On the day Vanessa Redgrave entered the world, her father Michael Redgrave was playing Laertes opposite Laurence Olivier's Hamlet at London's Old Vic Theater. During the curtain call, Olivier gestured for silence and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a star is born. Laertes has a daughter." Olivier probably thought he was being gracious rather than oracular. But the man generally acknowledged as the greatest actor of his age in the English- speaking world proved as inspired in his fortune-telling as in his art: the infant born on Jan. 30, 1937, has ripened into the greatest actress in the English-speaking world. Her trophies include the Oscar, the Emmy and London's equivalent of Broadway's Tony (appositely named for Olivier). She also has a prize even more important to her: the awestruck regard of virtually everyone in her craft.
However offbeat the part -- and she has played everything from a shaved- headed musician in the Auschwitz women's orchestra (Playing for Time) to / the transsexual physician Renee Richards (Second Serve) -- Redgrave never camps up a performance, never tips the audience the equivalent of a wink to distance herself from neurotic excess. She gives every character she plays her loyalty and respect. Trying to puzzle out how she achieves such artless naturalness, fellow actors gather to scrutinize her work. Says writer-director David Hare, who starred Redgrave in his movie Wetherby: "She's the one they all watch. Vanessa has an access to her feelings without parallel. She is the least flustered, most completely focused actress; she barely needs to study a part."
Her fragile beauty has cast her on film as Isadora Duncan, Mary Queen of Scots and Guinevere. Her toughness made her an anti-Nazi adventurer in Julia and a fierce literary agent in Prick Up Your Ears. Onstage in the summer of 1986 in London, she demonstrated her range by alternating as the worldly queen in Antony and Cleopatra and the humiliated, housebound maiden in The Taming of the Shrew. If anything linked those two roles, it was only the pained look they shared, that unforgettable gaze from those grave and piercing eyes as they take in the unimaginable perfidy of the world.
The same haunted, haunting look is hers in the role that has brought her back to Broadway after an absence of a dozen years: the thickly accented daughter of an Italian immigrant in the steamy Southland of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, which opened last week. The production, by Sir Peter Hall, former artistic director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Britain's National Theater, was a hit in London in December. Yet it took a risky struggle to transfer the show. Redgrave is a fervid member of a radical group called the Marxist Party; she has poured much of her income into its causes and four times stood as a candidate for Parliament representing the Workers' Revolutionary Party. That commitment helps explain why she has endured for more than a decade an unannounced but unmistakable boycott by much of the American entertainment business.