
how she researched the part. Richardson opened up a bit when
she talked about how tough it was to leave her two young sons,
Michael and Daniel, then six and five years old, for the six
week location shoot. She saw them at weekends, and the family,
including actor Liam Neeson, her husband, had been together just
before she started this final week of work on the miniseries.
At that stage of her career, Richardson seemed to have lost the
great momentum she'd once had in the movies and was instead turning
toward more television. Recently Richardson had seemed to settle
for lesser projects like the remake of "The Parent Trap"
or such justly obscure features as "Blow Dry" and "Chelsea
Walls." Even some of her choices of TV work had been bizarre,
like a truly bizarre remake of "Suddenly, Last Summer"
with Maggie Smith and Rob Lowe. Or her portrayal of Zelda Fitzgerald.
I felt she had always been drawn to the offbeat, the bizarre.
There was just something off putting about her star turn as "Patty
Hearst" (1988). But on Broadway she was in well regarded
revivals of "A Streetcar Named Desire "and took home
a Tony award for her acclaimed performance as Sally Bowles in
"Cabaret."
She was born in 1963, daughter of the luminous Vanessa Redgrave
and British director Tony Richardson. He had experienced early
acclaim and an Oscar as director of "Tom Jones" (1963),
but his career was in decline when he died of an AIDS-related
illness in 1991.
Natasha took up causes like her mom. She seemed to take a different
turn after a happy second marriage to Liam Neeson and the birth
of her sons, who are now 13 and 12. They lived primarily in New
York although she publically wished all could move back to England
and a culture she more fully understood.
Her accident and subsequent brain death last week while skiing
at Quebec’s Mount Temblant caught everybody off guard. I’m
remembering the woman who bobbed and swayed with me on the ship
and seemed to be put off by my questioning.
However, as we parted and she went back to filming,she did poke
me in the arm and say it was OK to like "The Comfort Of
Strangers."
“It was a black comedy…very black…”she said,
allowing herself her only smile of the afternoon.
And she was very good in "Haven," very resourceful,
a character study for a woman beautiful enough to float by as
a star. But that’s not what she wanted. The family history
had seized her. She wanted to be respected as an actress. And
so she was at the time of an early and unexpected death.
©2009 by Jim Bawden. This column first posted March 23, 2009.
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