Vanessa Red Grave

Vanessa Redgrave Kempson was born in London, United Kingdom, on January 30, 1937. Her family makes up a complete clan of artists: she is the daughter of actors Michael Redgrave ( Alarm in the Express , The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner ) and Rachel Kempson ( The frisky spinster ), and sister of the also interpreters Corin and Lynn Redgrave , but the truth is that it has been Vanessa, the eldest of the three Redgrave siblings, who has gone the furthest. She is also the mother of two actresses, Natasha and Joely Richardson , the result of her marriage to director Tony Richardson .. If there is another reason why Vanessa has stood out off the screens, it has been because of her political ideas, openly Marxist, and because of the accusations of being anti-Semitic, or at least not exactly pro-Jewish. That is why Redgrave has won admirers and detractors in equal measure.

Vanessa trained professionally at the Central School of Speech and Drama and later joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom she premiered works such as “Lady from the Sea” and “The Seagull”. After a not very relevant participation in the Farewell to Arms series , Fred Zinnemann signed her for A Man for Eternity and, almost at the same time, Michelangelo Antonioni hired her to star in the controversial nude in Blow Up , quite a revolution when it came to show the sexual in the cinema. Both films were released in 1966. That year she won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Morgan, a clinical case. For this role, Redgrave was also nominated for an Oscar, which meant that she competed with her own sister Lynn, who was up for the statuette for The Frisky Bachelorette , a film, by the way, if the curl can be curled even more, who also starred in the mother of both, Rachel Kempson . Elizabeth Taylor took the award at the end.

Years later, the actress began to rub shoulders with the activists of the counterculture of the sixties. At this stage she would star in transgressive theater and film works, such as Mary Queen of Scots and The Trojan Women , in the cinema, and “The Threepenny Opera” and “La Viola” in the theater.

Years later, she ran for the elections for the presidency of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Party, something that greatly tarnished the good image that she had forged in the film circle that had seen her rise to the top. However, some directors continued to give him work. Another film by Fred Zinnemann stands out , Julia (1977) , where Vanessa played almost herself when playing a revolutionary. Nor did the Academy set her aside and award her the Oscar.

It is difficult to cite all the good films that this notorious actress has starred in, so we will limit ourselves to reviewing the most important ones. This is the case of the literary Las Bostonianas , by James Ivory , or Return to Howards End , by the same director; for both she obtained Oscar nominations.

Redgrave, after leaving the Trotskyist Party, joined Labor; Although it was a less radical sector, the Academy, when the time came, did not dare to award her for fear that the same reactions that arose after the speech that the actress gave when receiving the previous award would arise. But not all her institutions and festivals would turn her back on her (San Sebastián and the Golden Globes gave her the recognition she deserved).

More trouble for his activism came with the Iraq War. Vanessa refused to go to the ceremony in protest of the conflict and she remained in the UK, where she founded an anti-war party. During these first years of the new millennium, she preferred to dedicate herself to the theater, where it seems that she went more unnoticed while she continued doing what she liked. In 2005 she returned to the cinema, again at the hands of Ivory, with whom she seems to have signed a life contract. The film was The Russian Countess , which aroused somewhat weak reviews. Her latest works have been Expiación and El atardecer , in both as secondary.