The Redgrave acting dynasty has taken a severe battering in the past twelve months seeing it’s ranks depleted by the deaths of now three of it’s respected members. On a more grass-roots level it is a family which now grieves for the loss of yet another of it’s precious talents – the actress Lynn Redgrave who has died at the age of 67 from breast cancer.
I thought she had beaten that damn disease, it only seemed like recently that I read she had been diagnosed and undergone treatment and yet it was almost ten years ago in fact that this all happened. You would wonder that if anyone could beat such a foe it would be a Redgrave woman; but as strong, forthright and charismatic as many people can be in life, they seem as small and vulnerable as the rest of us in death. Lynn Redgrave was a wonderful actress and to me she was the human face of the Redgrave clan with her beautifully open face and warmth of manner – the same warmth which reached out and embraced you when she played the role of Gillian Helfgott, the wife of the brilliantly unique Australian pianist David Helfgott, in the movie ‘Shine’.
I feel very deeply for Vanessa Redgrave right now. A woman who did not endear herself to many over the years for her political views and actions but a fine artist of the stage and screen and now, surely, a woman as griefstricken as any other who had only a year ago lost her own daughter, then her brother last month and now her sister. The House of Redgrave might be the poorer for the loss of another of it’s own but Lynn’s work and the causes she worked for live on as her legacy.
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