Tony Award-winning actress Natasha Richardson died Wednesday, March 18th in a Manhattan hospital. Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and sister of Jolie Richardson, was flown to Lenox Hill Hospital on Tuesday having sustained a head injury after falling the previous day whilst receiving skiing instruction at Mont Tremblant in Canada. The star is survived by sons Micheál and Daniel, and husband Liam Neeson.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8pmn2_natasha-richardson-dies_news Natasha Jane Richardson was born in London on May 11, 1963. She made her first film appearance at the age of 4, playing a bridesmaid at the wedding of her mother’s character in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” directed by her father. She attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and got her first job in an outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
She eventually moved to the United States, where “no one cares about the Redgrave baggage,” as she once said. She gave her greatest performances there.
In the movies she played the title character in Paul Schrader’s film “Patty Hearst” (1988), about the heiress and kidnap victim. She worked with Mr. Schrader again on “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), a creepy psychological drama with a screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan.
The same year, she also starred in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” an adaptation of the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood about subjugated women in a pseudo-Christian theocracy. In a 1993 television adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer,” she was Catherine Holly, a young woman (played by Elizabeth Taylor in the original movie) driven to the brink of insanity by the gruesome death of her young cousin. And she played the title role in the 1993 television movie “Zelda,” based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ferociously competitive and emotionally delicate wife.
Ms. Richardson’s more recent work has included more conventional Hollywood fare, including a remake of “The Parent Trap” (1998), the comedy “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) and the teenage melodrama “Wild Child” (2008).
Sources:
New York Times,
The Guardian
March 23, 2009, 04:14:52 PM
