Natasha Richardson, And The World Of Tomorrow


I’m not the person to write this.

Myself, I think Natasha Richardson was still finding herself as an actress - and really, when we memorialize, we’re talking, as critics, about the work - and worked under the obvious, enormous shadow of her mother. I said as much when I reviewed Evening, where Vanessa Redgrave’s startling performance blew me away; Richardson, playing her daughter, seemed overwhelmed.

(I used to say similar things about Joely… but somehow, with Nip/Tuck, she seemed to find a way to hold her own. It may be the role - Richardson’s got a great part as Christian’s wife and the writing’s superb - but playing against her mother as her mother, she never seems to wilt, there.)

There’s been a lot of talk about “acting dynasties” this week, about the “storied Redgraves”, but somehow I always saw Richardson on her own first, family second. She seemed to draw strength, as much as anything, from Liam Neeson, from the life she’d created for herself. That, I think, is what I admired most - that there wasn’t a shadow of the past, but always the keen sense of creating the future from her.

I didn’t see her as Sally Bowles; I wish I had; that production of Cabaret played across 8th Avenue from my apartment, and it appealed to me, though I’d heard reports of dicey singing, and it held me back (and I was often in full romance with the Chicago revival during the same period. Ah, we were so spoiled, without realizing it entirely, I think). And maybe she was meant for the stage, though I really don’t buy it; watching her onscreen I always, always thought that she was simply a performer waiting for the right time to seize her moment. It was all there… it just needed that last spark to set it free.

That’s the thing about sudden, unexpected passings; we wind up thinking of promise and what could have been, and probably miss what was - that she was happy as a working actress and mother, that she was doing what she loved, that she loved what she did. I think of all the shadows, the pressure to do more, be more… be what Redgrave was and is… must have been intense. How could it be otherwise? Yet she never appeared to give into it, to treat it as more than an interesting curiosity. You have expectations? This wasn’t about you. Or expectations.

And we are left with a life and career in the conditional tense. What could have been, what she was meant to be. It may never be enough to remember her as she was - the calm, lightly humorous presence she’d seemed to find for herself in movies (how charming she is in the reworked Parent Trap, one of the few to believably seem to parent Lindsay Lohan onscreen; or how she makes a one-note part in Maid in Manhattan into something reasonably sympathetic). But that’s what we have, and it’s what she was. And just for that… I’ll miss her. Never mind what she was meant to be.

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March 22nd, 2009
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