Birds of a Father

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Once there was an Englishman named Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore. He wrote atrocious Victorian melodramas, and it served him quite right when in 1907 his daughter Margaret married an actor chap named Roy Redgrave. The marriage was a bad show, but before it closed in Australia three years later, Roy and Margaret had inadvertently established a simply smashing theatrical dynasty. It has flourished in England for three decades, but within the last year the Redgraves have been recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as the first family of stage and screen: the nearest thing to the Barrymores that the era has produced.

Sir Michael Redgrave, 58, is a tragedian who ranks only a little lower in English estimation than Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier. Lady Redgrave, who plays as Rachel Kempson, is accounted a superb supporting actress. And over the last year a new generation of Redgraves, who might well be known as "Michael's bloody marvels," has spangled the marquees with a retina-rocking glitter of new talent. Corin, 27, played his first big part (Sir Thomas More's son-in-law) in a big picture (A Man for All Seasons) and charmed the critics with a witty portrait of a political noddy. Lynn, 24, hit the top with a gloriously vulgar clang in a British film called Georgy Girl that left nobody wondering who was the most gifted British comedienne since Kay Kendall. And Vanessa, 30, interrupted an illustrious career on the English stage with two far-out and almost offhand film performances in Morgan! and Blow-Up that suddenly and quite unintentionally projected her before millions of moviegoers as the most potent image of mystery and allure since Greta Garbo made John Gilbert's eyeballs spin like pin wheels.

Deb & Daffodil. By last week, with both Blow-Up and Georgy Girl making boffo box office, the wave of acclaim had temporarily deposited both Redgrave girls in the U.S. Lynn was in Manhattan playing a dippy deb and bringing down the house night after night in the funniest show on Broadway: Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy. Vanessa was in Hollywood, playing Queen Guinevere in her first cinemammoth: a $17 million movie version of Broadway's Camelot, in which she sings in a musky mezzo and looks like a rain-washed daffodil in a fire-green Sussex meadow. On April 10, they will both take a day off to celebrate the climax of the Redgrave year in cinema. They will appear together at the annual Oscar awards ceremony, where for the first time since 1940, when Joan Fontaine beat out Olivia de Havilland, the nominees for Best Actress of the Year include a set of winsome sisters: Morgan's Vanessa and Georgy Girl's Lynn.

If the prize goes to one of the Redgrave girls, it will acknowledge more than her own abilities. The rise of this remarkable sister act coincides with the emergence of a new international era in cinema and a new international species of film actor.

Beyond Recall. The new thrust in movies took inception from the collapse of Hollywood in the early '50s and the revival of Europe as a center of film production. Since the European industry was small and loosely organized, such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, Franc,ois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could pretty well shoot them as they saw them and let the censor take the hindmost. As a result, they made a number of fine far-out films (The Bicycle Thief, Wild Strawberries, 8 1/2, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, Breathless) that made a startling amount of money.

U.S. producers were impressed. Unable to beat the new movement, they decided to join it. New Hollywoods, largely supported by U.S. capital, arose on the Seine and the Isar, the Tiber and the Thames. In 1966, every other movie made with American money was made abroad, and many of them (A Man for All Seasons, Blow-Up, Taming of the Shrew) were made by European directors and actors. Moreover, moviemaking at last fell out of the pockets of the moneymen in the front offices and into the hands of directors, writers and actors who suddenly found themselves with more freedom than they had ever known in the dear dead days that were happily beyond recall.

Less Hypocrisy. Along with this shift came the fresh realization that audiences and their attitudes have changed. They are younger and they carry more intellectual clout. Says Karel Reisz, who directed Morgan!: "The literacy gap between the people who are making films and those who are seeing them has narrowed." The kids still flip for spoof spectaculars like Goldfinger, but they just don't believe in 40-acre bathrooms and proscenium-size smiles. "The grand image no longer awes the spectator," says Director Claud Lelouch (Un Homme et Une Femme). "He recognizes a smooth but forced decor and performance as unnatural. There is much less hypocrisy in films today."

Also much more sex and nudity. But in the new films, sex is rarely prurient. If it is sometimes startlingly explicit, it is nevertheless unself-conscious and often functional to the plot--or what plot there is. It is also unstereotyped. People make love on the couch (Georgy Girl), in cars (Alfie), and in a susurrous sea of blue backdrop paper (Blow-Up). And the girl hardly ever waits any more to be asked; she communicates sex like a banner headline.

The new cinema is realistic yet not merely representational. The reality the films are aiming at is often a subconscious or transcendent experience. To communicate its quality, the new moviemakers have taken some weird flights of imagination and made nervy innovations in style.

Directors are undertaking instead a sort of radial reorganization of experience in which the elements of a story occur in no necessary order and the sense of succession subsides in the illusion of a permanent present. Fantasy heightens reality. Cause and effect are denied, and in the more extreme experiments such as in Last Year at Marienbad, a fundamental reorientation in time and space takes shape. Even as it strives to entertain, the new cinema is part of the broad cultural movement of an age that is searching for a contemporary redefinition of man's place in the universe.

In this more humanistic order of cinema a more human sort of actor has found his place. For two long generations, American moviegoers had been staring at actors attached to profiles that looked as if Phidias had chiseled them out of vanilla ice cream and at actresses shaped like animated advertisements for the California Fruit Growers Association. In those days, movies were "vehicles" for stars whose on-screen images were doctored by diffusing lenses and light screens and with makeup that was laid on by fellows who should have belonged to the plasterers' union. Now, says Director Reisz, audiences "no longer want to look up to something different. They want stars with whom they can identify."

Country Calves. These stars, with few exceptions, are Europeans: Michael Caine, Jeanne Moreau, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton, Oskar Werner, Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif, Anouk Aimee, David Hemmings, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Rita Tushingham, Melina Mercouri, Ingrid Thulin, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Susannah York, Samantha Eggar, Sarah Miles, Terence Stamp, David Warner, Alan Bates--and the Beatles. Hollywood's contribution to the constellation is insignificant: James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Lee Marvin are big boys at the box office now, but for some curious reason, Hollywood has yet to bring on a new and better class of girls.

Though none of these actors and actresses look as if they were made in the Max Factory, they manage to seem definitely male and distinctly female. Belmondo, for instance, has a wrinkly-crinkly, all-squeezed-together-in-the-middle sort of face that appears to have just been released from a duck press. Caine has a soft little mouth that seems to be slowly crawling away and a hollow in his chest that a girl could sip champagne from. And Oskar Werner --well, actually he's as straight as they come, but at first glance people some times wonder if he isn't Julie Andrews in drag.

The new European actresses, for the most part, are a flat negation of everything Hollywood thinks a girl should have. Rita Tushingham, though her eyes are a glowing glory, has a porridgy complexion and a walloping set of country calves. Julie Christie has a face straight out of Terry and the Pirates and the sort of figure that looks better to a camera than it does to a man. And Jeanne Moreau has the bitsy body and petulant face (except when she smiles) of a very small child sent to bed without her supper.

What the customers seem to like about all these performers is that they are all as different as chalk and cheese. They cannot be typed; they are individuals. They don't look like actors; they look like themselves. They look like vital, intelligent, stimulating men and women, and they act the way they look. They act, in fact, like the very thing most big Hollywood stars were not: thoroughly trained professionals.

Mod Goddess. All that's exciting in the new cast of cinema characters is prepotently present in Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. They look, to begin with, like no other actresses currently facing clapper cues--and certainly not like each other. Both are tall, but Vanessa is the taller by a smidgen; at 5 ft. 10 1/2 in., she is the skyscrapingest screen queen in filmsville. (Garbo, though her pressagent insisted that she was only 5 ft. 7, wore flat heels in Grand Hotel but still swayed high above John Barrymore, whose pressagent insisted that he stood 5 ft. 10.) For her height Vanessa is slender: her bust is small, her legs long and elegant; and she moves with the grace of a Watusi dancer--or a high-fashion model. Her lips are thin and subtle, her nose fine, her eyes a cool matte blue. There is something royal in her bearing and at the same time something girlish. The effect is delightfully incongruous. Says Peter Ustinov: "She's a mixture of Harper's bizarre and church bazaar." She is a mod goddess, Eleanor of Aquitaine in a miniskirt.

Lynn, on the contrary, looks like a hockey star trying to look like a movie star. She seems to be bigger than Vanessa and to have more arms and legs--quite nice legs that somehow look sexy even though they are semaphorically knock-kneed. Lynn, continues Ustinov, "gives the impression of knocking things down by mistake because she doesn't know her tail is wagging." She has a kewpie-doll face countersunk in a strawberry-blonde mane; she wears what looks like fluorescent face powder; and she sometimes paints her lower lashes, Twiggy-style, so far below the natural eyeline that people wonder if they need a hairnet. But the eyes look out between the lashes with a wonderful sparkling sanity, and the high excited voice goes burbling on like a Bayswater faucet--it just can't keep anything in.

A Dinosaur & a Colonel. The girls differ in their acting as much as they do in their looks. Lynn, by the very bumptiousness of her nature, seems almost doomed to be a comedienne. She doesn't particularly try to be funny; she just can't help it. She is a madcap mimic who at an instant's notice can turn into anything that stands on two, four or 36 legs. She does an imitation of a dinosaur that would bring Alley Oop on the run, and she takes off a pukka colonel so vividly that the onlooker can hear his imaginary wattles flapping. But what Lynn begins by mimicking she ends by understanding; she works inward from the comic gestures to the tragic core of a character.

In Georgy Girl, for example, she seemed at first to be playing the heroine for heehaws, for one of those hopelessly single shoes that plod through life interminably in search of a mate. Yet as the reels went by, the heroine changed slowly from a standard figure of fun to a unique and even sinister individual: a wounded and frightened young woman who wanted love but settled for power--with a husband she could dominate and a baby she could smother-mother. As Georgy, Lynn cunningly combined emotional empathy and ironical detachment. Says Sidney Lumet, who directed The Dead'y Affair, in which Lynn played a small role: "She can editorialize on a character without interrupting her portrayal of it." Acuity and control of this order, rare in one so young, intimate a talent for the highest comedy--the kind of loving laughter that hurts only what it heals.

"I Give As to a Lover." Vanessa, on the contrary, seems born to be a great leading lady, the Duse of the coming decade. She has that magic in her that all the great ones have: a sense of mystery and radiance in her presence. When she first appears on stage or screen, the spectator feels his skin begin to prickle. In A Man for All Seasons, she appeared in a single scene and spoke a single line, but the aura of her Anne Boleyn was so enthralling that she got more attention from many critics than most of the featured players. Yet Vanessa can play comedy too, and play it dazzlingly. In Morgan!, cast as the better-class bride of a young artist who after careful consideration has decided he is a gorilla, she performs a tour-de-force of the comedy of incomprehension.

Vanessa's way of working is dead opposite to Lynn's. Where Lynn begins with imitation and ends with insight, Vanessa begins with an idea of the character and ends with an illustration of that idea in gestures. Her roles are thought out logically and constructed move by move. She is a much more intellectual actress than Lynn, but no less imaginative and emotional for all that. If anything, she is even more passionately devoted to her profession. "I give myself to my parts as to a lover," she explains. "It is the only way."

Dogs & Cats. It is, in fact, her father's way. Sir Michael is a large, emphatic man whose demonic belief in his own genius and religious devotion to the theater (he once played a performance of Macbeth with a freshly broken ankle) are warmly encouraged by his wife. It was in this highly qualified atmosphere that Vanessa took her first breath on Jan. 30, 1937. She has called her early childhood lonely and frightening, and it isn't hard to see why. Her parents were often on tour or in Hollywood, once for nine months at a stretch, while Vanessa was left in a London flat in the care of servants. When she was three the blitz began, and it scared her stiff.

When she was four she learned to read, and before long had found a blissful refuge in romantic Victorian novels --about lonely little girls. She also daydreamed a good deal, and Father approved. "Like the Brontes," he says, "she lived in great islands of imagination that were entirely her own creation." Daydreams found an outlet in play acting. With Brother Corin, Vanessa performed for several years an almost daily drama in which he was an Austrian prince and she was the President of the U.S.--Daddy's girl was already ambitious. When Lynn came along, she was allowed to play a dog or a cat. "And I liked that," she says, "because dogs and cats got fed things, and it was even all right if they stole bits of food because they didn't know any better."

Lynn was a cheerful child from the beginning ("In my childhood I remember only things like sunny days"), though it wasn't always easy to see why. She developed acute anemia and was so weak that she went to the park in a wheelchair until she was six. She remembers Vanessa as "simply smashing," Corin as "incredibly brilliant," and her mother as "the mother of all the mothers."

"I Can't See My Head!" The teens were a bit gritty for both the Redgrave girls, particularly for Vanessa. Her father once introduced her to friends as "my daughter Vanessa--she'll never be an actress, so we're having her do languages. That way she can always get a job with an airline or something." She grew like a beanstalk on a hill of hormones. One day, after staring appalled at her reflection, she broke into tears and telephoned her mother, who was weekending in the country. "Mummy! Mummy!" she cried, "I just looked in your mirror and I can't see my head!" Daddy as usual had the answer: "Don't worry about being tall. Hold yourself up and be splendid." He prescribed ballet, and the medicine worked. Vanessa's grace and poise improved, and she showed her mettle in school theatricals. At 14, she played a St. Joan so powerful that her parents were awed. Says proud Papa: "The whole school revolved around Vanessa's personality."

The fact was all too apparent to little Lynn. Instead of leading lady she played a shepherd in the school Nativity play. Her only line: "I see a star." She developed such a virulent indifference to everything theatrical that one day, when her father asked if she wouldn't like to come watch him play Hamlet, she quite seriously said thanks all the same but she'd rather stay home and watch her favorite soap opera on the telly. Soon she developed a compensating mania--she went crazy over jumping horses, and by the time she was 16 had littered the house with glittering trophies that all said the same thing: Lynn can do something the others can't do.

Glamor & Clamor. Meanwhile, Vanessa went into the theater and had her self a thundering great success. First year out of school she was in two West End plays; by 1959 she was signed on at the Stratford Old Vic; and in a 1961 production of As You Like It, she played a Rosalind of such fire and grace that most theater people were agreed: for the next 25 years any actress who values her reputation will think twice before playing Rosalind in England.

The glamor and the clamor of it all got to Lynn, and one day she decided that horses really were not the answer. When Vanessa turned down a minor part in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lynn jumped at the chance to play it. In 1963, Olivier took her on at the National Theater, and she found that she could play for pathos (Brecht's Mother Courage) as well as waddle through twaddle (Coward's Hay Fever). Big things were expected of her--but not quite the sort of big things that actually happened.

Naked down Piccadilly. As usual, everything happened to Vanessa first. Offered a part in Morgan!, she decided to take a stab at pictures. The public got the point all right. To Vanessa's amazement, millions acclaimed her as the most exciting thing the British had produced since radar. Director Antonioni, casting for a British actress to play in Blow-Up, had heard about Vanessa. "I had not met her before," he recalls, "but I looked at stacks of her photos and concluded that she was the one I wanted. But I didn't know if she really would accept the part. After all, it wasn't a very big role, and she would have to strip down to the waist. She didn't have the slightest hesitation about that undressing part." Pressagents got into the act, of course, and reported that Vanessa had offered to "walk stark naked down Piccadilly for Antonioni." With some acerbity, Vanessa retorts that she "never said such a rubbishy thing."

She took the part because it was challenging and because she admired the director. In turn, Antonioni taught her the basic lessons every film performer has to learn: how to respond to the camera as to another person in a room, how not to act but react. He wrote her a marvelous part. She was cast as a woman without qualities, an embodied enigma. The spectator knows only that she was an accomplice to a murder. Otherwise he knows nothing about her except what he chooses to imagine, and her job was to make the imagination seethe. She did it superbly. She leaped through the picture like a leopard through a glade. She was glimpsed, she was gone: ulterior and magical, the eternal puzzle of the passerby.

Lynn meanwhile had another feast on the crumbs from Vanessa's table. Just before Blow-Up came along, Vanessa had backed out of a commitment to play Georgy Girl. (It was just as well, since the script says that Georgy "looks like the back of a bus.") Offered the part, Lynn grabbed it and put on 18 Ibs. of omnibustle. The Redgrave rampage was on.

"I Squeak Cheerfulness." Sir Michael, Rachel and Corin are, of course, delighted with the girls' success, but no more than the girls themselves. Each one seems genuinely to hope that the other will win the Oscar, but neither is the sort to grump for long if someone else gets it.* For one thing, they keep too busy to think about prizes and such. In Manhattan, Lynn gets a thorough workout eight times a week in Black Comedy. Her role calls for some adroit tricks, since the action takes place in a house where the light fuse has blown. To let the audience see what is happening, the stage lights are actually turned on, and the performers have to act as though they are in the dark. Lynn's butter-legged climb up and down the stairs, the way she pours drinks to overflowing, and her well-timed near-misses as she staggers around the room are hilariously engineered.

Offstage she is a sunny torrent of activity. "I squeak cheerfulness," she says, "in the face of adversity." She carries on an endless correspondence with her family, loves to have a good blub over their letters. To relieve the Manhattany, she often cooks up an enormous meal--one of her favorites is a lamb casserole crammed with raisins, garlic, apples, onions and lemons. She downs yoghurt by the pint, and has been heard to hail a taxi by imitating the shriek of a pewit--which she learned from a Northumbrian shepherd when she was nine years old.

Underneath the hoyden there is a serious and remarkably mature young woman who knows exactly what she wants. For a while at least, she wants all the fun of being single, and she wants a career. In her rare brooding moments, she worries over how to perfect her craft. "I find myself occasionally elaborating on things a bit too much," she says. "I hate my voice most. It's always higher than I expect and more childish. It annoys me. The best things I do happen suddenly by accident. I have to be acting something out with other people."

Rose in the Fridge. Vanessa's problems are of a different sort--though on the surface no problems are apparent. She rents a modest stucco house in a pleasant but not palatial suburb of Los Angeles, and except for her daily visits to the studio lives there like any other matron of reasonable means with her two children, their nanny and her secretary. She gets home by 7 or 8, gives a big hug to her two little girls--Natasha, 3 1/2, and Joely Kim, 2. Then she hears all about what they did that day, reads them a leisurely bedtime story, puts a diaper on the baby, and tucks them both in bed. Weekends she sees the children all she can, but arranges to spend a few hours by the pool or work in a round of trapshooting. She is a charming though infrequent hostess, and the nanny and the secretary love her dearly.

On the Camelot set she is adored. Warm and natural with everyone, she never claims her star prerogatives except for the sake of somebody else. Last week, when a workman got drunk, she summoned her limousine to take him safely home. At the noon break, on occasion, she bunches her floor-length royal robe between her thighs, hops on a studio bicycle, goes pedaling off to the fridge for the bottle of rose that she stashed there in the morning--and then shares it with her hairdresser or the company's dog trainer.

On a date she is delightful--"a smashing bird," says Director Reisz. She can make away with a bottle of Taittinger between 6 and 8, kick up her heels with the Tijuana Brass, get so interested in what someone is saying that she misses her mouth with her fork, and blurt a delightfully risky remark if it seems to be in order. "My bras have all turned yellow," she groaned to a friend recently. "I expect Nanny has boiled them in urine."

Off the Diving Board. And then all at once, in the middle of a smile, she gets that funny blank look in her eyes, as though a light had been switched off inside her head. "She just switches off," says Corin. "It's a very strange thing. She's done it as long as I can remember." But Vanessa has an explanation. "I have a bad habit of not giving much of myself," she says, "of saving myself up for work. To lose oneself in a role--that is what one lives for!"

It is a romantic conception of acting--but then Vanessa is above all a romantic. "She is one of the great romantics of our generation," says her estranged husband, Director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones). "Anything and everything can be romantic to Vanessa. She can believe in everything." Says Director Lumet: "She just plunges off the diving board without bothering to check if there's water in the pool."

Sometimes she plunges into little things. One day not long ago, quite unwittingly, she scheduled six separate appointments for 2 p.m., broke all of them, scheduled three others--and then forgot she had any at all. "It is necessary," sighs her secretary, "to keep one's appointment calendar in pencil." Sometimes she plunges into big things. For a while, the big thing was pacifism. In 1961, she plunged militantly into Britain's ban-the-bomb movement, was arrested four times during demonstrations, stood up before a rally in Castro-style battle dress and sang a Cuban revolutionary song. Sometimes Vanessa suffers for her romantic impetuosity, but then, as Corin points out, "Vanessa likes to suffer." She transforms her sufferings into performances. "She is mad," Sir Michael says, "I mean divinely mad. She is an inspired actress."

They are both inspired actresses--birds of a father--who seem sure to enjoy quite a flutter in the next few years. Some time this spring, Lynn will fly to London to make a movie with Rita Tushingham. Some time this summer, with Camelot in the can, Vanessa will fly to Turkey to make The Charge of the Light Brigade with Director Richardson--they agree that their divorce, which by then will probably be final, will not affect their professional relationship. The girls now have everything going for them, including the rumbustious new scene in cinema. The way things have turned out, after all, would surely cause a silent tear of joy to course down the whiskery cheek of Fortunatus Augustus Scudamore.

* The other nominees for Best Actress: Anouk Aimee (Un Homme et Une Femme), Elizabeth Taylor (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and Ida Kaminska (The Shop on Main Street).

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