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VANESSA REDGRAVE was three years old during the
evacuation of Dunkirk, the 1940 rescue operation of
British and French troops that is portrayed to gripping
effect—via a panoramic, minutes-long tracking shot—in
the wartime romance Atonement.
“One of
my very first memories was eating my breakfast one
summer morning, which actually turned out to be August,
when the Blitz started,” Redgrave said recently. “The
air raid siren went off—the first big, big warning—for
real, my nanny calling me in, and then from then on at
night we’d go down to the cellar of the house my parents
had rented.”
 Redgrave
was recalling this in her hotel suite at the Four
Seasons, as the sound of leaf blowers drifted up to the
room. She was in Los Angeles to promote Atonement,
bringing an unhurried grace to the grubby hustle of a
press junket.
As
director Joe Wright’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel
Atonement unfolds, Redgrave serves as the movie’s
denouement and its elegy. She plays Briony Tallis in
later life—the 13-year-old girl with the vivid
imagination whose impulsive act in the film’s first hour
reverberates throughout the lives of those around
her—namely her sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and
her sister’s lover, Robbie (James McAvoy).
It seems
inaccurate to call Redgrave’s a walk-on role, given the
depth she has to project. Throughout Atonement, Briony
is played primarily by two actresses, Saoirse Ronan as
the preternaturally poised young girl, and Romola Garai
as the young woman, a shell-shocked nurse in a triage
hospital.
It is
merely Redgrave’s job to show up at the very end as the
accomplished novelist Briony ends up becoming and to
embody one of the themes of the story—art’s ability to
resonate beyond the brutality of war.
Somewhere in her fine, studied performance is the
alchemy of Redgrave’s talent and experience, but also
this theme.
For like
Briony, Redgrave experienced war at once up close and at
a remove—in Redgrave’s case, as the offspring of acting
royalty. With her father, Michael Redgrave, serving in
the merchant navy, the Redgraves evacuated London, first
to a home her parents rented in Essex and later to her
elderly cousins’ house in Heredfordshire, “which in a
much humbler way was somewhat similar to the country
house that was the home of the main characters” in
Atonement, Redgrave said.
It was
there that she gave some of her first professional
performances.
“I got
roped in by a boy who was a little bit older than
myself, and we’d put on plays, when I was 4 and he was 6
and my brother was 2,” she said. “We used to charge what
was called a ship park penny, a half penny, and rope in
as many people in the household and some of the people
who were living there who were also evacuated from
Oxford, and we’d put these plays on to make money for
the merchant navy.”
Amid her
cousins’ books, Redgrave said she discovered an
antifascist exposé called The Brown Book of the Hitler
Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag. It was, she
said, “the first book that really seized my attention,”
with photographs of abuses committed at
Dachau.
“I knew long before the death camps and the
concentration camps were liberated why we were fighting
a war,” Redgrave said.
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REDGRAVE,
who turns 71 this month, still looks resplendent, with
liquid-blue eyes and a measured, at times languid manner
of speech.
Last
August she concluded a nearly half-year Broadway run of
The Year of Magical Thinking, the one-woman show based
on Joan Didion’s memoir of the year after the sudden
death of Didion’s husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.
Redgrave
is set to reprise the show in
London
this spring. Her role in Atonement is relatively
minuscule, though it is also unusual, even for an
actress of her caliber.
Redgrave’s acting, of course, has deep roots. Father
Michael, mother Lady Redgrave, who performed under the
name Rachel Kempson. The Redgrave children—Vanessa,
brother Corin, sister Lynn—are actors, as are Vanessa’s
daughters Natasha and Joely Richardson, from Redgrave’s
marriage to director Tony Richardson.
Storied
as her acting career has been, Redgrave’s activism over
the years has become inextricably linked to her image.
For better and for worse, you could say she is a
latter-day pioneer in the politicization of a movie
career.
With
Eleanor Roosevelt’s work on the International
Declaration of Human Rights as her “golden compass,”
Redgrave has traveled to war zones and been an
ambassador to Unicef. It was in this capacity that she
put on an arts festival in 1999, for ethnic Albanians
displaced during the Kosovo war.
There is
a through line, back to what Redgrave tells of her
wartime childhood:
“In the
case of my father and a number of his colleagues—John
Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft and others—they went to the
ministries concerned, and urged them to allow the
theaters and churches and concert halls to be open at
lunchtime to give plays, concerts, so that people could
have that enormous, irreplaceable gift of resisting.
“....And
then of course people discover it’s amazing what they
can do, and that I’ve found repeated in every place of
war that I’ve been to since, where the indigenous
artists in the area automatically have continued to try
to put on plays and concerts, whether in refugee camps
or in cellars or, whatever the circumstances, to keep
that resistance going.”
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OUTSIDE
the hotel suite where Redgrave was recalling all this,
her young costars Knightley and McAvoy were being chased
by outlets like MTV2.
Redgrave,
by contrast, had a banana. She stole onto her small
balcony for a smoke. If the buzz on Atonement is about
the lovers and not the legend, Redgrave didn’t seem to
mind.
“Well,
my trick, if you call it a trick—and you’re perfectly
entitled to—what I do is I just concentrate very acutely
on all the questions and all the people I meet as if
it’s the first one,” she’d said of doing publicity.
“They
get me,” she added later, “as I am, in that moment, and
they don’t get a regurgitated version of what I’ve said
before.”
She
sounded more than convincing. |
