In family photographs of her illustrious acting dynasty, Lynn Redgrave could be recognised, she once said, as “the glum one”.
Redgrave, who has died aged 67, spent most of her personal and professional life in the shadow of her father, Michael, and her siblings, Vanessa and Corin.
Yet in moving to the US and developing a talent for comic self-effacement unusual in her family, she was able to emerge on her own terms as a respected and versatile actress.
She died at her home in Connecticut on Sunday night after a seven-year battle with breast cancer, a month after her brother, Corin, died at the age of 70 .
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“She lived, loved and worked harder than ever before. The endless memories she created as a mother, grandmother, writer, actor and friend will sustain us for the rest of our lives,” her three children said in a statement.
Redgrave was nominated for two Oscars, two decades apart, during a 50-year-career that ranged from the National Theatre to Desperate Housewives.
“She was a phenomenal actress, she could do comedy, tragedy — anything really — with absolute ease,” said the director Michael Winner, who cast Redgrave in one of her first films in 1960. “She was a wonderful person and a brave woman involved in many causes. She wasn’t facile — she didn’t only care about fame.”
The retired chat show host Sir Michael Parkinson expressed his sadness. “She was maybe the jolliest and most likeable of all the family,” he said. “She was a lovely, funny, open character, she was very easy to get on with. She was a good actress, but being a Redgrave I suppose she couldn’t help it — it’s in their blood, in their marrow. She had a great comedic talent.”
After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Redgrave made her professional debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Court in 1962 and the next year became a founder member of the National Theatre.
On screen, she had a small part in Tom Jones (1963) before achieving fame and an Oscar nomination in the title role of Georgy Girl (1966).
She made her debut on Broadway in 1967 and settled in the US soon afterwards, eventually taking up American citizenship. While her brother and sister became almost as well known for their left-wing activism as for their acting, Lynn Redgrave was resolutely, if quietly, pro-American.
The differences became public only once, when Lynn and Vanessa were appearing in Three Sisters in the West End in 1991. Vanessa condemned the first Gulf War and American “imperialist pigs”, prompting Lynn to repudiate her in print, even flirting with the idea of changing her name.
Redgrave explored her family background in her one-woman show Shakespeare for my Father (1993). She said: “I knew my Shakespeare but I didn’t know my father, only the characters he played.”
Redgrave clearly felt herself an afterthought in the family — while Vanessa’s birth was announced from the Old Vic stage by Olivier with the words “tonight a great actress has been born”, Sir Michael did not even mention Lynn’s birth in his diary for March 8, 1943.
She struggled for many years with bulimia and in 2000 divorced John Clark, her husband of three decades, after discovering that he had fathered a child with the woman who was to marry the couple’s son.
Redgrave’s film career revived in the 1990s with roles in Shine (1996) and Gods & Monsters (1998), for which she was nominated for an Oscar for the second time and won a Golden Globe. In 2005 she starred in the Merchant-Ivory film The White Countess, alongside Vanessa and niece Natasha Richardson, who died in a skiing accident last year .
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