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Talent and stubborn individuality are Redgrave family legacies. The tradition of performing reaches back to her grandparents and includes her father, her mother Rachel Kempson, brother Corin, 50, and sister Lynn, 46 -- plus, now, Vanessa's film-star daughters Natasha Richardson, 26 (Patty Hearst), and Joely Richardson, 24 (Drowning by Numbers). In Vanessa's generation, the clan paid a steep emotional price. Says Lynn: "All families are peculiar in some way, but ours was extraordinary, a volatile, emotional and passionate mix, which probably helped us to be good actors. My parents never got us up in the morning or picked us up from school. We could live a week in the same house and not see them once. My father was distant. His main means of communication was acting."
From the start, Lynn recalls, Vanessa weathered the rackety Redgraves with ego intact: "She was the only one of us who wasn't shy. If someone asked her to get up and sing, it wouldn't have bothered her for three seconds." The family's expectation that Redgrave would go into show business was tempered by her abrupt adolescent growth spurt to an eventual 5 ft. 11 in. She towered over classmates of both sexes and was considered too tall for anything but character parts. Her father had her study ballet so she would move well and tap dancing so she might have a chance at musical comedy. Still, according to a classmate at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Redgrave was not thought especially talented, perhaps because inner turmoil got in her way.
By her early 20s, she joined what became the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. She was a hit as the lanky Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a role played sooner or later by most of the willowy Redgrave women; as Rosalind in As You Like It, Redgrave gave a performance many still consider definitive. In 1961, when she appeared in The Lady from the Sea, critic Kenneth Tynan said, "If there is better acting than this in London, I should like to hear of it." By 1967 she was up for an Oscar as Best Actress for Morgan!, competing with her sister, who was nominated for Georgy Girl. (They lost to Elizabeth Taylor for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.)
Despite a trying childhood and the dual demands of art and political activism, Redgrave has been, by all accounts, a stable and nurturing parent. Says Joely: "Mother may have been a free spirit before we came along, but we were terribly normal and conventional as a family. Domestically, she's nothing like the force she is in acting and politics. She is not a creature of comforts. She will always take the smallest room in the house."