From The Times, April 7, 2010(Everett Collection/Rex Features)
Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson with their children, Corin, Lynn, and Vanessa, at their home in Chiswick in 1946
- David Sanderson
For Corin Redgrave, the show always had to go on. When his beloved niece Natasha Richardson died after a skiing accident, he took to the stage within hours in the “Redgrave tradition”. When the BBC, in his words, blackballed him for two decades because of his political views, he sweated it out in relative anonymity before returning centre-stage for a new generation.
His show — encompassing stage, cinema, television, memoirs and, of course, politics — ended yesterday. After being taken ill in the early hours of Sunday he died “very peacefully and surrounded by his family”, according to his wife, Kika Markham. He was 70. His favourite Shakespeare play was King Lear, which he described as “asking the large questions”, but family was all important. More so than the stage, and more so than the political causes he passionately espoused.
«Corin was attracted by power – he actually believed the Workers’ Revolutionary Party was going to run England»
A member of an acting dynasty, the son of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, brother of Vanessa and Lynn, father of Jemma, and uncle of Joely and Natasha Richardson, Redgrave started in the “family business” while at the University of Cambridge.
From his first stage appearance at the Royal Court in 1961 as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through the Oscar-winning film A Man for All Seasons in 1966, and then through his fallow period before a mainstream comeback to Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 and, last year, Trumbo, about the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Redgrave garnered credits for his intense, passionate portrayals.
This zeal carried over into politics. He believed he had been ostracised by the BBC in the 1970s because of his embracing of Marxism and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party but it did not curtail his activism. He founded Artists Against Racism, the International Movement for Peace and Justice in Chechnya, the Peace and Progress Party, which fielded three candidates in the 2005 general election, and later, with his sister Vanessa, the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission.
After stunning performances during the early 1970s in, for example, When Eight Bells Toll and The Red Baron, he had seemed poised for international stardom. Instead, he appeared intermittently until the Berlin Wall had fallen.
It was in 1994 that his rehabilitation began when cast as a corrupt policeman in the Guildford Four film In the Name of the Father. His appearance in Four Weddings, one of British cinema’s biggest films, led to key roles in Persuasion and The Ice House, and in 1998 a Laurence Olivier award for his performance as Boss Whalen in Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales. He also wrote a memoir of Michael Redgrave, formed The Moving Theatre Company, campaigned to save a theatre in Surrey and in 2005 received the Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award for his lifelong commitment to the Bard.
But in 2005, while speaking in Essex in support of travellers, he had a heart attack. Prostate cancer was diagnosed in 2000. His first wife, Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, had died of cancer. A statement from his family said they would “miss him so very much”.
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