May 03, 2010 12:23
I saw her in Boston several years ago. The story I remember her telling was being scheduled to do a library reading for children in Los Angeles with Charlton Heston. She suggested they do Romeo & Juliet scenes or something else by Shakespeare. Heston suggested they do Moby Dick and that she'd be a marvellous Queequeeg. Her comic timing was perfect when she said, "and I was."
I occasionally wonder whether she'd have been better known had her surname not been Redgrave. Her intelligence and wit shone through, but on some level I think Lynn Redgrave was seen as a "lesser Vanessa" rather than as someone extraordinary in her own right.
As for Vanessa, in the past fourteen months, she's lost one of her daughters and both siblings. Corin died less than a month ago. My thoughts are with her and the whole extended Kempson/Redgrave clan.