Word: star
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...truths, to teach us the lessons of love and grief. Among these is the cruelest jest of fate: a child's death that precedes his or her parents'. That instructive obscenity slammed home today with the death of Natasha Richardson, a distinguished British actress who was a third-generation star of the noted Redgrave acting clan and the eldest daughter of the great and controversial Vanessa Redgrave. Richardson died two days after a seemingly unremarkable fall while skiing in Quebec. She lost consciousness and within 24 hours was in three hospitals - the last in New York City, her adopted home...
...revisionist take on The Charge of the Light Brigade. By then, Redgrave had become the brightest new light of stage (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and screen (Morgan, Blowup, Camelot.) Having separated from Richardson, Redgrave took up with Franco Nero, her hunky co-star in Camelot. (See pictures of Natasha Richardson's life...
...Sometimes, through the fine lace of period propriety, fire and madness emerged. In one of her first starring roles, as the budding author Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's loony Gothic (1986), Richardson somehow made emotional sense of a young woman who is racked by visions of her stillborn child, and who, from the labor of her nightmares, gives birth to literature's most enduring monster: Frankenstein. Two years later, she was convincingly Californian in Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about Patty Hearst - another nightmare role that she approached with the passion and, especially, the precision of a mature actress...
...would-be beau was a strapping Irishman, Liam Neeson, who became an instant matinee idol by playing the role like a backward child with an oversize soul, lurching in an instant from anger to perplexity. It was this performance that convinced Steven Spielberg to cast Neeson as the star of Schindler's List. The actor had a similarly galvanizing effect on Richardson. Married at the time to actor Robert Fox, she divorced him and married Neeson the following year; Franco Nero gave the bride away, Natasha's father having died in 1991. The couple had two sons, Micheal...
...spell, she was a revelation in Trevor Nunn's take on Ibsen's Lady from the Sea. The plot is high harlequin: a dark and stormy night, a chronically sensitive young wife aching for a strong rogue to free her from the marital cage. But Richardson let star quality shine through, with a grandeur audiences had been hoping for since her youth. Virtually channeling her mother, she had all the intensity, and nearly the magic, of Vanessa Redgrave in her early radiance. (In an ironic and infuriating example of life imitating art, Redgrave was last on Broadway two years...