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Once there was an Englishman named Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore. He wrote atrocious Victorian melodramas, and it served him quite right when in 1907 his daughter Margaret married an actor chap named Roy Redgrave. The marriage was a bad show, but before it closed in Australia three years later, Roy and Margaret had inadvertently established a simply smashing theatrical dynasty. It has flourished in England for three decades, but within the last year the Redgraves have been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as the first family of stage and screen: the nearest thing to the Barrymores that the era has produced.
Sir Michael Redgrave, 58, is a tragedian who ranks only a little lower in English estimation than Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier. Lady Redgrave, who plays as Rachel Kempson, is accounted a superb supporting actress. And over the last year a new generation of Redgraves, who might well be known as "Michael's bloody marvels," has spangled the marquees with a retina-rocking glitter of new talent. Corin, 27, played his first big part (Sir Thomas More's son-in-law) in a big picture (A Man for All Seasons) and charmed the critics with a witty portrait of a political noddy. Lynn, 24, hit the top with a gloriously vulgar clang in a British film called Georgy Girl that left nobody wondering who was the most gifted British comedienne since Kay Kendall. And Vanessa, 30, interrupted an illustrious career on the English stage with two far-out and almost offhand film performances in Morgan! and Blow-Up that suddenly and quite unintentionally projected her before millions of moviegoers as the most potent image of mystery and allure since Greta Garbo made John Gilbert's eyeballs spin like pin wheels.
Deb & Daffodil. By last week, with both Blow-Up and Georgy Girl making boffo box office, the wave of acclaim had temporarily deposited both Redgrave girls in the U.S. Lynn was in Manhattan playing a dippy deb and bringing down the house night after night in the funniest show on Broadway: Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy. Vanessa was in Hollywood, playing Queen Guinevere in her first cinemammoth: a $17 million movie version of Broadway's Camelot, in which she sings in a musky mezzo and looks like a rain-washed daffodil in a fire-green Sussex meadow. On April 10, they will both take a day off to celebrate the climax of the Redgrave year in cinema. They will appear together at the annual Oscar awards ceremony, where for the first time since 1940, when Joan Fontaine beat out Olivia de Havilland, the nominees for Best Actress of the Year include a set of winsome sisters: Morgan's Vanessa and Georgy Girl's Lynn.
If the prize goes to one of the Redgrave girls, it will acknowledge more than her own abilities. The rise of this remarkable sister act coincides with the emergence of a new international era in cinema and a new international species of film actor.